Chris Blattman

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Kim Jong Elizabeth II

Beautifully done: BBC footage of the Queen’s birthday, but with sneering BBC commentary about Kim Jong Il’s birthday dubbed over it. The lovely irony.

Hat tip to Philip Sterne, self-described longtime blog lurker.

24 Responses

  1. @William Sjostrom So I think you’re strawmanning quite a lot here, since I (and I think most other people) interpreted the video as being a criticism of BBC’s self-unaware reporting and subtle dehumanization of North Korea’s citizens. If anybody is “contemptible” in this situation, I think it’s BBC (and I think that that’s indeed the purpose of the video).

  2. Are you serious? My neighbor is from England. He hopped a flight at Stanstead airport to leave, without the aid of smugglers or without worry of being shot. Monarchists and anti-monarchists argue in pubs without fear of being sent to concentration camps. The Brits like pageantry, and they are very good at it, but if you didn’t want to see the queen’s birthday or watch the royal wedding, no one bothered you, much less tortured your family for it. This kind of moral equivalence game no doubt goes down well at Manhattan parties, where more food gets consumed in a night than the typical North Korean gets in a year, but it isn’t funny, it isn’t clever, it isn’t witty. It is low and contemptible, a gross insult to the millions of North Koreans murdered, tortured, and starved by the ruling regime. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

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