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Fri, March 22, 2019 | 19:57

Opinion > Blogs > Imbricated Chaos >

Watching the movie 'The Wandering Planet' in Shanghai

The contradictions of contemporary China were on my mind during my trip to Shanghai in February, 2019. After all, China is not just some country and observing it is not just an amusement. What China becomes, or does not become, will determine our common future. As I looked around Shanghai, I was thinking about how the American government, and American corporations, have slipp...

Imbricated Chaos | 2019-03-16 19:09

Fractured governance fractures the Hanoi summit

The sudden cancellation of the joint statement on February 28 at the end of the Trump-Kim Summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, was one of the most complex and contradictory historical events in my memory. Of course the adlib briefing by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo immediately after was not complex at all. It was a banal show for the media that avoided talking about much of anything oth...

Imbricated Chaos | 2019-03-01 10:38

An American psychopathocracy

When Dr. Lance Dodes of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society told MSNBC that Donald Trump “is not in control of himself. This is what we mean when we say that somebody is becoming psychotic or is briefly psychotic,” his words made sense.

Imbricated Chaos | 2019-02-07 14:24

The light and shadows of the Korean Peninsula

How many times have I seen an American expert pointing to a satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula at night and remarking that the striking difference between the darkness the envelops North Korea and the bright lights that illuminate South Korea, as well as Japan, symbolizes the insularity, the oppressiveness and the pathetically backwards economic state of the North. The o...

Imbricated Chaos | 2019-02-05 16:27

Merit, wisdom and the Korean tradition of governance

The ruthless competition between young Korean to get into good high schools and then be admitted to leading universities as the necessary step to finding superior jobs takes a terrible toll on the lives of many and has distorted the nature of learning. Education has become a concealed combat that drives us into isolation, rather than the grounds for cooperation among all peop...

Imbricated Chaos | 2019-01-27 12:07

'Sky Castle' and the deep fissures in Korean society

Koreans have been riveted to their television sets for the last three months watching the JTBC hit drama “Sky Castle.” This tragicomedy relates the machinations of four families who live in an exclusive development that houses the restless, the reckless and the ruthless super-rich. Those four families also manage to tread on the shattered remains of other families that have s...

Imbricated Chaos | 2019-01-22 16:24

Inconvenient parallels between responses to the Holocaust and to climate change

A comparison between the culture of denial and self-deception that swept Europe during the Holocaust and the disgraceful failure of so-called “advanced nations” to take even the most basic steps to address the catastrophe of climate change may strike readers as a painfully stretched analogy that undermines the authors' credibility. Sadly, the resistance to this analogy that w...

Imbricated Chaos | 2019-01-13 14:05

Meditations on the word 'unification'

The debate about North Korea's future has been reduced to a fight between those on the one hand who favor expanding cooperation with North Korea and thereby increasing investment, business activities, transport networks, electric grids and energy ties, and those on the other hand who feel that North Korea has not completely denuclearized, that it cannot be trusted by the inte...

Imbricated Chaos | 2018-12-23 10:26

Korea without smartphones

Imagine Korea without smartphones. When I make this suggestion, the response I receive from Koreans is one of intense fascination. But the assumption they make is that I am going to describe a futuristic “smart city” in which we no longer will use smart phones because information will be projected on to our eyeglasses, or our retinas, or perhaps relayed directly to our brain ...

Imbricated Chaos | 2018-12-02 13:22

NK sanctions: Green light for profit seekers and red light for concerned citizens

Although the newspapers give us wall-to-wall reports about the tight economic sanctions that North Korea is subject to, sanctions meant to bring it to its knees and make it give up its nuclear weapons program forever, we also observe a steady flow of articles about meetings between government officials, Korean corporations and North Korean officials to discuss investment, inf...

Imbricated Chaos | 2018-12-01 11:12

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World Water Day 2019