Obama desperately needs an enemy. More than anything else in the world, more than to see his daughters married off while they’re still worth something to someone,i he needs a foil.
Anything will do. Anything at all really. He just needs something to distract people from the fact that he’s the fallguy and shit’s falling apart right before his very eyes.ii
But regardless of the difficulty embedded in the task of leadership, that doesn’t excuse blatant mistakes, namely Obama’s recent decision to call out North Korea for being bad, mean, and generally unfair to all the little creatures of the earth.
He thought this would be good PR for him. He thought that this weird little country straddling the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan was low-hanging political fruit. So Obama went on the record predicting North Korea’s imminent collapse at the hands of western sanctions and something called “Internet penetration.”
Big mistake. Very big mistake.
The Korea Herald reports:
“The recent wild remarks made by Obama are nothing but a poor grumble of a loser driven into a tight corner in the all-out stand-off with the DPRK,” the ministry’s unnamed spokesman told the Korean Central News Agency. “
This is little short of admitting himself that the U.S. lacks ability to stifle the DPRK and that a military option is not workable.“
Basically, if the quote is accurate, North Korea just bitchslapped Obama clear into next week, calling the dope out for the needledick he is, and giving him a good ol’ fashioned public relations thumping the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of MPOE-PR.iii All of which goes to show that Kim Jong-un and co. understand the emerging world order better than anyone in the west, and that they particularly grok that:
Public relations is strategy incarnate.
Think about that for a minute. This is important whether you’re running a religion, a country, a business, or a household. Having a top-notch product or service is one thing, but positioning yourself for long-term success is quite another. In a global marketplace, one free of charge-backsiv and socialist pandering, you have to be ready to go for the fucking throat.
Playing nice with “the community” might’ve worked fine when the state could protect businesses who appealed to the masses from the inherent depravity implied therein, but those days are behind us now, as the laundry list of successfully funded Bitcoin scammers well demonstrates. Today, such a strategy, for anyone intent on being around in a year or two, much less ten, is suicide.
Today, if you want to be in business at all, much less in a position of market leadership, you have to defend your interests from moat-hopping mongoloidsv while attacking the weaknesses of your opponents.vi There’s no room for singing kumbaya on reddit. You have to be ready to flat-out call people idiots.
If you think you’re ready to run a Bitcoin business, that is, the only type of business the world will soon know,vii start separating the lemma from the palea.viii
It’s the only way to do PR.
Even North Korea knows that.
___ ___ ___
- In Europe circa 1700, and still in many “backwards” tribal communities extant, Obama would’ve used his daughters to purchase peace or some other type of concession by now. Say, by marrying the older one off to Mikhail “Knows how to stay rich” Prokhorov, one of Putin’s boys, in return for, say, not having Russia dump their T-bills (or their US sports teams) all at once.
It’s really not a bad strategy, this. Goodness knows Obama could use a little help right now!↩
- His two-term presidency has been waaay too long for comfort. This is eight INTERNET years we’re talking about here. Eight years of constant, incessant, nerve frazzling scrutiny, the likes of which were unimaginable to the Founding Fathers, to whom a single four-year term must’ve seemed a pittance when it took months to travel from sea to shining sea.
In the 21st century, of course, with disruption coming left, right, and centre, two terms is more like ten, and it really doesn’t help that Obama is so woefully unprepared for the task. Not like anyone would argue that Bush was so much more “better prepared,” they’re both mental midgets, but at least Bush had the good fortune to watch his old man give the oval office a crack. At least Bush had some semblance of grooming. Not poor Obama. I mean, just take a look at pictures of him from his 2007 campaign run and compare them with shots of him today.↩
- Speaking of the woman-as-trebuchet formerly known as “Mircea Popescu Options Emporium – Public Relations,” or MPOE-PR, you’d be well advised to see what public relations looks like in Computer Times. There’s a whole two-year anthology to work your way through, in addition to a bevy of “best-of” articles.↩
- Power is in the hands of he who holds the private key, and all that.↩
- Eg. BitBet I: ↩
- Eg. BitBet II: ↩
- This isn’t to say that you won’t always have a smiling local grocer. You will. Just don’t expect a smiling loan officer anymore than you’d expect a smiling lion in a gladitorial arena.↩
- This of course only applies if you have a functional product or service and you’re not just some would-be scammer like Ethereum. Because if you are, you’re going to cause yourself a lot of grief and headaches and generally end up in a ditch by the side of the road for misrepresenting yourself in the grand forum of public opinion. You’d be far better served to, oh I dunno, get in the WoT, present your ideas to #bitcoin-assets, and, if you* pass muster, diligently and reliably build them.
___
*Yes, you must pass muster. Not your ideas. Ideas aren’t worth anything more than grains of sand are worth to a scorpion until those ideas are signed off on by a legitimate person. And unless you’re in the WoT, guess what, you’re not a person of any description as far as Bitcoin is concerned.↩
[…] Second Best Korea’s Hat still has some learning to do in the public relations department, so much so that I’m quite prepared to take them on as a client.ix Y’know, […]
[…] to yourself in an exceedingly flattering way doesn’t change a damn thing. What is this, North Korea ? Not last time Einstein […]
[…] economic elephantiii they’ve been tasked with reigning in, and their grotesque obsession over little more than PR fluff is revealing of deeply structural problems in America : the land of the free-ish and the home of […]
[…] sane reaction to an industry awash in derpitudinous scammers is to hire some wicked PR (even from NK), publish your interactions with the scammers on your blog so that you have a permanent record of […]