Useful Idiocy – Page 3

January 11, 2014

Hey … isn’t that video of Dennis Rodman personally giving banned luxury goods to Kim Jong Un?

Skip to the two-minute mark. Well, that certainly looks incriminating. (Hat tip to a reader.) [I guess he picked the wrong week to quit drinking.] If you haven’t read my post explaining the ban on importing luxury goods to North Korea, you should probably start there.* And since you ask, yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe the bottles are engraved with likenesses of Kim and Rodman. Just to be clear, I don’t think Dennis Rodman should do time over five bottles of liquor,...

Sanctions/Sports/Useful Idiocy

January 9, 2014

So, Dennis — other than that, how is the trip going so far?

Dennis Rodman’s September trip to North Korea included a trip to Kim’s yacht near Wonsan, which Rodman described as “like going to Hawaii or Ibiza.” Evidently, this trip hasn’t been as pleasant: A day after the former basketball star sang “Happy Birthday” to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and led a squad of former NBA players in a friendly game, Rodman issued the apology through publicist Jules Feiler in an email message to The Associated Press. “I want to...

Sports/Useful Idiocy/WTF?

January 8, 2014

And now, a long list of people who think Dennis Rodman is a tool.

Update: Jesus wept (hat tip): ~ ~ ~ Charles D. Smith, one of the former players who went to Pyongyang with Dennis Rodman, is still in Pyongyang, but he’s already saying he feels “remorse” for going because of the public backlash against the trip, and because of Rodman’s mouth: “The way some of the statements and things that Dennis has said has tainted our efforts,” Smith said. “Dennis is a great guy, but how he articulates what goes on — he...

Sports/Useful Idiocy

January 7, 2014

Source: Dennis Rodman brought luxury gifts to Kim Jong Un (and that’s punishable by 20 years in prison).

Writing at The Weekly Standard today, Dennis Halpin informs us that Dennis Rodman (no relation) was bringing more than his august presence to Kim Jong Un’s birthday party. Halpin, citing a “diplomatic source” he understandably won’t name but says is reliable, claims that Rodman was also carrying “several hundred dollars’ worth of Irish Jameson whiskey,” “European crystal, an Italian suit for him, and Italian clothing, a fur coat, and an English Mulberry handbag” for Kim’s wife, Ri Sol Ju. The level...

Sanctions/Useful Idiocy

January 7, 2014

Lifestyles of the Deeply Stupid, Pyongyang Edition (or, Dennis Rodman, the accidental activist)

Despite the loss of his sponsor, Dennis Rodman is back in Pyongyang with several other NBA has-beens for what Rodman calls a “birthday present” basketball exhibition game for Kim Jong Un. Rodman appears to be taking his talking points directly from KCNA: “The marshal is actually trying to change this country in a great way,” Rodman said of Kim, using the leader’s official title. “I think that people thought that this was a joke, and Dennis Rodman is just doing...

Sports/Useful Idiocy

January 6, 2014

Christine Hong really should tell us what she thinks about Kim Jong Un’s sweet new ski resort.

Kim Jong Un’s reign must be a dark time for North Korea’s apologists on the far left. Those who elevate equality above all other values (or say they do) must be hard pressed to find solidarity with a regime that has imposed the world’s most obscene case of economic and social injustice. Under Kim Jong Il, North Korea was no paragon of socialist equality. Since his dynastic succession, Kim Jong Un has added the arch-heresies of gaudy consumerism and an...

Fiskings/Sanctions/Sports/Useful Idiocy

December 25, 2013

Does this mean we can all forget about Dennis Rodman again?

Kim Jong Un has proven to be beneath the corporate image of the Irish online gambling company, Paddy Power, which has withdrawn from sponsoring Dennis Rodman’s basketball invitational, planned for Kim Jong Un’s birthday in January. Rodman’s mouthpiece says that he plans to continue with the game anyway, but The Simon Wiesenthal Center is asking other former NBA players to boycott the game: “Everyone it seems, except Dennis Rodman, understands that this is not a game to promote peace, but...

Human Rights/Kim Jong Un/Useful Idiocy

November 21, 2013

Say, do you suppose Merrill Newman bought the wrong North Korea travel guide?

The San Jose Mercury News identifies the U.S. citizen arrested in North Korea three weeks ago — yes, that’s right — as Merrill Newman, age 85, of Palo Alto, California. He was arrested on October 26th, when the North Koreans pulled him off his flight out of Pyongyang Sunan before it took off. For whatever reason, we’re only just hearing about it now, although dozens more Americans might have entered North Korea since then, and might have benefited from knowing that the North Koreans...

Foreigners in N. Korea/Useful Idiocy

November 20, 2013

Elle Magazine makes a morally retarded fashion statement about North Korea

When I first saw the report here that an Elle Magazine columnist had declared “North Korea chic” to be one of this year’s top fashion trends, I immediately assumed that someone was failing to appreciate someone’s rather tasteless parody. When Americans do think of North Korea, they often infantilize it. Tasteless parodies may be our third-most common reaction to North Korea, after apathy and passive disgust. Sadly, having seen the screenshot of Joe Zee’s post, I think Zee was seriously...

Media Criticism/Useful Idiocy/WTF?

October 28, 2013

Is the next Banco Delta Asia in Malaysia?

Over the weekend, a lot people were giggling at the decision by Paul Chan, President of HELP University, to award an honorary degree in economics of Kim Jong Un. Foreign Policy’s Isaac Stone Fish, who first revealed the story, obligingly prints Chan’s manifesto, which reads like the work of a true belieber — a man who writes as if he has spent an inordinate amount of time watching High School Musical over and over again. I have fond memories of...

Money Laundering/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy/WTF?

September 10, 2013

Breaking: Baby Born in Pyongyang. Not Breaking: 600 Others Die in Wonsan

If I could ask Dennis Rodman one question, notwithstanding the fact that the answer would only be a string of obscenities and non-sequiturs anyway, it would be this: Would you have played Sun City? I’ve already argued the comparison between North Korea and South Africa once, so I see no need to rewrite it. I went to work in South Africa for three months in 1990–after Mandela was released, and after the government had begun to repeal the apartheid laws. I’m...

Kim Jong Un/Sports/Useful Idiocy

March 3, 2013

Rodman on North Korean gulags: “We do the same thing here.”

Update: Video: OH, AND HE ALSO SAID, “DON’T HATE ME”: Hearing those words makes me wish we could fast-forward through whatever remains of Dennis Rodman’s biography and go straight to the perfect epitaph. One of the drawbacks of our age is the constant mind-rape we endure from the forcible penetrations of unwanted information. I’ll eventually die regretting all I know about Dennis Rodman because so many people enjoy watching the moral and financial despair of other people. Thanks to those...

Useful Idiocy

February 27, 2013

This Just In: North Korea fails to absorb any of Dennis Rodman’s tact, class, gentility, or gravitas.

So yet again, we learn that visitors do not change North Korea. The tricky part is getting out before North Korea changes the visitor. Since I broach the engagement-versus-isolation debate, it’s been argued enough times that I seldom hear any new arguments, but this one by Michael Totten, in response to the reliably trite Nick Kristof, is a terrific deconstruction of mirror-imaging by both the North Koreans and the Americans who don’t understand how they think. The answer to the debated question,...

Appeasement/Humor/Satire/Useful Idiocy

February 27, 2013

Would Dennis Rodman have played Sun City?

Visit Pyongyang – An idiom used to describe a desperate plea for media attention (see also Jump the Shark) by a washed-up celebrity or politician (see Jimmy Carter, Bill Richardson, Ric Flair) who, lacking the residual talent to attract such attention by any other means or device, visits the one place on Earth where any publicity-seeker whose name is vaguely recalled by persons over 40 can be assured of making global headlines without being arrested, indicted, or otherwise worthy of...

Human Rights/Propaganda/Useful Idiocy

January 11, 2013

Breaking: North Korea Still Poor, Ignorant, and Run by Narcissistic Assholes

I’ve never expected anything good to come from a Bill Richardson visit to Pyongyang, and this visit fulfilled my expectations. A lot of journalists, bloggers, and academics in Washington and New York made a big deal out of this. (It was good for our traffic.) But in the places that really count — in Chongjin and Hamhung and Uijongbu and even in Pyongyang — it didn’t change a thing. It will not reduce the black market price of corn, it...

Appeasement/Useful Idiocy

December 14, 2012

A Quick Thought on this Psy business

My ten year-old can already tell you that one of my life’s newer objectives is to die an old man without having heard “Kangnam Style” even once. Pop culture has never been my thing, but I sure did get tired of all the forced Kangnam-Style allusions and cliches in just about everything written about Korea during Psy’s 15 minutes. Anyway, if you’re wondering whether I’m even a little bit surprised that Psy once sang, “Kill those fucking Yankees …. Kill their...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/Useful Idiocy

November 7, 2012

Escape from North Korea: An Incremental Review

Nov. 7, 2012. Early in Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Korea, you start to find powerful phrases that stay with you — phrases that make you stop reading and chew on them, to extract the full significance of some aspect of life in another reality. I couldn’t help quoting two of them. The first is illuminating: So accustomed are North Koreans to the lack of light that when I asked a North Korean who had settled in an American city...

Books & Films/Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/Useful Idiocy

May 20, 2012

Kim Jong Un Buys up Luxuries; Christine Ahn Attributes Famine, Cannibalism Reports to “Political Bias”

When North Korea tried and failed to launch its Unha-3 rocket this year, it not only chose that launch instead of a big shipment of American food aid as the price of keeping quiet until November, it also lost the six-month supply of grain it could have bought with the money it cost to build the damn thing to begin with. But it’s good to see that those choices haven’t cramped the lifestyles of any North Koreans fortunate enough to...

"United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy

Category: Useful Idiocy