Author: Josh Philip Ross

It’s time for a little upgrade in the world of my blog. Making a migration over to WordPress.com, which seems to be a little fresher visually than Blogger.com, and a little richer in the features, and a little less dependent on Google+. Welcome to my new home.

If you’re looking for posts from my previous blog, you can find them here.

Mark Wahlberg has lately come under attack for seeking a pardon in his 1988 racist assault of two Vietnamese men. Much of the criticism has argued that a black man assaulting and maiming two white men in such a way would never have resulted in such a light sentence (45 days in prison) nor been given the opportunity to become a beloved pop star and movie star.

But this criticism strikes me as exactly backward. Even without his philanthropic efforts, whatever you may think of them, Mark Wahlberg is pretty much exactly how you want a violent, racist young person to turn out as an adult: he pays taxes, participates constructively in society, eschews violence, and expresses public regret for his crimes.

Keep in mind that Wahlberg was 16 when he committed his crime: a child, despite our unfortunate tendency these days to try 16-year-olds as adults. He was young and did something stupid and paid a limited price that enabled him to learn that what he did was very wrong while also enabling him to turn into a functional adult.

The core problem with our criminal justice system is that it denies these opportunities to too many of the young people who fall afoul of it — especially those who are black or Hispanic. Too much of our criminal justice rhetoric is focused on retribution and punishment and shame rather than on rehabilitation and compassion. There are deep cultural reasons for this, going back to America’s Puritan roots, and also racist ones, going back to the idea that people of certain races are incorrigible, ineducable, beasts in their essential nature. These ideas help to explain why America has such a high incarceration rate and such dreadful prisons and jails, and why brutal mistreatment and prison rape have been so long tolerated: criminals, according to this logic, deserve all the punishment they receive, including extrajudicial punishment like rape and assault.

We need to move away from this punitive thinking, and we need to avoid the easy outrage that demands that the unfair suffering heaped on black youths be heaped on a white youth too. I would like young violent offenders of all races to have the opportunities Wahlberg has had, and I would like for them, as non-violent adults who have demonstrated their decent citizenship, to be granted forgiveness. If you have served your juvenile sentence and gone on to a productive adult life free of criminality, that ought to be enough. That ought to be the whole point.

That number, in real terms, is terrible. It’s gone down throughout Obama’s presidency, and it has stayed down. It’s now at the same level it was in 1995, as it was climbing out of the recession trough that took down George H.W. Bush, made Ross Perot briefly plausible, and beat up Bill Clinton in 1994.

There are some systemic reasons for the decline that go beyond the economics of the moment. The retirement of the baby boomers is likely a factor, though I gather from talking to my parents that a lot of that retirement was involuntary and isn’t going very well. And older people are a significant part of the electorate, especially in non-presidential years.

If you wonder how much median income matters, look at this graph of satisfaction over time.

It looks a lot like median income, doesn’t it?  It bottoms out in the early 90s, climbs steadily through the Clinton years to a wobbly high, starts to fall after 2001, and starts a decline in the 2000s.

There are a lot of complicated economics and statistics and demographics behind median income, including the changing composition of households and much more. But it seems to be a significant factor in the national mood, and it may help explain why many Americans feel that the drop in unemployment and the rise in the Dow is somehow not helping them.

But that’s not what’s happening in Korea.

And Jews are a high proportion of Nobel Prize winners, prominent in education, prominent in finance, and prominent in the media industry. This is a thing we talk about all the time amongst ourselves. We’re proud of Albert Einstein and Mike Bloomberg and Jerry Seinfeld and Goldwyn and Meyer and lots of other Jews who have excelled. We need to move past the ghetto mentality of assuming that any outside praise is a veiled attack. Just as one can criticize Israel without necessarily being an anti-Semite — their own members of parliament do it all the time — one can also praise Jews without necessarily being an anti-Semite.

Second, Hazzan is exactly right about “too much,” but could have explained further. In Korean, “too much” (너무) is a modifier like “really” or “totally” in English. It’s common to say things like “That food was too delicious!” or “Your girlfriend is too pretty.” The implication is not that the food has exceeded a deliciousness limit or that the girlfriend really ought to be uglier. Like “totally,” which doesn’t always imply actual totality — “She’s totally pretty” doesn’t mean I think her toenails and her liver are gorgeous — “too much” or “too” is often just a strengthening modifier in Korean.

Third, it is drastically absurd to expect Koreans to have the same kind of linguistic care around racism that we do. Their culture and history is different, and so is their language. We make a very big distinction between “There are a lot of really great African-American athletes” and “African-Americans are good at sports.” It is, in the American context, a really important distinction. It’s also a distinction many Koreans don’t quite grasp. Their country had close to zero foreigners in it until the 1890s, and even now it has fewer foreigners than most countries. The proportion of foreign residents is now up to 2%, about half of whom are Chinese. Until the 1990s, few Korean traveled overseas and few foreigners came to live in Korea, so Korean society is relatively new at dealing with issues of race and ethnicity. (There’s basically no ethnic variation within Korean society outside of foreigners.)

Finally, we should not do to Koreans what the ADL accuses them of doing to us, which is applying a single perspective across an entire population. Some Koreans are undoubtedly racist. Some are idiots too. Some are well educated and worldly, others are poorly educated and ignorant. Kind of like Americans. Or Jews. You can point to specific incidents of Koreans acting racist — and the press is very happy to do just that whenever they get a chance, as in the recent case of an Irish job applicant who was rejected because her kind are alcoholics. That case was presented as if “Irish Need Not Apply” signs were on display all over Korea, but they’re not.

All of which makes me question the ADL’s surveys and methodologies everywhere else. They’re an organization committed to fighting anti-Semitism, which means they’re an organization committed to the widespread existence of anti-Semitism. One should be very careful about taking these kinds of surveys at face value. Like global happiness surveys or measures of what people care about, they often fail to take into account local cultural variations (Which cultures like to complain while happy? Which like to say they’re happy when they’re miserable?) and come up with results that are facile at best, grossly misleading at worst.

In reading Laurel Kendall’s The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman, I was struck by a passage describing a cramped, dim inner courtyard that approximated the larger, brighter courtyards of traditional Korean home. This was in the 1970s, in the then-modern home of a shaman who lived in the not-quite-countryside on the outskirts of Seoul.

A DIY under-floor heating system.

It got me to thinking about how architecture incorporated, modified or discarded aspects of traditional housing as Koreans made the rapid transition from mostly rural villages with thatched-roof homes to mostly urban, stacked apartment towers. Early attempts at modern homes kept some semblance of the traditional courtyard spaces, but these seem to have disappeared as Koreans moved to what they call villas — small brick apartment buildings — and then the larger apartment towers that have become so common. Under-floor heating, for example, seems to have been maintained in the transition to villas, but I don’t know about the more modern apartments. Sliding doors were also common in older buildings. And entrances to apartments had a recessed area for shoes, approximating the step up to a traditional house’s platform.

There’s a paper to be written about this, or perhaps a book. Maybe someone has already done it. There’s comparative work to be done on China and Japan at the very least. And I’m not going to do any of that. But if it strikes your fancy, maybe it can become your research project.

I have recently upgraded modems with Time Warner. As expected, the process was not smooth. Nevertheless, for a company that took three years to replace some waterlogged cables in my building, there were some surprisingly clever bits of customer service.

Initiating the process

One day, out of the blue, my modem reset. This isn’t exactly as rare an event as it should be, but it’s never good. When it finished rebooting, I had some brief trouble accessing the Internet, until Time Warner redirected me to a webpage where they told me that my modem was out of date and took me through the process of ordering a new one.

The good:

• This is the first time ever that Time Warner has proactively let me know that my equipment was out of date, rather than waiting until it began to cause problems, and then sending a technician to say, “Oh, this box is really old!”
• The ordering process was remarkably simple, and the new modem showed up in just a few days.

Freedom is a pretty strange thing. Once you’ve experienced it, it remains in your heart, and no one can take it away. Then, as an individual, you can be more powerful than a whole country. -Ai Weiwei

Right now, Liberty in North Korea is raising funds to rescue 200 North Korean refugees. That might seem like small potatoes against the daunting power of the North Korean state. But I’m gonna go with Ai: freedom is a pretty strange thing.

Last night, at a fundraiser, I spoke for a long time with Joseph Kim. He’s a sweet kid. We talked about North Korea, and we talked about Max Weber and sandwiches and cheap ways to travel. His English is better than it was the first time I met him, and he’s studying hard in school.

He’s just one individual with freedom in his heart. And it makes him powerful. It’s voices like Joseph Kim and Ai Weiwei that the dictators of this world fear most: people who speak the plain truth.

And it’s not that they speak without fear. In Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the documentary where Ai spoke about freedom, he admits that he’s afraid — maybe more afraid than most other people, which is why he realizes that he must speak now. He sees the danger of not speaking.

LiNK is working hard to bring 200 more Josephs to freedom. They won’t all do TED talks. Many may choose not to be activists at all — but choice is exactly the point. Given the resources and opportunities of freedom, North Korean defectors might open a kimbap stand together on the outskirts of Seoul, like the mother of a defector friend of mine and a few other defectors. Or they might get degrees in political science at one of Seoul’s top universities, like someone else I know.

But their acts of freedom, large and small, have an impact. They change the way the world sees North Korea and North Koreans. And many North Korean defectors remain in contact with their families back home, sending them money, sending them information — and planting the experience of freedom in their hearts.

If this matters to you, now is an especially good time to give because your funds will be matched. Even small donations make a difference — most of LiNK’s 265 rescues to date have been funded through the efforts of college students who’ve done things like bake sales. Sometimes it can make a difference just to talk to the people around you. Whatever you can do to give the experience of freedom to others, on this issue or somewhere else, please do it. Once you’ve experienced it, it remains in your heart, and no one can take it away.

North Korean officials recently dropped in on the Asian Games in South Korea and offered to renew talks between the two nations, an offer that South Korea was happy to accept. Meanwhile, North and South Koreans are exchanging gunfire across the border. What’s going on?

One of the most common misunderstandings in international relations is the belief that nation-states act like coherent individuals. People say things like “North Korea wants engagement” or “The United States has shifted its focus to Iraq” or, as I did above, “South Korea was happy to accept,” as if these countries were individual people.

Now, you could question whether even individual people act coherently all the time. But when it comes to large nations whose governments comprise thousands and thousands of people, it shouldn’t be strange that some of these people are working at cross purposes, or simply don’t know about each other’s intentions. In democracies, these variations are made explicit. We have presidents and legislators and appointed officials from different parties, and we have layers of government at the local, regional and national level. Politicians openly debate with each other.

In dictatorships, however, disagreements are hidden, as is so much else about how government works. It’s easy to believe that in a totalitarian state like North Korea, everything flows from the leader, and all government actions are under his control. But the reality is more complex. First of all, it isn’t always clear what the leader wants, and in fact dictators are often cagey about how much they reveal of their intentions. It isn’t just the outside world that has to struggle to parse Kim Jong-un’s intentions. North Korean officials have to take actions and make decisions based on cryptic instructions, or none at all, and they can face dire consequences if they guess wrong.

Second, we need to remember that information flows less effectively in dictatorships than in democracies. Totalitarianism is not the same as efficiency. Totalitarian states expend enormous effort to limit the flow of information, and that very much includes the flow of information within the middle levels of government. The top leadership must ensure that no individual or group is able to organize sufficiently to be a threat. That means siloing leaders and siloing information. Any system of information distribution that would allow a high-level minister to call a mass of people to action — the banality of a foreign minister sending a general memo to the full staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — is a danger to the leader. The leader needs multiple paths of information that lead to him, and he needs to limit the ability of those below him to share information widely.

So what does all this mean in terms of the gunfire at the border? Possibly nothing much. Peace talks, after all, do tend to happen in the context of conflict, and that’s what’s going on in Korea. The exchanges of fire, which led to no casualties, had to do first with North Koreans trying to shoot down balloons sent over the border by South Korean private citizens, and later with South Koreans warning North Korean soldiers not to move any closer to the demarcation line. Who ordered the North Koreans to fire at the balloons? Quite possibly a low-level border officer who knows absolutely nothing about the recent high-level exchanges with South Korea. Who ordered the South Koreans to shoot back? Probably a South Korean officer with standing orders to do exactly that, and whose orders don’t change because of the vague possibility of a thaw at the highest levels of his government. And why did the North Korean soldiers approach the demarcation line when they did? Who knows? But it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that they did so as part of some kind of clever cat-and-mouse game ordered up by Pyongyang. Instead, like so much else from North Korea, it’s probably just noise.