North Korea

When I get referrals from Twitter I use to search a bit to see how my posts are being talked about. Recently I saw Nick Land calling me a North Korea sympathizer of sorts. Now, I had been wanting to make a post about North Korea since a while ago, so this is as good a chance as any to write what I think about that country.

North Korea is a nasty place. I define "nasty" by the way the people live, not by the way its political system conflicts with the political positions I’ve signaled over the years. I don't give a crap about it being "totalitarian" or "communist" or "antidemocratic". I’m not married to any particular political structure. I haven’t spent years signaling my commitment to this or that form of government. I probably should have, as everybody I know has been busy loudly proclaiming their allegiance to western democracy, and my silence on the topic hasn't gained me any status. Fortunately, I get my status from other sources, and my heartfelt fear that joining the game of public political signaling would get me purged by more adept agitators sooner rather than later made me confident that my outsider strategy is the best over the long term. This is I think the mental calculation that most "conservative" people do.

Anyway, as I was saying, I don't care about totalitarianism or whatever. If a totalitarian regime produces a wealthy, pleasant and interesting country, God bless it. If a communist country does so; I’ll sing its praises. If a democracy does so, great for them. I’ll go visit often.

North Korea does nothing of the sort. It's a nasty, wretched place, where commoners starve, and people must constantly fawn over the powerful to avoid being killed or enslaved on trumped up charges. I wouldn't like it there. North Korea is as bad as everybody says it is, most particularly the people who have managed to get out of there, and have written books on it. Chinese people are generally more nonchalant about it. Many Chinese can remember the Mao days; and they'll tell you North Korea is mostly the same thing; even slightly better, now that cheap electronics are available by smuggling. The Mao era was bad, of course, but it wasn't living hell. People lived through it. Most people are glad they got out of it, but others do miss that era of simple poverty. Some people are of course better at loudly proclaiming their love to the Great Leader than they are at making money in a capitalist marketplace. So of course some people miss Mao. When North Korea falls, some people will miss the Kims. I hear some North Korean refugees eventually go back.

Most criticisms of North Korea from abroad blame communism or totalitarianism for the poverty and lack of freedom. Even Moldbug when arguing for monarchy, was pointed out that North Korea is a monarchy too, and it's not looking so hot. Moldbug answered that North Korea isn't an actual monarchy, and the totalitarian system there is due to the lack of formal recognition of the Kim's sovereignty. He stressed that North Korea is communist, and that's why it's so bad.

I think that's wrong. North Korea is of course communist by any definition of the word. But North Korea is also, well, Korea. And the situation in North Korea is by all accounts very similar to what it was during the Joseon dynasty. There you had a king, with absolute power. You had a ruling elite, the yangban, who manned the court and the state administration. You had the commoners half starving and constantly fawning over their leaders in order to get by in life. And you even had slaves, large amounts of native population with no legal status and who could be traded as property.

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The Joseon dynasty was as bad, if not worse, as north Korea today, and it wasn't communist. It was a monarchy run on a traditional Chinese state template. And yet it managed to be one of the poorest countries on earth, containing one of the smartest population of humans. Again, no communism. I guess you could call it totalitarian, but the resources of social control available to the Joseon dynasty were pitiful compared to what any modern state can do. The Joseon dynasty was what it was, and north Korea today is a very similar thing. Communism has little to do with it. China is communist too, and it's flourishing. Vietnam is communist too, and it's doing ok.

Of course most people would pull a no true Scotsman here, and say that North Korea is real communist, while china is fake communist, because china allows (effectively) private property, while north Korea doesn't, and that explains the difference. Well, did the Joseon dynasty allow private property? Surely it did. Until it didn't. If you were a yangban of status with good connections with the present ruling faction, your property was not secure, it was most likely soaring. If you were a yangban of status with good connections with a falling faction, you could lose your property and life at the whim of a bureaucrat. Is that very different from what happens in North Korea? surely some people own stuff. Land, housing, even factories. Even if its nominally owned by a state department, some man effectively controls that department, and will continue to do so as long as he's friends with somebody close to Kim the Fat III (as the Chinese call him). Actually that's not different from how things work in china today. You can hold on your property as long as you are allowed to hold on your property. You can ask the "corrupt officials" that Xi Jinping has been cracking down on recently. How's your private property?

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North Korea today

North Korea also has no issues with feminism; most men can and do get married, and women are, as peasants everywhere, not pretty flowers, but generally pleasant enough to run a household. For all the poverty and oppression, they manage to breed more than we do. Now this is not to say North Korea is a paradise of traditional sexual mores; I’m sure Kim the Fat gets dozens of 13 year old girls sent to him to abuse sexually. And surely there's some homosexual official in some province who enjoys raping little boys and does so with impunity. That again happened all the time in premodern monarchies, it is nothing new.

As a reader of history I know enough of the past not to worship the good ol' days, the golden age of peace and prosperity that we've lost. There was no such thing; the past was a nasty, brutal place to be. Poverty is nasty business, and peasants in a poor country are the most selfish and immoral people you can find. Talleyrand was right as saying that only aristocrats before the revolution really got to know about the true douceur de vivre. But the real douceur wasn't living standards; it was the guarantee of high status for live. That was very, very sweet, but by definition only available to a few, and it created resentment of the same intensity in the opposite direction.

And yet people do still look back at the past with nostalgia, and it's not only about pretty buildings. It's about SP, both real and potential. There is no status for white men today in the West, and all we can see in the horizon is even worse prospects. If the basic programming of the social brain is to prevent loss of status by any means; well then the North Korean solution, the medieval solution, doesn't look so bad. Blood, iron and hellfire don't look so bad. Even Islam doesn't look so bad. Anything, no matter how crazy and poorly thought, is better to the status quo, because uncertain high status beats certain low status, and absolutely anything beats certain lower status in the future.

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I always enjoy your succinct clarity of thought.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

I have been to the DPRK multiple times, and not as a tourist. I find that your analysis of the country is correct with respect to the media narrative that is "North Korea," however that media narrative has nothing to do with the reality of the DPRK. The DPRK is in fact an explicitly anti-Leftist state. And by explicitly, I mean by order of Kim Il Sung himself. In his autobiography, he goes on chapter after chapter in volume after volume warning of the dangers of Leftism and "Leftist adventurists." He cites Stalin's Russia with its self-consuming security purges as the inevitable outcome of Leftism, and hints at China's disasters without naming them. It may be DPRK's actual anti-Leftism that is the source of what seems to me to be the West's irrational fear/threat posture towards DPRK. The country has zero territorial ambitions, a military largely stuck in the 1950s, precisely 5 operational second-hand Mig-29s purchased in 1989 from Kazakhstan, etc. Although DPRK claims to have an atomic bomb, I am highly skeptical. DPRK media shows its military day in and day out, often the very same video clips they have shown for decades. In the words of Marvin the Martian, "where's the kaboom?" I think that if DPRK had an atomic bomb their media would be showing the kaboom over and over and over again. That in itself doesn't prove anything, but it's inconsistent with prior and current behavior. Words like communist, fascist, liberal, conservative do not translate across languages and cultures very well. What is "conservative" in one culture may be "liberal" in another. In any event, those are English words. DPRK has not claimed (note: claimed) to be "communist" since 1971, and has dropped all references to "Marxism-Leninism" which it now refers to in official publications as "previous theory." In any event, "communist" in the DPRK tended to mean something like "other neighboring allied countries also fighting the Japanese just like we are/were" (i.e. Soviet Union and China). There was a famine in DPRK in the 1990s, but there have been famines in my lifetime in China, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. There is immense suffering in DPRK, but in my experience it is the result of poverty and not political cruelty. In the rest of the world, poverty is associated with chaos and ignorance. DPRK is the most highly organized society in a part of the world that values conformity, and it has as close to 100% literacy as it is possible to attain. So it is easy to view their poverty as a miscalculation or the result of ideology or something else that would make sense to rich educated westerners. The DPRK is ethnically homogenous, meaning that one is likely to get the same answer to a normative question no matter how many people one asks. DPRK rejects foreign interference and has an intentional policy of national self-sufficiency and placing its independence above everything else. Those are values that one hears extolled all over the Alt-Right/Reactosphere. I'm not suggesting that Juche would work in a western country, but it's an interesting system. It was my time in the DPRK that opened my eyes to the fact that Western media lies...about everything. So consider the source about DPRK. In any event, DPRK has a right to be left alone. Moldbug is correct that the Kim family is very much a dynasty. As a monarchist, I think that's a good thing. In my opinion, it would be a better thing if the outside world left them alone.

Wow, this post is awkward. The points about status are good, but everything else is mostly wrong. The problem with this post is that you are contradicting yourself. You say "Communism has little to do with it [NK's poverty]. China is communist too, and it’s flourishing. Vietnam is communist too, and it’s doing ok.". Then you say "Of course most people would pull a no true Scotsman here, and say that North Korea is real communist, while china is fake communist, because china allows (effectively) private property, while north Korea doesn’t, and that explains the difference.". Ok, fair enough, but suddenly you also claim "Communism is just a name put on things; actual political realities lie on a continuum. Communist North Korea today does suck very very much, as it did before being communist. It could stop sucking any day, even while still being communist.". Well, who is the one pulling a no true scotsman here? I actually agree, political realities do lie on a continuum. And this is why when I use political labels such as "communism", I make sure that they have a very particular meaning and are not vague generalizations. So tell me Spandrell, if political realities do lie on a continuum can you seriously claim that North Korea and China are run in the same manner? Obviously not (don't know about Vietnam). Obviously North Korea and China are not identical in the way they are ran by their states. And I would hope that someone like you would realize that when discussing the outcomes of the state management, the manner of this management is pretty important to keep in mind. In this post you seem to regard everything which calls itself as communist, communist. Sure, and The United Kingdom is an actual Kingdom as well. Let's be real here. Yes, it is true that your property is not absolutely secure in China. But that doesn't mean it's the same as NK. Security is a relative thing. A continuum, if you will. And one's property would be much more secure in China compared to North Korea. Once again, this is obvious. For starters, in China you are at least allowed to legally own private property. Already a massive advantage. I hail from an ex-Eastern Bloc state and my parents and granparents had the privilege of living through it and my great-grandparents the privilege of getting their lives destroyed by it. In terms of how the country was ran by the government, it looked much more like North Korea than China today. With, quite predictably, more North Korean than Chinese effects. Once again, nontrivial differences. Some "communist" states happen to be more "communist" than others. Finally I want to address your point about why the west is getting a progressively worse place to live in: "The West however is going down. It has no potential for improvement. Living standards are falling, and the pace of the fall is getting worse. And most importantly, the status fall has been proportionally higher for, well, us. White males with below average political skills are the scapegoat of this generation. They are fair game for all manner of injustice. You could be framed as a rapist in college, as a racist in your workplace, as a homophobe in your bakery. And your dear private property and individual freedom will be taken away from you just as easily as a Joseon yangban of the wrong faction, or a North Korean with insufficient zeal for Kim the Fat. And it gets worse. Your son could be anally raped by a homosexual leader in the Boy Scouts. And a crossdresser could jerk off naked at the girls’ dressing room in your teenager daughter’s school. And you could do nothing about it. The very attempt of doing something about it will deal you the same punishment as a free spirit in north Korea." All of this is true. But you yourself note here that there are some similarities between North Korea and the West nowadays, which have actually grown in the past decades. As you note, you will get severely punished and have your life destroyed for not toeing the official party line. This is something that both NK and the US share, even if the party line is very different. Maybe this has to do with the fact that the countries like the US are in fact, um, I don't know, communist states? Have you heard of this guy Moldbug. He had this post, in fact several of them, where he said the US is a communist country. Crazy stuff, I know, but it is worth a read. It will blow your mind, man. And here's another comparison I would like you to make. Take the history of the past 40 years of the US on the one hand, and China on the other, compare them, and tell me which one has been moving away from stereotypically communist policies and which one has been moving towards such? Once again remember, political realities are relative, they are on a continuum. China successfully halted its Communist revolution several decades ago. Thus they stabilized, thus today they are infinitely more prosperous than they were back then, even if they still have some problems (some more serious, some less) with how they manage their economy. The USA on the other hand never stopped its revolution. Indeed, it has been actively accelerating it in recent times. Thus it is getting worse and worse. China is definitely not as communist today as it was at the time of Mao. The USA on the other hand, is indeed much more communist today than it was at the time of Mao. And the point of your posts was what? That communism is not the problem? Come again?

Oh well, what would we do without economists? When you look at North Korea, you see communism, because you've studied communism, and your family has lived communism. Fair enough. You are not the only one. When I look at North Korea, I see the Joseon Dynasty, because I've studied history. I see Communism as a very good excuse that the Kim Dynasty has used to keep its hold on power. I see the way power is held, the arbitrariness, the violent and murderous faction disputes, the ideological conformity; it's all the same, if strengthened by modern technology. You can use the word "communist" to mean "bad government", because it suits your background. But I don't think it's an accurate way of looking at how politics work. And cut it out with the snark. I've read my Moldbug too. I'm older than you. A reactionary society would tell you to be a bit more polite, if only overtly. I happen to disagree that calling the US communist is a useful way of putting it; and I've said so myself in other blogs years ago. See here: https://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/who-defeated-communism/

Hum. What do you think about Barbara Demick's book? Are the stories she retells accurate? What's missing? > The DPRK is in fact an explicitly anti-Leftist state. If a leftward movement is not to self-destruct in a singularity, somebody has to put the brakes on, and that means suppressing further attacks from the left. Stalin was big on pursuing "left opportunists" like Zinoviev, Kamenev and most famously Trotsky. Anarchists and socialist-revolutionaries were proscribed almost immediately after the 1917 Bolshevik coup and systematically destroyed.

I think experience trumps (no pun intended) journalism.

So you know Woolsey made it up about DPRK's EMP technology

I read this yesterday, but the sense of the 'authoritative' gave it an extra day to sink in. One's belief is beggared by this 'tome'. "In any event, DPRK has a right to be left alone." Yes, you say that's your opinion, and it's not likely to happen. I don't know of anybody else who thinks it should. It's quite impressive that you say this: "It was my time in the DPRK that opened my eyes to the fact that Western media lies…about everything." as though this 'authoritativeness' and 'experience' would be worth paying any attention at all to. The 'Western' media certainly does not lie about everything. And nobody could find this out by trips to N. Korea, even if the 'Western' media did lie about everything in DPRK. Amusing the way you make this particular 'monarch' and his descendants as something almost precious, when they're so obviously repulsive (or do Western cameras lie about the Fatso?). You're like an SJW, frankly, and in fact, the hard Marxists do, in desperation, end up defending N. Korea (without quite the 'Dear Leader' you sing for) when their welfare checks don't come in. Nothing like claiming 'experience', and 'not as a tourist'. A tourist? Yeah, one can understand why not. I did see some old Korean paintings once, and searched out the ones from 'Old North Korea'. It was good, but the lush DMZ, even in just photos, is better, and that we do owe to the North Koreans, without whom this could never have taken place. The world's rarest bird lives in it. Did you know that? In one day, your experience in DPRK has the same crumbliness, like plaster subject to a plumbing leak, of the Ryudyong. Do you stay there? It is a kind of exotic artwork, verging on becoming a protoplasmic organism.

I think I meant his 'ancestors', not 'descendants'. I don't know if Kim the Fat has re-expressed his gene pool full of future 'monarchs'? Hello?

Experience also trumps (pun intended) vitriol.

'Experience also trumps (pun intended) vitriol. ' I didn't know Trump would have visited Pyongyang, but I don't see why anybody believes your 'experience'. You're just a common troll, and with terrible writing. I like some of Trump's vitriol, though. So you claim to be Donald Trump? Most trolls came far less pedigree of hyperbole. I don't believe a word you said.

"I met a guy from North Korean, and I asked him how things were there. He replied, 'I can't complain.'"

Spandrell--I just saw this: "It’s funny how my SP theory posts get no comments. It’s like most internet comments are just a way of seeking status by trying to sound edgy, and my saying it out front effectively activates the shame-evasion routine in the brain that blocks that behavior from manifesting itself." I think this makes sense and I found those posts profoundly useful. I first decided to say something because you said 'get no comments'. But then I read the last one which had 12 and the link to the one with 45. ?? In any case, it's one of the best things I've seen to think about, even though it's not at all clear that NRx or 'Cathedral' SP are always more or less. I find that I do tend to read several of the NRx blogs just because of having formerly read a lot of 'admin's' things, so although I never comment there (SP too low and too high), I read that one every day and, in spite of everything, there are all these smart people. I don't buy any of you (or anybody else either, I guess, so I'm sort of low SP in terms of finding few groups other than literal artists and family) totally, but there are 'Erebus' and SVErshov, etc., a bunch of people I've got to see what they think. 'Admin' may be right that 'people are nodding their heads' about the SP posts, I guess so, you actually want to start the maximizing even more after being introduced to it in this specific overt way, but may not care to say 'how wonderful', etc.. Does indeed seem absurd, though, that we haven't heard this literally when it's what directs us most. I know you can see who I am, and there were things in the old blogs, I don't care what that seems like, point is just that I think I've read 'Jim Blog' a few times, 'n/a' sometimes, one or two of Dampier, and don't tend to comment unless I think somebody is totally ignorant about something I think is of some importance. What you say about 'edgy comments' interests me, but that's probably a stage most go through. I commented on a lot of blogs till I got my own, and mine is closed to comments, because I'm bored with being harassed because I'm going to do things as I please. There are all the other off-topic blog-things about 'companionship', but now that I banned comments, I don't see that there was ever anything along those lines that mattered very long for me. Success is still in the meat world anyway, as far as I'm concerned. On the net, you just shouldn't 'be beaten'. Someone once said 'winning an internet argument is like winning in the Handicapped Olympics', some truth to that, not entirely, of course. The troll at 'n/a/' that he lets write drunkenly (the troll brags about his aristocratic alcoholism) has recently given me an example of this 'winning on the net'--which ought to amount to something, but doesn't. Yes, it's the search for high SP, and so was the one on this thread, too obvious by use of word 'trump'. Also high SP would definitely BE 'experience' if one had any reason to be convinced that there had been not only experience but experience by intelligence. I don't care, for example, if Moldbug says 'the Kims are a dynasty', and had just been reading Koppel's new book when I remembered the comment (he's right, of course, it's not being taken seriously.) So your commenter says something about 'no territorial ambitions' and also 'they'd show their atomic bomb if they had it'. So there's at least that. 'realgary7' is not that close to the Kims. SVErshov's comment about how 'no response' is also an answer, and always his things are good, no matter the spelling, etc. Yes, I think these are all skills (I guess I still think of them as 'low' even if I've had to learn them) and then the net doesn't seem so powerful. Who cares if your comment is deleted or responded to if it was just important you said it? Although I see why that wouldn't be the case if you're seriously involved with a group, as you and the other Moldbuggians are with each other. Then outsiders (or is 'outliers' more appropriate in this case?) like me read the various sagas, as with Anissimov claiming to be 'leader of NRx' and then doing 'naughty things' or whatever it was that got him in bad odour. So in the core that matters. If you really identify with NRx, then there are meatworld and cyberworld SP things. Thing about the cyber things is they can always be lied about even more easily. In NRx, you're supposed to adhere to certain ideas just as everywhere else. 'Citizen KoKane' slipped in and back out, not 'Gnonish' enough, but it was smart. 'Erebus' said so, and he's usually right. The SP never works unless you are sure yours are that high. I'm thinking about some idiot I knew once back in my 80s 'New Age period' who had gorgeous top models come to him and tell him they thought they were ugly, that sort of thing. People who are 'objectively attractive' often don't 'broadcast that number' of .001 or whatever you put on the Oct. thread, and may project the .999. So how much of it has to do with self-esteem? You also mentioned, or somebody else did, this arrogance of 'calling people fat', which I've been doing non-stop for most of my life (and I think it keeps me slim and forces me not to be a DYEL, even if somebody thinks I've got low SP for some other reason.) I used the term 'Cathedral' for awhile, then stopped. Never read Moldbug, so I already have low SP with NRx even if I didn't for other reasons already. But I don't think it has that much to do with which groups, which seems to be something you agree with, even if you loathe the leftist SP standards (I tend to think the ones mentioned on that thread are all loathsome too, but that's personal, isn't it?), and also not agree with. You mentioned 'your wife', and SP should be determined by imitating 'white fathers', something like that. In which case, I ought to give SP to my father and brothers, and don't somehow. Citizen KoKane was good at that sort of thing, knew how to explain it and flex muscles right in front of the core. Most of the response was not favourable, though. But his self-esteem was unmistakable, and he didn't care whether anyone responded favourably or not at all. I do find that those with certain high SP may have wealth and resources and class in the traditional sense, but may also be crass. At some point, crassness brings with it SP. But not always. And so on. The 'equality' of SP, yes, that's total bullshit. Better to get them for yourself, the maturity of crassness. But I like the open generosity of, say, SVErshov, that's maybe better than my own crassness? Because I know I am crass, and not just to the subway homeless. Some work toward crassness for security, it works for some things and not others. I am not only crass, or I wouldn't be good at certain things I'm best at.

A lot of the stories about North Korea in the media do seem to be sensationalized or even false: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/true-or-false-kooky-north-korea-stories Of course this isn't to say that it's a nice place, but a lot of what we hear about North Korea in the media seem to be these sorts of sensational stories that everybody automatically accepts as self-evident.

Thanks for letting me know how trashy The Guardian is. I don't read it that often, but surely Michael Rogers and James Comey are no match for Anna Broinowski and Jemima Kiss. I'm referring, of course, to the only part of that hack article worth even paying attention to, the matter of the Sony hacking, the rest is no different from TMZ, just gossippy little shits little different from Kardashian businesses. I love this from the wiki about the Sony hacks: The North Korean news agency KCNA denied the "wild rumours" of North Korean involvement, but said that "The hacking into the SONY Pictures might be a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers with the DPRK in response to its appeal." North Korea offered to be part of a joint probe with the United States to determine the hackers' identities, threatening consequences if the United States refused to collaborate and continued the allegation. The U.S. refused and asked China for investigative assistance instead. Some days after the FBI's announcement, North Korea temporarily suffered a nationwide Internet outage, which the country claimed to be the United States' response to the hacking attempts." Of course, it's according to who you believe, something like Norse, who admits to being 'inconclusive' (I definitely believe them on that part, truckload of assholes), or Ted Koppel's book 'Lights Out'. I've now finished the parts on North Korea, and sure, you've got to decide if you're going to believe anything Keith Alexander or Koppel's daring to mention that it's well-known that DPRK test-launches Taepodong-2 missiles over Northern Japan. That means you have to also assert that South Korea and Japan also lie about everything they say. Power, you know. Success. Status points. They got 'em. DPRK has NONE. What could possibly be more appealing to a down-freak than DPRK? And Koppel points out that there are only 1024 Internet protocal addresses in North Korea, so a cyberattack on them wouldn't have much impact--place just perfect for grubby ashram-dykes to go camping. So sure, it was natural for us to turn off what little they do have after they did the Sony hack. The 'Guardians of Peace' surely, as 'disgruntled employees of Sony', would have chosen 'The Interview with a mere flip of the coin, and the subject matter being North Korean was purely coincidental. So it looks to me like 'no enemies to the right' (isn't that what you NRxers say?) is so involved with its anti-democracy movement, that some of the same that used to call themselves 'neocons' and worship Karl Rove, have now turned on the USG altogether, and defense of N. Korea and 'the Western media lies about...everything' has begun to resemble the hard-leftist 9/11 conspiracies and endless defense of Islamic militants. Okay, I'll concede something brain-damages people at some point, it's just that it's a lot of different things. It used to bother me, for example, that total mealy-mouths like the leftist playwright John Steppling (blurb: 'A great American playwright. Period.') knew how to make it seem unseemly to believe anyone in the msm, obviously including (but never mentioning) people like Ted koppel, Charlie Rose and military people like David Petraeus and Adm. McRaven and CIA people like Petraeus, Morell and Gates. Well, it's true they even contradict each other sometimes. I don't care how cruel anybody is to North Korea. I used to have a blog series called ASSHOLES OF NORTH KOREA just after Kim the Fat assumed power. I think he was seen in a well-stocked supermarket, just like Jane Fonda would have been in the old days.

[…] can click on over there and RTWT. Also from Spandrell: Thoughts, contra Moldbug to some extent, on North Korea. And lo… Open Borders: the Novel. […]

Ok, so the DPRK is shitty and communist, and Joseon was shitty and non-Communist, and China is communist, and not as shitty as it used to be, when it was also communist. So you've proved that shitty non-communist governments can exist, and that shitty communist governments can get less shitty. Congratulations. Did anyone every really doubt this? You're a sharp guy, Spandrell, and you have a lot of really good insights - it's been a long time since I've enjoyed anything as much as your "Golden Mangoes" post. But you really need to stop trying to jam every peg into the SP hole. It's certainly important, but it's not the philosopher's stone...