Don’t be put off by the ‘Loaded’ style laddish presentation, the Vice guide to North Korea is very much worth watching. Fourteen, five minute segments where the Vice guys bribe their way into Pyongyang and are taken on a series of surreal tours to barren destinations throughout the failed state.
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Another very good video magazine from SexyBeijing is the Hard Hat show. Here, Beijing based English film maker, Nick Bonner talks about his films about North Korea.
Sexy Beijing is a videoblog, written and presented by a New Yorker (I assume), living in China, Anna Sophie Loewenberg. Its great, everything that video blogging should be, short, smart and funny. Collect them all.
A galaxy of Chinese stars (almost none of whom are recognizable in the West) sporting Zoolander haircuts and wearing the type of clothes that children’s TV presenters wear (hip, but very clean, and not too hip that you’ll scare the kids) sing an anthemic, fist in the air, Chinese pop song of the universal “We are the World” genre.
This is a fascinating glimpse of what an emerging, mainstream Chinese TV culture might look like, and you get to see all the cool new buildings that Beijing has built for the Olympics (the stadium, swimming stadium, national theater, Beijing museum and airport etc.) The lyrics to the song go something like this:
“When you see our Olympics on TV in America, you will shit your pa-ants. We take your capitalism, sell you plastic toy and build ourselves a free-eeway. There are a billion of us, we are very indu-ustrious, you can never wi-in. Repeat 78 times: There are a billion of us, you can never wi-in.”
Running time: 6 mins 50 secs
In order to persuade anyone that any kind of institutionalized event is a bad idea, all one needs to do is say “imagine x run by the DMV”. The Eurovision song contest is what it would be like if the music industry were run by the DMV.
To commemorate Eurovision’s biggest winners, the Irish, who have just blown the European Union treaty and the last time oil buggered up the global economy, here is the 1973 Eurovision song contest, held in Luxembourg – which is a bit like a country run by the DMV.
Following the terrorist attack against Israel at the Munich Olympics, and Israel’s debut in the competition, the floor manager strongly advised people in the audience to remain seated while clapping, to avoid being shot by security forces.
Belgium’s entry at 8:15 is pretty special, and if you have a history of hallucinogenic flashbacks, I’ve no idea what’s going on at 1:05, but you might not want to watch it. Beyond satire.
Part 1 here: 115 mins.
Running time: 50 mins.
It has become such customary practice for politicians to criticize other regimes as if they could only possibly rule without the will of the people that this was even trotted out when the Chinese government waded into China. Which is why this clip found by Charles Firth is so interesting – it gives us a glimpse of popular Chinese nationalism and for reasons Charles explains convincingly.
If Mugabe were assassinated, there is a strong chance that many innocent lives would be saved and huge number of people would suffer less. Unlike many leaders Mugabe does not have the resources to make himself safe, and a single Cruise Missile would perhaps have a chance of success. Yet this outcome is unlikely, leaders rarely get assassinated outside of war, by a foreign state. There are reasons for this: Zimbabwe has no strategic benefit to others – no oil, and it is ‘illegal’ under UN law to assassinate a leader of a foreign state etc. But what if these reasons were actually an inevitable result of the way that countries evolve collectively?
What if the institutions of states evolve over time so that they self calibrate towards the stability of rule rather than the well being of the largest number of people? The natural equilibrium of politics is such that decision paths that allow for attacking the head of an organization or society will be rarer than war which requires bottom up confrontation with lots of individuals when evaluating the chance of a net reduction in suffering.
In other words, like the Selfish Gene perhaps there is a Selfish Meme, a naturally selected macro organization where people are expendable if the rules and institutions and nationalistic ideas (extended-genotype?) that create countries (extended-phenotype) survive. Perhaps what looks like the result of corrupt humans in government, is in fact the nature of government itself.