Please make the following a thread rule: It's the single least interesting, obviously trolling derail imaginable.
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Jun 17, 2017 05:08
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I wonder how many undeclared nukes would fly out of Japan?
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Jun 17, 2017 05:24
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Burt Sexual posted:I wonder how many undeclared nukes would fly out of Japan? No need, the Americans would be launching if anyone was going to be.
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Jun 17, 2017 05:37
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Discendo Vox posted:Please make the following a thread rule: What's that supposed to be?
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Jun 17, 2017 16:33
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Silver2195 posted:What's that supposed to be? That's a snork. He's saying no snorks allowed.
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Jun 17, 2017 16:36
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I'm referring to warpednaba's unneeded reintroduction of that slur. It's come up three times in the last two days.
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Jun 17, 2017 22:12
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Oh hey! Now I know where the custom avatar text came from. You'll be a mod before you know it.Azathoth posted:Also don't forget that to get to the point of being one of those pilots, your family has gotta be insanely well connected within the government as well, and there's no way they're putting anyone in the cockpit of one of those unless they're one of the most fanatically loyal of the fanatically loyal. Eh, if that were the case then their planes wouldn't be constantly limited to within-border fuel. Concern for defection via the only way to reliably avoid mines and machine-guns is represented well enough in that alone. What gets me is why we haven't seen more submarine crews defect - they don't even have to worry about Ack-Ack on the way over.
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Jun 17, 2017 23:35
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https://twitter.com/nknewsorg/status/876630545140199424
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Jun 19, 2017 04:03
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Hahahahahaha annnnnnnnnnd, this first comments - Well, at least they didn't get sent back in a comma(sp) 18 months later are they in comas? How does that sit with you tankie??
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Jun 19, 2017 05:00
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Why does NK demand total submission to whoever is at the top? Why do they continue to promote the cult of the Kim family? By they I mean those in charge whoever they may be.
Telephones fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Jun 19, 2017 |
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Jun 19, 2017 05:27
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Telephones posted:Why does NK demand total submission to whoever is at the top? Why do they continue to promote the cult of the Kim family? NK is led by the Kim dynasty. All the giant conglomerates that run South Korea are also led by direct descendants of their founders. Maybe Koreans just like having hereditary leadership and families?
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Jun 19, 2017 05:48
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OXBALLS DOT COM posted:NK is led by the Kim dynasty. All the giant conglomerates that run South Korea are also led by direct descendants of their founders. Maybe Koreans just like having hereditary leadership and families? I think that's more a Neo-Confucian issue, it has a thing for rigid caste systems. The Zaibatsus in Japan had/have the same issue, probably just as widespread in the Mainland.
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Jun 19, 2017 06:18
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Can't believe the Amerisnorks (short for Americans) would do something like this.
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Jun 19, 2017 07:26
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WarpedNaba posted:I think that's more a Neo-Confucian issue, it has a thing for rigid caste systems. The Zaibatsus in Japan had/have the same issue, probably just as widespread in the Mainland. Buddy, we were a couple of fluke elections from a thirty-six year dynasty of the Bushes and Clintons trading power. And one of the guys who interrupted that was, himself, from a highly connected family based corporate empire- one of the few public ones since most of them stay out of the media limelight. I mean, ugh, seriously, where does this idea come from? That hierarchal family based power structures are a construction of the Inscrutable Oriental? Is it just racism or what? How many populist revolutions do we need to have out in the West before people realize that we have those too? Anyway, why am I forgoing my better judgment to post in D&D today? Because the big news story in South Korean lately is such a perfect counterpoint to the standard English narratives about the peninsula that I feel like laughing about it. You may have heard (if you consult sources other than this thread) that the new South Korean President Moon Jae-in has been pushing a softer line on North Korea, and recently stated that South Korea would meet North Korea without preconditions if they drop the "nuclear provocations"- that's the specific phrase used in Korean, although official English translations have been interpreting this as being them giving up nukes in general. North Korea has responded by saying "go play at the kid's table. This is between us and the Americans, vassal state". Which isn't all that unusual, except that the big news story in South Korea lately is that an an official advisor to the government on reunification, Moon Chung-in (no relation to the President), recently made comments at a seminar in Washington last Friday stating that South Korea might be willing to downgrade the annual military exercises if North Korea suspends its nuclear activities. What annual military exercises, you might be asking? Why, the mock invasion American and South Korean forces do of North Korea every summer of course. The one that has consistently increased in scale every since the six party talks broke down. The one that North Korea always refers to as the one thing the United States could stop doing to guarantee that North Korea comes back to the bargaining table right away. Those annual military exercises. Bear in mind that since Moon Chung-in simply suggested reducing the scale of the exercises, rather than canceling them entirely, North Korea would probably reject such a deal anyway. But still. It's an offer to meet them halfway. There's been a huge stink about this in the South Korean press. Higher ranked officials in Moon Jae-in's government have downplayed the suggestion, while still insisting that in principle Moon Chung-in has the right idea. The larger right-wing party, the smaller right-wing party, and the centrist party have all condemned the remarks as being tantamount to suggesting the destruction of the American alliance. The smaller left-wing party, for reasons you can probably guess, is not getting as much airtime on the subject. Moon Chung-in has responded to the controversy by stating that if the American alliance can't experience any downscaling at all then the alliance loving sucks and probably isn't even an alliance at all. Which, of course, completely validates North Korea's policy of not considering the South Koreans as serious players in the dispute. But what really sells all this was my discovery just now that, even though Moon Chung-in made the original offending comment in Washington, and American officials have responded to it, there is so far as I can tell no coverage of this controversy in the American press at all. The real ludicrous part- American officials, including military ones, have been downplaying the remarks just like Moon Jae-in's administration is. It's the opposition parties that are climbing all over each other to censure someone for daring to suggest that South Korea take the lead on the North Korean issue, and that America sure is great and we should do literally everything America wants, even when what America wants are policies that aren't publicly discussed in our own media and which our own government officials don't even seem all that committed to. So...yeah, an addendum to my initial reply? Official North Korean propaganda demanding submission and worship of the Kim dynasty comes off a lot less weird to me having been exposed regularly to official South Korean propaganda making the same kind of comments about America. The media here is still having trouble adjusting to the idea that for the first time in ten years there's a president who's not going to try to use bureaucratic bullshit to get them fired for publishing stories he or she does not like.
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Jun 19, 2017 10:47
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Telephones posted:Why does NK demand total submission to whoever is at the top? Why do they continue to promote the cult of the Kim family? By they I mean those in charge whoever they may be. For the same reason as any other absolute monarchy or dictatorship? Doesn't have anything to do with Confucianism or whatever, it's the natural way to do things if you have nominally all powerful leader and a bunch of people dependent on said leader staying in power who control lesser government authority. This shouldn't be hard to figure, we all know about like Hitler.
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Jun 19, 2017 16:12
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Telephones posted:Why does NK demand total submission to whoever is at the top? Why do they continue to promote the cult of the Kim family? By they I mean those in charge whoever they may be.
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Jun 19, 2017 16:53
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If I've only learned one thing about Asian politics, it's that whenever we don't know why Asians do something, we call it Confucianism. In the case of North Korea, Kim Il Sung's administration was highly nepotistic, both for his large extended family of legitimate and illegitimate children and for the rest of the officialdom. And as Martin and Cumings have said, to paraphrase Martin, autocratic leadership was the norm in a country without a democratic revolutionary tradition, and "freedom" in the minds of occupied Koreans didn't mean freedom to establish a Western-style liberal democracy. These two elements in North Korean culture are, as far as I can tell, the only basis of claiming that Kim Il Sung was a Confucian patriarch. I don't think the principal texts on Juche even mention Confucianism, and I'm not aware of any times KIS or KJI painted themselves in explicitly Confucian terms. Yet people keep trying to paint the North Korean dynasty as a Neo-Confucian patriarchal revival of Choson, and Juche as a Neo-Confucian ideology. It just doesn't hold water. I think that instead you just have to look at the peculiar context of Kim Il Sung's leadership style and North Korea's development. Kim never gave up his ambition to unify the peninsula under his control. So he continued an attitude of belligerence toward the U.S., and intensified his personality cult, at a time when the Soviet Union highly discouraged these developments in Eastern Bloc countries. He quite successfully performed a weird balancing act wherein the DPRK positioned itself in-between Russia and China in such a way that it could solicit aid from both, and presented itself as a national communist regime to the Non-Aligned Movement and Western sympathizers, all while cultivating a xenophobic ethno-state in its domestic propaganda.
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Jun 19, 2017 17:27
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Telephones posted:Why does NK demand total submission to whoever is at the top? Why do they continue to promote the cult of the Kim family? By they I mean those in charge whoever they may be. Power in North Korea derives in a very direct way from control of the military, and as such, Kim Jong-un 's most powerful post is the head of the National Defense Commission. If another person were to gain de-facto control of some part of the military, as his uncle Jang Song-Thaek was speculated to have acquired before he was executed, it would represent and existential threat to Kim, since such power is very much a zero-sum game. A general or a military unit can't fight for both sides in the event of civil war. So, every bit of power that Kim loses puts him closer to not just being put out of power, but being killed. Thus, he cannot tolerate anything less than absolute power and absolute loyalty. As for why his subordinates promote the cult of the Kim family, that's easy. The power of any given person derives directly or devolves from Kim Jong-un. So the promotion of the cult reinforces their own position within the hierarchy by demonstrating loyalty and affirms that they exercise power on behalf of said authority. In Bradley K. Martin's book Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, he asserts that he believes roughly 10% of the population are true believers in the Kim cult, and the remaining 90% pay the necessary lip service as a means of getting ahead of just getting by. He openly states that there is no statistical basis for this beyond his research and gut feeling, and nor could there ever be a way to know this with any accuracy, but it feels right.
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Jun 19, 2017 17:58
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WarpedNaba posted:I think that's more a Neo-Confucian issue, it has a thing for rigid caste systems. The Zaibatsus in Japan had/have the same issue, probably just as widespread in the Mainland. It honestly seems to work for them. Thinking of the company as a family duty to be passed down encourages more long term thinking and responsibility than thinking of it as a place to scam money and play games with the stock price before taking your golden parachute to some other sucker company.
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Jun 19, 2017 18:46
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Halloween Jack posted:If I've only learned one thing about Asian politics, it's that whenever we don't know why Asians do something, we call it Confucianism. This too. It's pretty dumb and whenever someone falls back on it I know they don't know what they're talking about
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Jun 19, 2017 18:48
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I mean, as far as I can tell the only "Confucian" parts of North Korea stuff is the very arcane details of some of the craziest monuments to Kim Il Sung and I doubt that has any relevance to daily life or how the regime actually rules.
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Jun 19, 2017 18:56
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OXBALLS DOT COM posted:It honestly seems to work for them. Thinking of the company as a family duty to be passed down encourages more long term thinking and responsibility than thinking of it as a place to scam money and play games with the stock price before taking your golden parachute to some other sucker company.
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Jun 19, 2017 19:50
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WarpedNaba posted:I think that's more a Neo-Confucian issue, it has a thing for rigid caste systems. The Zaibatsus in Japan had/have the same issue, probably just as widespread in the Mainland. the mishima zaibatsu is a prime example
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Jun 19, 2017 19:54
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Some Guy TT posted:I mean, ugh, seriously, where does this idea come from? That hierarchal family based power structures are a construction of the Inscrutable Oriental? Is it just racism or what? the answer may surprise you!
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Jun 19, 2017 20:33
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Sadly, but not surprisingly, Otto Warmbier has passed away. http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/19/politics/otto-warmbier-dies/index.html I'm curious about how exactly it happened, since he wasn't ventilator-dependent, and the U.S. laws on physician-assisted suicide in the cases of patients in persistent vegetative states are unclear.
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Jun 19, 2017 22:00
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fishmech posted:
something something the militaristic nature of the Teutonic mind
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Jun 19, 2017 23:29
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Pinball posted:Sadly, but not surprisingly, Otto Warmbier has passed away. Feeding tubes are a medical intervention. Same with antibiotics for infections. He might have had a pressure sore from being in a single position for too long and that can get infected.
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Jun 19, 2017 23:34
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WATCH TRUMP START A loving WAR Nah, everything's gonna stay the same
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Jun 20, 2017 00:38
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Reunification will never happen.?
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Jun 20, 2017 02:43
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Telephones posted:Reunification will never happen.? No, eventually one side is going to collapse, and no one is going to stop the remaining side from taking over the peninsula in all likelihood.
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Jun 20, 2017 03:07
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Just want to add my own two cents on the Confucian discussion. As a Chinese, the teachings of Confucius is something they make us read in school, you memorize parts of it because you want to pass tests. Some of the teachings are ingrained into our values, like respect the elder, follow the ruler, have children to continue the family name and so on. Except it's not dogmatic; there's no big stone tablet that says "THOU SHALL HIERARCH" or "THOU SHALL HAVE MALE CHILDREN OR ELSE". Confucius has temples but there's no priests to give you sermons, or as far as I am aware because I only ever see tourists there; true believers go to Taoist or Buddhist temples. And that part about obeying rulers, we Chinese usurp our emperors all the time. I believe Korean do the same to their kings. Only Japanese let their emperors be, but that's because they're politically impotent. My point is, Confucianism defines some core Asian values, but they're not religious tenets and are often taken at face value and rarely strictly followed. You will never hear anyone say "Praise Confucius!" or burn down abortion clinics because "Confucius says it's evil". As people already pointed out in this thread, Confucianism is a predictor of how an Asian person might react given a certain situation, it is rarely a driving force of anything significant.
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Jun 20, 2017 03:52
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In the same way that you could say that Americans have an Aristotelian set of ethics, and you might be right, but any pundit who says "The U.S. has first-past-the-post voting because they are Aristotelians" is undoubtedly a wanker.
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Jun 20, 2017 04:18
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Yeah, of course an Aristotelian would say that. 
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Jun 20, 2017 05:04
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OXBALLS DOT COM posted:This too. It's pretty dumb and whenever someone falls back on it I know they don't know what they're talking about have you ever heard of a little book titled the chrysanthemum and the sword? i think it has all the answers you seek re:north korea icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 11:33 on Jun 20, 2017 |
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Jun 20, 2017 11:17
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aristotle's ethics, at least as they developed and were interpreted up to the early modern period, were not meaningfully more liberal than those of confucius. modern liberalism is a product of the 17th and 18th century and is as radical a break with premodern aristotelian ethics as it is with confucianism. i think you could say that the lack of a distinct tradition of political thought vis-a-vis ethical thought in china is real and meaningful, although this applies to all the other non-western philosophical traditions as well. but that's not what is usually argued, namely the usual ruth benedict guilt/shame culture horseshit icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Jun 20, 2017 |
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Jun 20, 2017 11:30
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https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/877234140483121152 So what's the plan now Mr. President?
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Jun 20, 2017 22:42
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Some Guy TT posted:Buddy, we were a couple of fluke elections from a thirty-six year dynasty of the Bushes and Clintons trading power. And one of the guys who interrupted that was, himself, from a highly connected family based corporate empire- one of the few public ones since most of them stay out of the media limelight. White liberals gimmick up their racism with clever IR statements. It happens in every country thread where the country isn't a "white" one.
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Jun 21, 2017 01:03
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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-southkorea-drone-idUSKBN19C074?il=0quote:South Korea's military said on Wednesday a drone found earlier this month on a mountain near the Demilitarized Zone border was confirmed to have been from North Korea and described it as a "grave provocation" that violated the Korean War truce. I'm surprised anything can move over the DMZ without being detected immediately.
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Jun 21, 2017 03:50
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OhFunny posted:http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-southkorea-drone-idUSKBN19C074?il=0 I'm curious how big the drone is. Wouldn't surprise me if a bird-sized drone could go undetected if they kept it up high enough.
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Jun 21, 2017 04:20
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 07:26 |
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Azathoth posted:I'm curious how big the drone is. Wouldn't surprise me if a bird-sized drone could go undetected if they kept it up high enough. Eyeballing the picture in the article it looks about 5 feet wingspan.
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Jun 21, 2017 04:27
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