I’m afraid I’m not the only person seeing what I’m seeing in your comments. I’ve had several comments off-site about it in terms of a repeating pattern with your comments… So maybe you should reread them again and think about how someone could take offense in reading them.

Not putting others inane words (and arguments) into my mouth would be a good place to start. It’s a bit Procrustean, as in you can always supply me with inanities to disagree with.

(For example, I can’t recall equating Iraq to Vietnam, or Obama to Carter, though you have mentioned both analogies on my blog repeatedly. Even my Japan:USA analogy is not meant to be 1:1, but rather just a demonstration that extremists and ideologues can still railroad nations in bad directions, even now. Now is not so special, is all I was saying.)

Baltimoron,

I’ve emailed you again about this crazy spam thing. I hope it works out. Akismet is so good usually!

Yeah, I like Jared Diamond a lot; there are things I kind of disagree about, or shrug at — the first and last hunk of Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example. I haven’t really gotten too far into Collapse, either, though I can anticipate a fair amount of what he’s saying. But The Third Chimpanzee is one of several books on human nature — along with Pinker’s The Blank Slate and several (loaned out and never returned to me) books on human evolution/prehistory — that inform the sense of humans as described above.

The territoriality/cultural component thing you discuss is certainly interesting, but I think that a few things that aren’t so far off, historically speaking, will reformulate the question of whether human social evolution can go anywhere new.

One of them is radical life extension technology, which is still a fair way off — we probably won’t live to see anything much more radical than our parents saw — but which, in historical time, may be a mere eyeblink away, and secondly, when technology obviates certain kinds of resource competition. (When neat shit is so cheap anyone can download the schematics and fab it at home.) This would at least decouple territoriality from resource access, which is a big step, but not everything.

I’m actually working on a novella about the latter revolution — the elimination of certain kinds of material scarcity — hitting a future Burma that’s pretty much stuck where it is right now. The long and the short of it, for me, is that humans will sublimate their competitive instinct to other things, just as kids in school do it with relation to grades or popularity or whatever.

(Iain Banks’ Culture novels have characters competing over invitations to the best parties, because social status is the only real resource left for people to compete over. My story is considerably less far-future, and there’s still much more left to compete over in the world I’m writing about.)

Conscious responsibility — oh, yes, but how can we get the masses to do so? One hopes that, other problems aside, Clay Shirky’s characterization of our own addiction to lowest-common-denominator-entertainment being a short-term “bender” is correct, but I don’t think there’s ever been a time when huge masses of people were able to rationally enact their responsibility for the fate of the species, and I wonder if we can pull it off. (Or find some way of doing it without the inevitable coerciveness of most workarounds people are prone to suggest.)

It blows my mind that the subways in Seoul were built using ODA loans from Japan.

Significant resource problems or not, Japan was exporting very large amounts of Korean agricultural production to Japan during the colonial era, was it not? I seem to recall staggering figures in one or two books I read my first couple of years here.

It makes sense the Japanese were worried about Russian expansion into Hokkaido, though interestingly, the one book I’ve read about the Battle of Tsushima (much later, 1905) was from a Western perspective and pretty much claimed that around then turn of the century, the Russian leadership was in turn scared (rightly so) that Japan was going to expand onto the mainland. I don’t know how much of the fear was mutual in Japan at that time.

Yay for Portugal, anyway, or we wouldn’t have spicy gochu in Korea!

And, after contact was established with Europeans, even after the shogunate closed most of the ports, there were still contact and trade through the black ships of Portugal.

Gord said: “…in the broad schematics, I think conflict over “resources” (including, in the broadest sense, access to territory and enlistable human labour) is the driving force that has basically run the engine of human history. I think that makes sense — it’s wired into us, and can be observed in our closest primate relatives very, very clearly. We’re just such better tool makers that it carried us to every habitable zone (and several almost-uninhabitable zones) of the planet… and our genocides have been on a bigger scale.”

Two quick comments lest we go so deep beyond the sense of the post. I sense you’ve Jared Diamond. Two aspects of human existence impressed me from the three books, and one article, of his I have read. Firstly, humans are territorial, and not all animals are. Not only do humans make distinctions between species, but also between races and tribes.

Secondly, there’s a cultural component, too. Neolithic, agricultural culture, which still is a large component of human societies, creates a terminal competition between reproduction and food production. Neolithic societies face pressure to produce more laborers to produce more food, yet as societies advance specialization removes agricultural laborers from the fields for non-ag labor in cities. Paleolithic societies, like PNG and Native American societies control population expansion by limiting birthrates.

If we want to address this issue at this level, humans need to take conscious responsibility for species evolution by combining the prudence of paleolithic cultures with the prowess of the neolithic and modern. But, I think human territoriality will always be a final limit on social evolution.

On ROK’s miracle, I do have some reading in the queue, but Glenn D. Hook discusses Japan’s ODA and FDI contributions in “Japan’s International Relations”. America’s contribution is the other question. As the 50= years elapse there should be a paper trail now.

Obama is not Carter, Iraq is not Vietnam, and Sadaam Hussein is not Hitler, to name just a few.

If you think it is similar, well, we’re on two different tracks, and I don’t feel I can say much more. To be frank, maybe I took your initial response the wrong way:

You’re right, it would be utterly ridiculous to say that a dedicated group of right-wingers could seize the discourse and railroad a major, developed, democratic country — much less a hegemon — into a messy invasion and occupation over harebrained, irrational ideology and over resource security. How silly of me to imagine that could happen today.

I suppose I could have inserted a polite, “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” but I thought that went without saying.

You have an interesting point, though I have to qualify what I’ve said about resource scarcity and war — there is never any single cause for anything, even a single discrete act in a person’s life, if such a thing can be said to exist — but in the broad schematics, I think conflict over “resources” (including, in the broadest sense, access to territory and enlistable human labour) is the driving force that has basically run the engine of human history. I think that makes sense — it’s wired into us, and can be observed in our closest primate relatives very, very clearly. We’re just such better tool makers that it carried us to every habitable zone (and several almost-uninhabitable zones) of the planet… and our genocides have been on a bigger scale.

But yes, I’d say that wars also boost resource scarcity, and therein also stimulate more conflict. Conflict can cause scarcity, scarcity can cause conflict. Even unreal scarcity — the fear of it, or a sense of relative scarcity among one group looking at another group that seems to have more — can serve that same triggering function. There’s probably an autocatalytic cycle there, in which either can start as a trigger.

The ODA grants thing is interesting, though, and yeah, states certainly can be quite interdependent while talking sh*t about one another, that’s for sure. I’m curious to read more of your thoughts on bureaucratic infighting and ODA grants’ relation to Dokdo outbursts, if you’ve written more about that somewhere!

(By the way, I’ve edited the time stamp of your post, because my own response predates yours, stuck in the spam filter, coming to my attention. Hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to keep the thread clear. I wonder if it’s the word “moron” that’s in a filter somewhere, though I know the app I use checks for matches with a spam server online. Maybe someone else marked one of your comments as spam elsewhere?)

Mark,

Just because you don’t like my definition of right wing doesn’t make it meaningless. And by the way, if you carefully reread your last comment above, you’ll probably notice it can be read as carrying a very patronizing tone and the following two arguments:

1. people who think differently from you are immature and undersophisticated
2. that any opinion differing from yours is “watering down” the terminology.

You may have forgotten, but other people will define terms in ways you don’t. For plenty of people worldwide, the whole American political spectrum begins right of center. Could you keep it focused on ideas, please? I’m more than happy to be disagreed with, but the other insinuations are insulting at best. Your own website is a more appropriate place to insinuate that people you disagree with are unsophisticated and immature. If you want an example, look at Baltimoron’s comments: they’re focused on the ideas in play, and he’s disagreeing with me pretty forcefully, but I don’t feel insulted.

(By the way, I realize Japan in Korea is not US in Iraq; I just think it’s unrealistic to suggest that what happened in Japan couldn’t happen in an established democracy today… especially when an ideology-driven)

As for the O’Rourke quote, you know, he’s also asking his readers to squint and play make believe. (Each time you quote him I feel less interested in reading his work!) The war was obviously not about short-term oil supplies. Anyone who suggests that is implying the Bushistas are even dumber than I think they are. The best analogy I can suggest is that first scene inside prison, where the new guy beats the living shit out of the biggest, meanest SOB he can find. The US invasion of Iraq did not happen in a bubble where only Americans were watching, after all. The whole world was watching, and the take-home message was different in every country whose citizens I’ve discussed it with.

At this point, you’ve watered down the meaning of “right wing” so much that I really can’t comment any further. I know I’ve been guilty of making historical analogies on occasion myself, but as I get older and realize just how complex things are, historical analogies just don’t work. Obama is not Carter, Iraq is not Vietnam, and Sadaam Hussein is not Hitler, to name just a few.

Also, we have to recall that the present spat occurs when Japan-ROK trade favors Japan heavily, and past controversies either were ended or occurred in the midst of large Japanese ODA grants. Both states are fully capable of doing business, trading, and exchanging gifts while vilifying and belittling each other.

Actually, for the sake of argument, I think if the chaebol ever lost their supply links to Japan, it would prompt radical diplomatic and structural reform. As it is, ROK lives on borrowed money. It’s another reason I believe this is all a matter of domestic consumption and bureaucratic infighting.

You’re right, it would be utterly ridiculous to say that a dedicated group of right-wingers could seize the discourse and railroad a major, developed, democratic country — much less a hegemon — into a messy invasion and occupation over harebrained, irrational ideology and over resource security. How silly of me to imagine that could happen today.

In any case, you miss a big part of the picture when you say that the basis of Japan’s modern success is resource poverty. (After all, that was built upon earlier successes directly resultant from not just a head start in industrialization, but also in Japan’s colonial exploitation of places like Korea.)

Resource poverty and ingenuity can work well in a world where trade can be relied upon to make up the difference — that is, in a material-resource abundant world, like ours now. In a world where resources are less abundant, though, and viable, affordable alternatives are not found, that system becomes increasingly less feasible. Resource poverty becomes real poverty in such a world, and the likelihood of reverting to older methods of gaining resources to fend off poverty begins again… especially in one’s immediate neighborhood.

Do I think Korea should be afraid of this right now? No. But I do think Korea has a strong incentive to drive research into alternative energy, so as to keep the system from breaking down.

By the way, this is not a Simon-Ehrlich discussion: I haven’t brought population up at all. (Though Simon’s reasons for refusing to take the second wager is pretty revealing of how distanced he is from the fact that economic processes have to occur in an environment. How can athletic performances be better if the track is fullof potholes?) My point is that our post-industrial world civilization is dependent on resources that will, eventually, run out unless we develop alternatives. And if we don’t, our world civilization is likely to become much less civilized. Sliding back half a century is not so big a leap as we would like to imagine. All that said, I think your long run is probably on a different timescale than mine: that my long run extends a century or two beyond yours. The current trends of commodity prices are best considered noise on the scale I’m looking at this from.

I’m hopeful alternatives will be developed long before then, of course, and things are looking relatively bright at the moment, for example if (well-sealed) tanks containing this bacteria become feasible, and oil sands processing improves, and who knows what else…

But if they don’t, we will be seeing resource wars on a growing scale. The history of human civilizations has been driven, after all, by a series of wars over resources. And the first places Japan will be looking, naturally, are Sakhalin, Korea, Taiwan, and — conditions there depending — parts of coastal China.

Bruce,

Yeah, calling the island Takeshima’s a bad idea. :)

And yeah, there are a lot of photos from there. And what a lot of colorful arguments. Bleah!

Ir’s amazing to see how many photo icons from Panoramio appear clustered on and around Dokdo. Do people vacation there? :D

Nota bene, the example I cited was supposed to be evidence of the overall “health” of civic society, and wasn’t meant to denigrate the actions of the anti-racist activists.

As for worrying about the scarcity of commodities starting conflicts, despite the recent uptick in commodities prices, I’d still bet on Simon in the long run.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager

I didn’t know the vans extorted money for route adjustment. You’d think people would demand a crackdown on the noise pollution, given how much less tolerated noise pollution seemed, when I was visiting, anyway — it was nothing like how in Korea, techno music blasts from every damned storefront in some districts.

The hard right, for all that they may have a disproportionate hold on the public imagination, also did manage to have a profound influence on Japanese society in the first half of the 20th century. (As discussed early on in the only book I’ve looked at on the subject, Kaplan and Dubro’s Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld. The Dark Ocean Society’s involvement in promoting Japanese imperialism, various rightist groups in the 30s assassinating and marginalizing moderate politicians, and so on, suggests that — as unlikely as it would be now, given the current state of affairs — a small number of utter bastards — as few as 25 marching racists — can have a massive effect when the 200 anti-racists are staying at home, the 100 reporters are scared to report, the 50 cops are sympathetic or told to do other things, and the 25 racists are the only ones willing to use violence to achieve their goals.

Not that I think a rightist overthrow of Japan’s political system is likely for now, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility for a world where resources turn scarce. Same goes for Korea, actually. I imagine a lot of relatively homogenous states, and some not-so-homogenous ones, would go that route.

The guys driving the vans are paid to do that. It isn’t volunteer work, it’s a job. They’ll occasionally approach businesses for money – if the businesses pay them off, the vans take an “alternate” route.

I suspect the Japanese “hard right” is a lot like it’s Western counterparts: nasty, and ugly to be sure, but with a hold on the popular imagination disproportionate to it’s actual membership.

It’s an old standby of humorists in newspapers and magazines or TV talk show hosts to point out that at a public parade held by some racist organization, 200 anti-racist protestors showed up, 100 journalists were on the scene, 50 police men made sure no fights broke out, and 25 actual racists marched.

Sorry to have missed those comments in the moderation/spam filter. I see what you’re saying, and it makes sense strategically for the government to try milk this. I’m saying it doesn’t really make sense for Korean society to freak out every time it comes up. If even a small fraction of the public energy wasted on ranting about Dokdo (or, for that matter, futilely preparing for unnecessary TOEIC exams en masse) were diverted to funding research into stuff like this, the Peak Oil debacle you mention in the post you linked wouldn’t be such an inevitablity for Korea. We don’t even know if we can mine methane clathrate safely, after all.

I’m kind of hoping the public will figure this out in the next generation or two. And kind of hoping that won’t be too late.

Mark,

I disagree. I think it would be a step up the ladder of sophistication, essentially in learning to pick one’s battles, and to use a strategy that at least vaguely considers a point of view outside the “official” Korean one, when it comes to international issues. I would hope people would be protesting things that are obviously protest-worthy, not just moving from hairtrigger sensitivity to total apathy. The extremes are where the problems lie.

I’m glad to hear the rightists in Japan annoy everyone else. Those black vans were awfully annoying. I think my traction comment was more along the lines of thinking it might insult the hell out of regular people who would then be less sympathetic to Korean objections to the Japanese right.

Who’s the last Clarion West author you’ve read? You might be surprised at the range of things that amuse us!

(By the way: Shakedown how? I’ve never heard anything beyond how annoying and extremist they are.)

Julia: Sorry for turning your daughter’s undies into a scary interdimensional gateway! And yeah, I’m thinking the amusement factor would at least get people listening to something that disputes the current Japanese government’s position. If it could amuse Japanese people while doing it, that would be optimal. The problem now is that all discussion of the issue is utterly Korea-centric. Or, as Baltimoron would likely note — that’s exactly the purpose of the Dokdo/Takeshima issue: domestic politics on both sides. But if the people pushed this thing into a kind of public dialog, by circumventing the proper channels and using the Internet, maybe this could be avoided.

Jeff,

Yes, well, you should see how much I write about issues I do want to heard and talk about. And to be fair, I was talking about negative nationalism, about alternative strategies for dealing with these issues, and so on.

To make myself clearer, what I don’t want to hear are the usual: Koreans ranting about Dokdo and Japan in the same way that other Koreans did three years ago; or, more offensive still, the endless foreigner blogs that just use Dokdo to “prove” (with routinely incredible illogic) that all Koreans are insane. Posts of both sorts abound out there.

I wouldn’t mind hearing more thoughts on better ways for the Korean public to grapple publicly with this issue. (From Koreans and from knowledgeable foreigners alike.) I’d rather not read ignorant rants by people who don’t give a shit about the Korean public and are just out to mock people.

And while we’re wordcounting, over 10% of those approximately 2060 words above are a quote from a book on Canadian politics, so, you know, the post does range beyond just Dokdo. Quite far, I’d say.

I think if some of the tactics you suggest are taken, it’ll be amusing for enough people that word will get out on the internet to people who normally wouldn’t follow Korean/Japan relationships, but who would have the capacity to form an informed opinion, given the chance — and the notification.

Just as an aside, I don’t think the “right-wing” whack jobs in Japan would gain any traction from the kind of satire that you are suggesting (no offense, but it sounds more Larry Flynt than Clarion West) partially because (and I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth) I’m not as cynical about people in general, but also because those guys just piss a lot of people off on a day to day basis. Those trucks they drive around in are essentially a very crude shakedown scam.

(follow the link)