Kathreb

Self-imposed Internet Ban

The latest and last Harry Potter is now out. I haven't read it yet and am very much afraid of spoilers. Especially given my tendency to scroll down and not fully read stuff on the internet. This leaves me very vulnerable to missing the sentence that warns people of spoilers ahead. Therefore, I am scaling back my internet surfing until after I've read the book - I'm third in line to borrow it so it could be a few weeks. That doesn't mean no blogging, it just means no blogging about news I got from the internet.

Meanwhile, I am not in the flood area of the UK floods. I've seen some stuff on the tv news but there is no evidence of the catastrophe in my neighbourhood. In fact, its a lovely sunny day today and the washing is blowing softly as it dries on the outside line.

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North Korean big wig blows hot air

Last week Chatham House hosted a talk by Ambassador Han of the Institute for Disarmament and Peace in Pyongyang. He gave a talk very similar to this piece by An Song Nam of the same Institute. After the talk there was a Q&A session. Now, as you can guess, everyone in the audience was keen to see if they could get this guy to say something remotely sane rather than the ridiculous diatribe he had spoken for his talk. It was not to be - he did not once acknowledge that perhaps, maybe on of the off-chance, there was another point of view to the one he had.

The event at Chatham House strongly emphasised (to me) the argument in favour of not talking to these guys. It really seemed that it was a complete waste of time trying to talk, let alone negotiate with people like him. However, I do hold that talking is better than not talking. As I have argued earlier, even if you can't expect anything of the North Korean regime and its representatives, it is better to chat inanely with them than to provoke them. Also, there is NO WAY that guy doesn't know the other side of the argument. I would think that the more you engage and ask questions, the more likely it is that one day these representatives are seriously going to start thinking for themselves and hopefully thinking about the crimes they are complicit in by supporting the DPRK regime.

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