Osler's Razor

"Despite attempts at appeasement..."

The sound you hear is 1930-40's Europe shaking its collective head at us.
 

The guy is a total nutjob. Did anyone see that weird marionette movie called "Team America: World Police"? Besides the very disturbing marionette sex scenes, the best part was the starring role of Kim Jong Il, who made a cameo appearance to make the movie more realistic.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372588/
 

The United States should do an Iraq on it and take out the dictator.
 

Um, I know this is in poor taste, but I can tell NK is poor because their leader is wearing the poor kid outfit (winter version)... awww. The South Koreans are wearing Prada.
 

Don't worry, this is why we elected Obama right? He is going to talk to these guys. Make them our friends. Continued appeasement...that's the ticket!
 

I am confident, that if he means well enough, our Dear Leader can secure from the NK Dear Leader "Peace in our time."
 

North Korea, even if they had an ICBM, would never attack the US. Nor our allies. What follow through could they have? As you said, they are very impoverished. They lack the resources necessary to even mount a successful invasion of South Korea. Yes, Jong Il is crazy, but he's also old and militarily impotent. I think our foreign policy is better directed at other parts of the world. The only reason anyone pays any attention to NK is because of Chowderhead's "Axis of Evil" speech.
 

The U.N. should pass a resolution requiring him to give Kanye his shades back immediately.
 

And his hat.
 

yeah, I'm kind of on board with Lane on this one. I guess the difficulty is that we have little to no idea what they would do, but I think if we don't piss them off by attacking them or something, they would be more likely to leave us alone.

I know it may sound cheesy, but it seemed to help a bit when the New York Philharmonic did a concert there last year, playing their music . . . Things like that work, I think. (Now please don't start singing Kumbaya. I'm dead serious!)
 

Except for his gratuitous last comment, I'm with Lane too. Clinton made noises about North Korea too and the idiot Madeleine Albright clinked champagne glasses with him.

What's Kim Il Jong and his backers gonna do? If NK actually attacked South Korea or Japan, there'd be hell to pay and he knows it.

Ignore him

And yes, Team America was a GREAT, overlooked movie!
 

Back in 2001-2002, my high school debate case actually had to do with engagement of North Korea to reduce proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. With the fall of the USSR backing the DPRK regime, North Korea has virtually no allies that would help them in a conflict. While China maintains a relationship, I doubt China has any wish to anger the US and its allies, with whom it trades extensively.

The nuclear posturing, I argued, is an attempt by a failing, impotent leader to keep his people in awe of him and sufficiently cowed. North Korea, as I said, it pretty resource-poor. Its people are oppressed and beaten, and it has an uneasy stalemate with South Korea/Japan. Now that the capitalism/communism foreign-policy tension in the world has evaporated, North Korea has become a convenient boogeyman for US presidents (yes, including Clinton. Even Gore seemed content to continue Clinton-era policies had he been elected, and I don't forsee Obama changing the official stance toward N. Korea) to trot out: scary because they're stalinist and bad, but not really threatening because they don't have the capability, the willpower or the ability to sustain a war.

From a practical standpoint, humoring Kim Jong Il and sending a diplomat every so often to make him feel important is an easy-to-maintain strategy that saves face for everyone. The only other options are to ignore him, in which case his cries for attention will only get louder, or to depose him, which would be costly and unnecessary, and probably destabilize the region. Just because the current leader is impotent doesn't mean that the leader that would emerge from a coup in N. Korea would be, and so often times it's better to deal with the delusional devil you know rather than risk too much of an upset.
 

Prof.--
Look, if South Korea is known by some as the gaming capital of the world, it is WAY more advanced than North Korea, land of the rationed electricity.
Lane--
Wasn't that the same year you had a little "incident" with freedom of the press and President Bush and stuff? Along those lines, my first newsletter was published today, and it contained an article on our school's uniform policy that I think is going to be extremely controversial. The only thing that could make my article more controversial, besides the inclusion of swear words, pointed insults, or threats would be if NK dropped a bomb full of uniforms on Northfield, Minn. That would make it EXACTLY like your Bush article (didn't the principal call you an "embarassment to the school's image and a disgrace to our country"?)
 

Micah, your detective skills amaze me. Yes, Dum-Dum wrote that in a letter to the editor of our local paper, where he also expressed my sorrow and remorse at having printed such mean words about a public figure.

Not that I'm still bitter.

But be warned: my first opinion column was about the school dress code, and how it made no sense for a new principal to come in and on day one completely change the dress code the high school had had for years, after everyone had done their back-to-school shopping.

It set a tone, a tone that severely worsened until they ran off the good journalism advisor and hired another one that wouldn't support me and my antics. Now the high school paper is barely published. It's been 8 years, but in that time, we've gone from an award-winning student paper that was the envy of schools in our population level to a non-existent joke class. It's enough to make me want to go back and teach those kids some real journalism.