North Korea and Starcraft (with notes on Chesterton and Pius XI)

Take a look at this Onion-style spoof news article, “Starcraft Tournament Players found to be North Korean agents“, on Writer’s Block. Left me somewhat LOL, though I admit it takes a homo superior–that is, a nerd–to truly appreciate it:) The article includes this gem:

Sources explain that the North Koreans did try to plant similar agents as early as 2004, but that they were usually detected whenever they chose the Zerg race in tournaments and resorted to “newbie rushes” across the map.

“I wouldn’t have expected silent_killer69 to be a North Korean spy,” narrates one tournament competitor. “He was using Terran surgical strikes, a combination of Siege Tank-Marine-Medic advance, and aggressive economic building [which] was uncharacteristic of how NKs usually play. I was really surprised when the news came out.”

One wonders if it is really too incredible, given the apparent lack of adaequatio between some policies of Kim Jong Il and, well, objective reality. (Or is it the case that he’s really ultra-brilliant in a Dark Knight Joker sort of way?)

This reminds us of Chesterton’s definition of insanity as the absence of anything but reason: a reason so closed in upon itself that it has ceased to be open to truth; that is, it has ceased to be rational. To be sure, the definition includes all forms of fundamentalism, be it rationalism (the denial of “non-empirical” knowledge, as though human values like love and justice themselves were empirical), secularism and modernism (the denial of transcendent values for socially acceptable shibboleths) and Evangelicalism (the idolatrous disregard for any truth outside the written word–as though the written word did not tell us to ‘hear’ as well as ‘read’, Luke 10:16). But it also includes the State when it forgets that its power is subject to a law higher than itself. As Pope Pius XI declared against Hitler:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God

Thus the insanity of Kim Jong Il.

But seriousness aside, the post I linked is funny in a geeky-gamer way…