World Brinkmanship

I was sad to see Obama making domestic partisan jabs during his world rock tour.

The jabs didn't surprise me. He is simply communicating the way that we were taught to communicate in school. The modern professoriat is built around arcane ideas about paradigm shifting.

The process of paradigm shifter involves teaching people to repeat themes with the notion that the theme will become the accepted reality. Both Obama's international Bush bashing and Hillary Clintons reset button gafaw were efforts to use the international stage as a platform for repeating partisan themes.

This is what we are taught to do in school. Apparently, it is effective.

The speech of note during Obama's trip came in the form of a prepared reaction to North Korea's flaunting UN Resolutions to launch an intercontinental rocket. (an interesting next step in its nuclear weapons program).

The speech echoes Bush's complaints of Iraq's repeated flaunting of UN's resolutions about its WMD program.

Of course, the NK issue is not quite as substantial a threat as Hussein's WMD program. Hussein had used WMDs against his people and the Middle East was gripped with the mistaken belief that a big war would lead to a new glory age for Islam.

NK is simply practicing brinkmanship. The NK game is that the missile spectacle attacks attention and attention helps consolidate power while bringing in money.

Regardless of the context, Obama's speech on the crisis was well played. For society to work, the words we say have to mean something. In a technically advanced world, we have to have more than empty rhetoric; otherwise, we will fall into a negative pattern where dictators use brinkmanship for political and monetary gains.