Re: Gaddafi, before him there was Pinochet. Near the end of his reign, Chile agreed to hold a plebiscite on whether to continue the dictatorship. Pinochet lost, and after some pushing from other officers, he stepped down. Then a few years later everyone started trying to prosecute him for all the bad stuff he did and he spent the rest of his life in a legal cloud. Something approximately similar, if a bit less harsh, happened to South Korean ex-dictator Chun Doo-hwan. That'll teach 'em to relinquish power voluntarily.
I worry that the ICC is accomplishing the same thing. If Putin dies tomorrow, Russia is full of people who will face dire legal sanctions if liberals ever take power. I'm worried in pursuit of justice, we're creating a larger and larger caste of tiger-riders.
Sad addendum: Maduro involved a lot of his generals in drug smuggling, thus ensuring that they can never relinquish power. They are all facing 30 years in ADX Florence, and who wants that? Which is why as of this writing his miserable undemocratic kakistocracy appears to be holding on.
But you are missing one thing: Russian liberals will never take power over anything because in reality they are unable and unwilling to actually wield it and shoulder all the burdens that come with it. They want someone else to do all the heavy lifting. That what Yeltsin was all about.
The problem is that the ICC doesn't go far enough. Killing a dictator is much easier than capturing him. The ICC/United States/Ukraine should simply offer a $10 million bounty, and relocation & secret identity in some free country for the family of, anyone who causes the death of Putin.
Some bodyguard or perhaps random citizen could kill Putin but would probably be instantly killed or arrested. The only way I could see someone killing Putin and being in a position to leave Russia after is if the person staged a successful coup, in which case the person is in control of Russia and $10 million isn't much of an inducement.`
Think this is the first review of a book I've already read, that's fun!
Dealt a lot with Korea in an old professional life, with a lot trips on to the peninsula (but only the Southern half). I can highly recommend B. R. Myer's The Cleanest Race for more insight into the ideology of the DPRK, and what motivates it (spoiler alert: racism to an extent would make Stormfront members raise an eyebrow). I *cannot* recommend the Juche Myth (a dull slog), but I can recommend his blog for more insights (mostly into the South at this point, but also into the North).
One thing I think Lankov underplays (but Myers' hits at pretty hard) is that we often tend to think about the problem of North Korea as replacing a regime and then setting up a new government to run that state. But the Korean Peninsula is a single nation (the Korean people) divided into two states, and the two of them can't keep existing. Nature will enforce a down-select at some point. Legally speaking, neither country recognizes the existence of the other, and any citizen of one is automatically a citizen of the other. So if the North falls, the core (the highest level) songbyun types who've been running the show mostly aren't worried about international tribunals deciding their fates; if they live that long, they've done well. It's the Hostile songbyun and the ROKs who will kill them a lot quicker.
This is also a major problem with any movement towards reunification: the ROK doesn't want the financial hit that's going to have to come with supporting what is one of the most backwards countries on earth. So they continue to try and set up some system (preferably a confederation) where the DPRK can become richer and collapse nicely without interrupting ROK standard of living. Although the ROK's catastrophic fertility rates are going to make issues for this.
You're ascribing human motivations to a machine. You're presumably intelligent enough to work out how to eat a food you hate every day. This would not interfere with your pursuit of other goals; depending on what it is, it might actually improve your health. But why would you? It lowers your utility function's value.
Gotta have someone teach the spies how to speak Japanese without sounding like a foreigner.
If you brainwash these foreigners, then you get spies that can blend in a lot more easily.
If your spies want to work overseas, they can steal the identities of the people they abducted and pretend to be them with their passports to avoid attention.
Re: Gaddafi, before him there was Pinochet. Near the end of his reign, Chile agreed to hold a plebiscite on whether to continue the dictatorship. Pinochet lost, and after some pushing from other officers, he stepped down. Then a few years later everyone started trying to prosecute him for all the bad stuff he did and he spent the rest of his life in a legal cloud. Something approximately similar, if a bit less harsh, happened to South Korean ex-dictator Chun Doo-hwan. That'll teach 'em to relinquish power voluntarily.
I worry that the ICC is accomplishing the same thing. If Putin dies tomorrow, Russia is full of people who will face dire legal sanctions if liberals ever take power. I'm worried in pursuit of justice, we're creating a larger and larger caste of tiger-riders.
Sad addendum: Maduro involved a lot of his generals in drug smuggling, thus ensuring that they can never relinquish power. They are all facing 30 years in ADX Florence, and who wants that? Which is why as of this writing his miserable undemocratic kakistocracy appears to be holding on.
But you are missing one thing: Russian liberals will never take power over anything because in reality they are unable and unwilling to actually wield it and shoulder all the burdens that come with it. They want someone else to do all the heavy lifting. That what Yeltsin was all about.
The problem is that the ICC doesn't go far enough. Killing a dictator is much easier than capturing him. The ICC/United States/Ukraine should simply offer a $10 million bounty, and relocation & secret identity in some free country for the family of, anyone who causes the death of Putin.
Some bodyguard or perhaps random citizen could kill Putin but would probably be instantly killed or arrested. The only way I could see someone killing Putin and being in a position to leave Russia after is if the person staged a successful coup, in which case the person is in control of Russia and $10 million isn't much of an inducement.`
The West has a really weird way with punishments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Veesenmayer personally responsible for about 10% of the Holocaust, 600 000 Hungarian Jews: two years in prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwane_Matsui who explicitly ordered Japanese troops to behave normally in Nanking: death, because he did not do enough
That is probably because they did not want to prosecute the real culprit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Yasuhiko_Asaka so they need a high ranking scapegoat.
Think this is the first review of a book I've already read, that's fun!
Dealt a lot with Korea in an old professional life, with a lot trips on to the peninsula (but only the Southern half). I can highly recommend B. R. Myer's The Cleanest Race for more insight into the ideology of the DPRK, and what motivates it (spoiler alert: racism to an extent would make Stormfront members raise an eyebrow). I *cannot* recommend the Juche Myth (a dull slog), but I can recommend his blog for more insights (mostly into the South at this point, but also into the North).
https://sthelepress.com/
One thing I think Lankov underplays (but Myers' hits at pretty hard) is that we often tend to think about the problem of North Korea as replacing a regime and then setting up a new government to run that state. But the Korean Peninsula is a single nation (the Korean people) divided into two states, and the two of them can't keep existing. Nature will enforce a down-select at some point. Legally speaking, neither country recognizes the existence of the other, and any citizen of one is automatically a citizen of the other. So if the North falls, the core (the highest level) songbyun types who've been running the show mostly aren't worried about international tribunals deciding their fates; if they live that long, they've done well. It's the Hostile songbyun and the ROKs who will kill them a lot quicker.
This is also a major problem with any movement towards reunification: the ROK doesn't want the financial hit that's going to have to come with supporting what is one of the most backwards countries on earth. So they continue to try and set up some system (preferably a confederation) where the DPRK can become richer and collapse nicely without interrupting ROK standard of living. Although the ROK's catastrophic fertility rates are going to make issues for this.
I read the bit about Slavic black humor to my wife and best friend - both Bulgarians. They cheered.
> In the limit, you can imagine a single mad king with no human servitors at all, just a computer as his grand vizier.
Just make sure the computer isn't smart enough to realize it doesn't need the mad king.
You're ascribing human motivations to a machine. You're presumably intelligent enough to work out how to eat a food you hate every day. This would not interfere with your pursuit of other goals; depending on what it is, it might actually improve your health. But why would you? It lowers your utility function's value.
Amazing piece. Thank you.
Does this ever actually explain what the rational purpose of the submarine abductions was?
Similar situation with Museveni in Uganda.
I’ve seen him a lot on Russian YouTube but now I definetely have to read his books.
Great review, but we've got to know: why *did* North Korea secretly kidnap all those Japanese people??
Gotta have someone teach the spies how to speak Japanese without sounding like a foreigner.
If you brainwash these foreigners, then you get spies that can blend in a lot more easily.
If your spies want to work overseas, they can steal the identities of the people they abducted and pretend to be them with their passports to avoid attention.
Well that's my sleep quality shot for the week.