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A big part of the slow downnis actually sagging economic prospects. Also, if 16% of undocumented people are new arrivals, that still a huge number. Yeah, we catch more but nowhere near most.
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May 13, 2015 21:25
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Popular Thug Drink posted:woah i didn't know tom clancy's corpse posted here we've got a few of them, must have been cloned in an underground lab or something
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May 13, 2015 21:37
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Cerebral Bore posted:Blooded by what? Some half-starved conscripts toting hand-me-downs from the last war? Eh, basically every war over the previous century has shown the foolishness of thinking that a bit of superior technology will effortlessly crush half-starved conscripts that have old but reliable guns, favorable terrain, and the ability to dig in somewhere resistant to overwhelming firepower. I agree that North Korea can't resist for long, since the army actually does a lot of the farming and the country simply can't afford to pull all those soldiers off the fields to actually fight for long, but I can't see how it could possibly be a cheap, easy, or bloodless fight unless you think they'll "greet us as liberators" or throw down their weapons and run in terror at the sight of our troops.
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May 13, 2015 21:39
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nm posted:A big part of the slow downnis actually sagging economic prospects. Well the first statement is just an unsupported talking point, and not a strong one if I'm any judge. For one thing, the US economy in 2003 was booming and continued to be great for years. Obviously it wasn't the economy that was deterring immigrants. On the other hand, 2003 was the year that the Homeland Security Act took effect. You be the judge of what caused that massive downturn in illegal immigration in 2003. The 16% figure comes out to 1.8 million illegal immigrants over the last 5 years, as opposed to 2 million deportations over that same period. I don't know how you're defining "most", but certainly it seems like a majority. And those figures aren't including the immigrants who are caught by DHS officials but then allowed to immigrate legally, of which there are hundreds of thousands each year. This thread doesn't need much more derail about American immigration policy, but I think that it is clear that border enforcement is certainly possible for China, even if conducted in the expensive and relatively low-impact manner as done by the United States. If China really wanted to close its borders, it could. Kaal fucked around with this message at 21:56 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 21:39
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Main Paineframe posted:Eh, basically every war over the previous century has shown the foolishness of thinking that a bit of superior technology will effortlessly crush half-starved conscripts
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May 13, 2015 22:25
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And there's no way China would support its ally in this hypothetical conflict with, say, food aid.
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May 13, 2015 22:27
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Main Paineframe posted:Eh, basically every war over the previous century has shown the foolishness of thinking that a bit of superior technology will effortlessly crush half-starved conscripts that have old but reliable guns, favorable terrain, and the ability to dig in somewhere resistant to overwhelming firepower. I agree that North Korea can't resist for long, since the army actually does a lot of the farming and the country simply can't afford to pull all those soldiers off the fields to actually fight for long, but I can't see how it could possibly be a cheap, easy, or bloodless fight unless you think they'll "greet us as liberators" or throw down their weapons and run in terror at the sight of our troops. I don't know what the people of North Korea would do, but I do know that their army is a drat joke and it would be beaten in short order. What happens after that is the problem, though. EDIT: The context of this discussion was that China somehow wuld use North Korea as a buffer state, and my counterargument is that North Korea is incapable of hurting or even holding up any potential attack in a strategically signifianct manner. JeffersonClay posted:And there's no way China would support its ally in this hypothetical conflict with, say, food aid. They already do, and the army is still half-starving. North Korea's problems are so severe that propping them up from the outside is necessary simply to have the country function on a basic level, let alone fight a war. Cerebral Bore fucked around with this message at 22:31 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 22:28
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China's gdp is about 800 times larger than north korea's, they could support the entire country indefinitely if they desired.
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May 13, 2015 22:45
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JeffersonClay posted:China's gdp is about 800 times larger than north korea's, they could support the entire country indefinitely if they desired.
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May 13, 2015 22:46
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Please tell me what leads you to conclude that China would be incapable of feeding North Korea for a year or even indefinitely.
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May 13, 2015 22:49
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They probably could do that, but why would they want to? NK is the little retarded brother that they need to pretend they love so they don't get poo poo from the rest of the family, while actually hoping for a quiet demise.
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May 13, 2015 22:59
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Kaal posted:Well the first statement is just an unsupported talking point, and not a strong one if I'm any judge. For one thing, the US economy in 2003 was booming and continued to be great for years. Obviously it wasn't the economy that was deterring immigrants. On the other hand, 2003 was the year that the Homeland Security Act took effect. You be the judge of what caused that massive downturn in illegal immigration in 2003. By the way, pew has estimates something like 500,000 persons are entering the US successfully (numbers may be old and is hard to estimate), and ICE says they deported 200,000 at or near the border (with no mention of people caught more than once.) The point being that we've invested enormous resources into immigration enforcement and we have some 11 million here and stop maybe 50% China has a good reason to be worried unless they're going to staff every mile of thier border and start shooting.
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May 13, 2015 23:03
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See here I thought something important actually happened in North Korea to warrant a hundred new posts ITT
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May 13, 2015 23:09
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Main Paineframe posted:I dunno. When I look at that picture, all I see is a bunch of black boxes, a couple of lines, a yellow box, and a think-tank member explaining to me that THIS set of black boxes is THAT exact model of anti-aircraft gun and the yellow box is unidentified but he thinks it's probably people. I desaturated the first and second image for the purpose of comparison: ZPU-4, Vermont Military Museum:  ZPU-4, Jackson Barracks, Louisiana:  Satellite image of DPRK firing range:  Note the ratio of wheelbase length to width.
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May 13, 2015 23:17
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JeffersonClay posted:Please tell me what leads you to conclude that China would be incapable of feeding North Korea for a year or even indefinitely. In theory China could. NK also shake down SK too. NK also get money from Russia and sell weapons to Iran, that's why NK doesn't listen to China and Kim 3 is not welcomed in China.
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May 13, 2015 23:18
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nm posted:What happened in 2003 is that undocumented people started staying in the US longer. Returns dropped, not new immigrants. If you read the article that chart is from entrys didn't decline or slow until about 2008. I don't think that you're reading that article correctly. Here's another Pew article, referenced in the article that I posted, that is more specific about the issue of Mexican border immigration in particular. In brief, 2003 marked the beginning of a massive inflection point in Mexican immigration into the United States. There was a year where there was a spike in activity (in terms of immigrants, attempts, arrest rates, prosecutions, etc.) and then a significant downturn as it became evident in the Mexican emigrant community that the US border had been significantly shuttered. That article also notes that annual Mexican immigration went from a high of .8 million in 2000, to only .14 million in 2010 - a trend that has continued over the last five years. Now I understand that there are ideological reasons to want to see the US border policy as a failure, so if you'd like then we could talk about border enforcement efficacy in other nations as well, but I just don't think that you're going to see markedly different statistics. Nation states are pretty good at patrolling their borders when they want to. There's examples all over the world, perhaps most notably in the Korean peninsula itself.  http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/net-migration-from-mexico-falls-to-zero-and-perhaps-less/
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May 13, 2015 23:24
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This is a lovely derail and I'm done with it.
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May 13, 2015 23:37
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Cerebral Bore posted:Arrest and deport like million desperate people fleeing for their lives? Yeah, that sure sounds feasible. Also China should build a minefield 1000 km long apparently. Well that's what South Korea has on their border which is why they aren't worried about refugees 
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May 13, 2015 23:44
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Rent-A-Cop posted:North Korea would starve to death in a single winter if the army was forced to take the field rather than plant rice. Oh, absolutely. North Korean resistance in any possible invasion could, at most, be measured in months. They'd probably crumple without a fight if we pushed troops just over the DMZ to force the DPRK to keep the troops in their positions, then marched back and forth for a couple months waiting for the nation's food supply to collapse. If, on the other hand, we decided not to wait for that to happen and decided to instead carry out a grand land invasion expecting North Korean resistance to crumple like paper, I think we'd take more casualties than would be politically convenient. North Korean troops may not be up to the same quality as US soldiers, and they may have outdated tech, but they've had sixty-plus years to fortify against an expected American invasion and build enough guns and ammo to press massive numbers of people into service. North Korea can't fight for long, and their ability to project power beyond their border is barely north of nil, but I can't think of many times that being foolish enough to charge head-on into a prepared enemy's territory assuming that they can't possibly put up any real resistance against advanced Western troops has ever worked out without spending a lot more lives than necessary.
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May 14, 2015 00:02
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JeffersonClay posted:And there's no way China would support its ally in this hypothetical conflict with, say, food aid. Main Paineframe posted:If, on the other hand, we decided not to wait for that to happen and decided to instead carry out a grand land invasion expecting North Korean resistance to crumple like paper, I think we'd take more casualties than would be politically convenient. North Korean troops may not be up to the same quality as US soldiers, and they may have outdated tech, but they've had sixty-plus years to fortify against an expected American invasion and build enough guns and ammo to press massive numbers of people into service. North Korea can't fight for long, and their ability to project power beyond their border is barely north of nil, but I can't think of many times that being foolish enough to charge head-on into a prepared enemy's territory assuming that they can't possibly put up any real resistance against advanced Western troops has ever worked out without spending a lot more lives than necessary. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 00:46 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 00:30
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Main Paineframe posted:To some extent, it is reliant on the US on purpose - the US has repeatedly bullied South Korea into canceling nuclear weapons programs, and I think it's safe to say that if the US pulled out, South Korea could very well have nuclear weapons capabilities within a few years. I guess that's one outcome of American bullying we can be proud of. 
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May 14, 2015 00:58
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Halloween Jack posted:In any hypothetical conflict worth considering, North Korea has collapsed into civil war and the US and China are intervening. I don't want to dogpile on you, but this idea where the US has to play through the North Korea stage before fighting the final boss in China is a silly Tom Clancy scenario. The point is China considers a stable, independent North Korea as a strategic asset and isn't likely to support reunification without some clear guarantees the new Korea won't be an American military ally. That is literally what they say when asked.
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May 14, 2015 01:17
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Kaal posted:I don't think that you're reading that article correctly. Here's another Pew article, referenced in the article that I posted, that is more specific about the issue of Mexican border immigration in particular. In brief, 2003 marked the beginning of a massive inflection point in Mexican immigration into the United States. There was a year where there was a spike in activity (in terms of immigrants, attempts, arrest rates, prosecutions, etc.) and then a significant downturn as it became evident in the Mexican emigrant community that the US border had been significantly shuttered. That article also notes that annual Mexican immigration went from a high of .8 million in 2000, to only .14 million in 2010 - a trend that has continued over the last five years. Reading that article it looks like the drop started in 2008 and can mostly be explained by the collapse of the U.S. economy.
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May 14, 2015 01:24
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What are you guys even talking about anymore? Why would America or anyone at all ever bother to invade North Korea? What's there to be gained? Who gives a poo poo? Right now those 25 million starving people aren't our problem (they're nobody's problem), why would anyone ever want to change that?
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May 14, 2015 06:22
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icantfindaname posted:we've got a few of them, must have been cloned in an underground lab or something Is there a  for Clancy-chat yet?
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May 14, 2015 11:59
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Oh boy this thread is like three months old, but I got a question. I've been reading about the North Korean regimes for the last two years (Bradley's Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader was particularly good, while Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick, gives a way more personal, on-the-ground experience of life in the North.) Since the death of Kim Jong-Il happened relatively recently, I haven't seen much written about Kim Jong-Un. Has he developed his own brand of hosed-up authoritarism? Do we know, from any recent refugees/defectors, what's the state of affairs over there/popularity of the new Great Leader?
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Aug 15, 2015 12:44
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There have been reports of a number of high-profile executions since his rise to power, which could mean that he is facing some dissidence.
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Aug 15, 2015 13:27
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In addition to that, KJU has done a number of things that don't look good to Koreans or to the outside world, like fawning over Dennis Rodman and showing off his pretty young wife at public functions. (The latter is considered poor taste in Korean culture as a whole, even having a particular slang word to describe it, and is especially problematic in NK where most men can't get married until age 30 and have a hard time finding a mate.) Myers opined that he appears to have spent enough time abroad to lose touch with Korea, but not enough to understand the West.
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Aug 15, 2015 15:06
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I completely missed the Rodman-Kim thing. "He's greater than Obama and a victim of the West's incomprehension."  This is somehow more funny than that one Communist woman from the US who wrote a piece to Worker Daily or whatever about the wonders of Kim Il Sung's achievements for the proletariat.
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Aug 15, 2015 15:41
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Azran posted:Oh boy this thread is like three months old, but I got a question. Keep in mind those books, while good are really old at this point- the vast majority of the commonly read books on nk come from experiences of the famine in the 90s.
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Aug 15, 2015 15:44
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Nintendo Kid posted:Well that's what South Korea has on their border which is why they aren't worried about refugees Maybe they could have a wall or something?
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Aug 15, 2015 15:44
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tsa posted:Keep in mind those books, while good are really old at this point- the vast majority of the commonly read books on nk come from experiences of the famine in the 90s. Yes, I know. When I originally asked for recommendation in the Military History/History Book threads, they named four or five, both academical and "journalistic", for lack of a better term. So you had those two, The Cleanest Race and the Aquariums of Pyongyang, plus one other that I can't remember the name of (might be the Orphan Master's Son, but that one isn't a history book). I decided to ask the thread because honestly, I didn't knew if there had been enough information out there for new books with actual, useful content to be made.
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Aug 15, 2015 15:53
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Azran posted:Oh boy this thread is like three months old, but I got a question. You need to check this book out: http://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/1476766568 It came out in mid-2014 iirc and is by a former "government poet" who met Kim Jong Un (or the father, can't quite remember) and was rather high-ranking in society. It covers a lot of the transition of power between father and son after Kim Jong-Il died.
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Aug 15, 2015 21:30
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Azran posted:Oh boy this thread is like three months old, but I got a question. I think the thing to realize is that, due to the combination of Kim Jong Il's two older sons being unsuitable and KJI himself dieing "early", Kim Jong Un was not given enough time to gain a power base of his own prior to ascension. I think that he's, while not quite a puppet, no longer the most powerful force in the country. So we can say that the government has been having purges and that many of them are aimed at people who weren't part of the most powerful security agency but we can't say whether or not Un is directing that or merely following along. He seems, to me, to have a more modern but equally gaudy taste than his father did as far as style goes. The difference is that unlike his predecessors he isn't shy about showing it in front of a home audience. Among the common people, as far as this can even be judged, he's less popular than his father and far less popular than the God-like Kim Il Sung. But being basically a kid in a country that is big on seniority that is not surprising. The purges and other signs of instability can't be helping him either.
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Aug 15, 2015 22:12
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 Shots fired
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Aug 20, 2015 10:35
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Watch as nothing happens.
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Aug 20, 2015 13:01
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Apparently some south korean broadcasts struck a little to close to home, so they decided to take out the broadcasting station. SK fired several shells back and it looks like things are back to normal.
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Aug 20, 2015 13:54
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Ooooh, gotta wonder what they said.
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Aug 20, 2015 14:09
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"What are you gonna do? Shoot us?"
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Aug 20, 2015 14:12
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I assume the DPRK media will inflate this story and use it to shore up KJU's credentials as a brave young general.
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Aug 20, 2015 14:22
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