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fishmech posted:I don't see how nukes actually allow them to pare down their conventional military. Most of their military is just a labor force - I doubt South Korea felt particularly threatened by the fact that hypothetically 5 million guys could slowly travel to the front to get torn up on foot. North Korea also can't really give up or not bother to replace things like their aircraft or land and sea military equipment much at all. So where's the savings on the conventional military meant to come in? Btw, we know that North Korea still has functional elements of a traditional military. They can logically delay maintenance/slow conventional arms purchases, and shift further amounts of their soldiers into factory positions. It will allow the military to become even more of a business than already is. Also, it means that imports from China can be rediverted to other interests (probably more show projects but eh) since rebuilding their conventional military is not necessary for the survival of the regime. It is also why, it isn't surprising if most of the guns around Seoul are rusted or removed, they're obsolete. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Nov 3, 2017 |
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Nov 3, 2017 01:45
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Kthulhu5000 posted:LOL, they are absolutely losing the propaganda war. When, by sheer dumb luck, the US doesn't seem inclined to take their nuclear bait, then their self-imagine as ruthless, angry madmen collapses and they look like stupid assholes who are causing trouble for no reason. Remember that a key part of North Korea's "justification" for their nuclear program is that they're at war with the US, and the nukes exist as a means of repelling a US invasion or delivering the finishing blow to the US (depending on the day of the week it is, of course). People like you have been referring to North Korea as the bolded for the past twenty years consistently, with zero regard to ongoing negotiations, changes in policy, or changes in rhetoric. That we will continue to the call them names like that is not new. What is new is that they are making explicit threats, and we obviously want to do something about it, but can't. North Korea is showing, through their own bluffs, that we too are constantly bluffing and no better than they are. Never mind the fact that this propaganda is intended more for internal distribution among its own citizens than it is to change minds overseas. They've obviously given up on trying to do anything about their international image. quote:And do you know why Koreans (and lots of different groups around the world, for that matter) might have accepted that kind of suffering? Because transportation was slow, expensive, and potentially dangerous. Because they couldn't get an idea of what a destination would be like, even if they embarked on a desperate quest to reach it. Because a new location might mean a hard and risky year of trying to build shelter, plant crops, and survive until a harvest. It was safer to try and preserve your local status quo than it was to leave and maybe end up in the exact same situation (or worse) elsewhere. Uh...have you seen the refugee crises the world is going through right now? Like, this is straight up magical thinking about how easy it is to move around in the modern world. Even assuming they could get to a new, safer place, there's no guarantee anyone would let them in. North Korea writ large has modified its entire propaganda stance about defectors to emphasize that when they leave North Korea, they're leaving lovely lives with their families to even shittier lives without their families. China's entire indifferent stance to North Korea's actions is predicated on the assumption that a North Korean refugee crisis would not just be bad for North Korea, but similarly disastrous for them. quote:Well, again, absent other people chiming in to tone-police me on it, I think the problem is with you. Seriously? Your defense is "I'm not being dogpiled?" quote:Projection? As I've pointed out before, you seem to have this tendency to present people (or at least, Korean people) as dehumanized and abstract political objects rather than a collection of flesh-and-blood individuals with the same kinds of concerns, desires, and motivations of other people on this planet. Your stated opinion of the South Korean people is that they're gullible morons who can be easily pressed into war if the government makes a tasteless propaganda power showing K-Pop stars being bayoneted to death. Anytime I point out to you that there is a very strong leftist presence in this country who successfully resisted attempts by the past two conservative presidents to cynically use the North Korea issue to maintain power indefinitely, you dismissively say that the only leftists in South Korea are disaffected whiners who'd rather shut up and play computer games than express free speech when push comes to shove. It is painfully obvious from every post you make that you know absolutely nothing about South Korean internal politics, yet continue to feel the need to make broad assertions about what they will or will not do in the event of an invasion. quote:If the Trumpstaffel came around and starting rounding people up to press them into conscription for a new Korean meatgrinder conflict, what would you do? Your asking this question is just amazingly bizarre to me, because it's clear from the phrasing that you know that you, me, and everyone else in this thread would probably take to the streets and refuse to participate. Yet you believe that the South Koreans are different. But I'm the real racist, somehow. quote:Are you posting to myself from the point-of-view of me being just another individual opinionated rear end in a top hat on the Internet? Or do you see yourself responding to me because at some level you believe I represent some collection of like-thinking people? Whether you couch it in terms of "this isn't what I believe this is what world leaders believe" is entirely besides the point, because the only place this issue is ever relevant is in the higher realms of power. This is like saying "I don't believe Donald Trump is the President, but the electoral college says he is so welp that's the way world works." Again, when Putin puts out those shirtless photo ops, he is not directly appealing to the latent homosexuality of the Russian common man. He is saying "look at how tough I am those other world leaders sure will be intimidated by my manliness". quote:Because my point in using the words I did is that national leaders (in my mind) view other national leaders the former way, even if those other leaders are technically supposed to represent the entire population of their particular nation. More or less one-on-one behind closed doors, national leaders aren't going to think that they're appealing to millions of regular citizens when they're talking to a fellow leader; they're going to think "This is the person with the power. This is the one I have to convince/win over/win against." That being established yeah this is the fascist viewpoint of international relations. What really baffles me is how you can apparently sincerely believe that this is how world leaders actually function, yet you can also sincerely believe that North Korea's people are on the verge of revolt because their government is failing the consent of the governed test. Those are diametrically opposed philosophies of governance. Incidentally, if your standard is going to be "behind closed doors", it's pretty obvious that Trump is a completely different guy with other world leaders one-on-one than he is on Twitter. I fully expect he tells them to just ignore the Twitter stuff because he only does it for internal political reasons, and going by how they've acted, they probably believe him. edit: and to take this back to the original premise, I cannot for the life of me figure out how you apply Hilary Clinton to that rubric and assume she does any better. Her approval ratings are somehow worse than Trump. What in the world makes you think that alternate universe President Hilary Clinton would be doing any better when she has to push everything through an openly hostile Republican Congress that would be constantly trying to impeach her? Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Nov 3, 2017 |
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Nov 3, 2017 03:47
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Is anyone else a bit worried that since someone was able to shut down Trump's twitter account for a bit, someone might be able to hack into his account, and have him announce a strike on North Korea?
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Nov 3, 2017 22:28
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well now I am
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Nov 3, 2017 22:35
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Willo567 posted:Is anyone else a bit worried that since someone was able to shut down Trump's twitter account for a bit, someone might be able to hack into his account, and have him announce a strike on North Korea? you really enjoy hyping yourself up for war lol
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Nov 3, 2017 22:36
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Willo567 posted:Is anyone else a bit worried that since someone was able to shut down Trump's twitter account for a bit, someone might be able to hack into his account, and have him announce a strike on North Korea?
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Nov 3, 2017 22:36
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Grouchio posted:The secret service or the FBI should get in on that then. gently caress what I just said then. Plus, the government would have known if he launched a strike or if it was some random troll claiming too Plus, I'm pretty sure that North Korea actively makes sure that they check if these threats are real or not
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Nov 3, 2017 22:45
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Willo567 posted:Is anyone else a bit worried that since someone was able to shut down Trump's twitter account for a bit, someone might be able to hack into his account, and have him announce a strike on North Korea? Nobody hacked Trump’s account. It was shut down by a Twitter employee on his last day.
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Nov 3, 2017 23:01
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Willo567 posted:Is anyone else a bit worried that since someone was able to shut down Trump's twitter account for a bit, someone might be able to hack into his account, and have him announce a strike on North Korea? Buddy just go into your bunker for the next 50 years and pretend WW3 happened. Ardennes posted:Btw, we know that North Korea still has functional elements of a traditional military. They can logically delay maintenance/slow conventional arms purchases, and shift further amounts of their soldiers into factory positions. It will allow the military to become even more of a business than already is. But I mean, isn't that what they were already doing for many years before they had nukes though? They were continuing to delay/cancel maintenance of a lot of equipment, often not bothering to stock too much ammunition, and all that. They were still using the military plenty, but again as a labor/industrial force and investment center, which isn't what we'd call a conventional military force.
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Nov 4, 2017 00:46
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fishmech posted:But I mean, isn't that what they were already doing for many years before they had nukes though? They were continuing to delay/cancel maintenance of a lot of equipment, often not bothering to stock too much ammunition, and all that. They were still using the military plenty, but again as a labor/industrial force and investment center, which isn't what we'd call a conventional military force. It will allow them to do what they were doing but to a greater extent, and also the type of growth North Korea has probably seen (looking at Chinese-North Korean trade statistics since 2011) has probably been diverted into other fields than the conventional military. Obviously, very few people actually know what is really going on the DPRK and we can only read tea-leaves but the boom in construction in the last few years is most likely to do the fact that the conventional military is on the back-burner considering how much North Korea is now importing from China and a lesser extent Russia, especially since critical investments (like long-range artillery around Seoul), seem to be dismantled or ignored. This isn't to say the spending has been done fairly or justly, but that it seems like major construction and infrastructure investment is being done.
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Nov 4, 2017 11:21
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I've recently heard from DEFCOM that Kim isn't willing to negotiate until his ICBMs can reach the east coast. Can he not be brought to terms before then? What are your thoughts (Kthullu, etc)?
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Nov 9, 2017 07:15
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Willo567 posted:Is anyone else a bit worried that since someone was able to shut down Trump's twitter account for a bit, someone might be able to hack into his account, and have him announce a strike on North Korea? Doesn't sound any less safe than Trump being in charge of his own Twitter account tbh.
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Nov 9, 2017 14:29
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Grouchio posted:I've recently heard from DEFCOM that Kim isn't willing to negotiate until his ICBMs can reach the east coast. Can he not be brought to terms before then? What are your thoughts (Kthullu, etc)? Kim Jong Un isn't willing to negotiate until you buy a car from France. Better go do that, OFUIL never lies.
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Nov 9, 2017 20:39
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So in domestic South Korean news, Trump made a visit. There were protests. Then he left. Not very much actually happened but it was all the news was willing to talk about while it was going on. Probably the weirdest element was the puff pieces about various important South Korean people hanging out with or performing for Trump and his wife. Evidently no one got the memo that it's selling out your principles to behave in a civil manner toward the Trumps. Considering Moon Jae-in's main publicity push has been to normalize Trump as being the same as other presidents, this makes sense. Trump himself is, notably, obviously in on this arrangement, since his speech at the National Assembly was more the kind of boilerplate veiled threat that Obama and Bush were known for than the usual inflammatory stuff. Of greater interest, to me at least, is that criminal investigations of Lee Myung-bak have been moving very fast. There's been much hand-wringing over how unfair it is to attack him over stuff so far in the past when we no longer has any political power. On one end, I say the guy deserves to be ratfucked. The smear job he organized against Roh Moo-hyun was a hell of a lot worse than this, and this country has a bad history of pardoning major political criminals only to find that this emboldens the next generation of assholes to expect pardons too. But on the flip side Park Geun-hye is already in jail and isn't going anywhere. The conservative is in shambles. Hong Jun-pyo, the leader of the conservatives, now regularly faces protests in Daegu. A point one guy made to me that kind of hurt was also that with Moon Jae-in palling around with Trump he's not exactly in a strong position to attack on purity and well, I can't argue with that. Except to the extent that Moon Jae-in doesn't actually have anything to do with the investigation, but honestly, it would be dishonest to pretend there's no political element going on there at all. This update is brought to you by my own ambivalence at finding a centrist position on this subject mildly persuasive. It does help that there's already a buttload of investigations and prosecutions going on against people everyone universally agrees should be in jail. Moon jae-in is no Obama. He didn't look at the work that would be involved in getting convictions against obvious crooks and go, nah, that sounds hard.
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Nov 10, 2017 10:03
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Every former SK president end his/her career in jail so no surprise there.
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Nov 10, 2017 18:03
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Yeah, that image issue is the only reason the argument has any merit. South Koreans are extremely self-conscious of how they are seen by other countries and factoids like that can give a bad impression. But the flip side of that is most American presidents should probably be ending their careers in jail too, and the paper-thin excuse for why we don't that is because of our reputation. So now we're just in a situation where sufficiently powerful people can do whatever the hell they want and never face any consequences at all.
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Nov 11, 2017 03:31
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Some Guy TT posted:Yeah, that image issue is the only reason the argument has any merit. South Koreans are extremely self-conscious of how they are seen by other countries and factoids like that can give a bad impression. The impression I got was that most people were impressed by the commitment of the Korean legal system to hold even the powerful to account. Especially when you consider the parallel situation in the US, and the fact the place was a dictatorship 30 years ago.
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Nov 12, 2017 11:05
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I listened to some white dude expat journalist on a podcast explain how the impeachment was actually bad because it demonstrates that Koreans don't care about the rule of law and are an racial-ethnic hive mind like all Asians https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/podcast-shrimp-and-two-whales
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Nov 12, 2017 20:35
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freebooter posted:The impression I got was that most people were impressed by the commitment of the Korean legal system to hold even the powerful to account. Especially when you consider the parallel situation in the US, and the fact the place was a dictatorship 30 years ago. Yeah, that's how I feel about that too. But I'm not going to say that a Korean guy expressing a desire to see partisan bloodbath end when it's not even my country. Every so often I do have to interact with people who aren't leftists. icantfindaname posted:I listened to some white dude expat journalist on a podcast explain how the impeachment was actually bad because it demonstrates that Koreans don't care about the rule of law and are an racial-ethnic hive mind like all Asians Now dipshits like this on the other hand I have no problem saying straight to their face they're full of horse manure. I understood why so much reporting about South Korea is so fantastically bad very quickly once I started meeting Western journalists here and realized that every last one of them was a complete loving moron. There's a reason why the foreigners you see on the variety shows here, the ones who speak the language fluently and obviously completely understand the country, are the ones whose real jobs involve them talking to normal people every day. About four minutes in this guy starts talking about all the people in Korea, and elsewhere, who go to Western universities and it does not seem to occur to him that most of the people in this country don't go to college at all, let alone Western ones, and his very idiotic impression is a consequence of how he only talks to people who know fluent English. Now he's talking about Confucianism and forget it. gently caress this guy. Unless you're a septuagenarian living in the middle of nowhere your life is not ordered by Confucian values anymore. This is like trying to talk about American poverty as a consequence of the Protestant Work Ethic and not any of the other massive social and economic changes that have happened in the last couple of centuries. Oh wow. Now he's talking about Park Geun-hye's cult leader as being her friend and saying no one knows what he actually did wrong since she never technically broke the law and comparing her to Clinton Christ gently caress him gently caress him gently caress him I'm taking the headphones off. edit: OK, last thing I heard was him talking about how in ten years she's going to be pardoned and all will be forgotten. No, no, no. One of Moon Jae-in's big campaign promises was to reform the presidential pardon system because Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye abused the hell out of it to pardon cronies. People really hate the pardon system and the stereotype of it being used as something to get past and heal political wounds is long dead. Imagine if American presidents after Ford repeatedly pardoning anyone who was involved in corruption involving the administration, and that's where South Korea is on the subject right now. The whole reason this Lee Myung-bak stuff is such a big deal is because it's very clear that this time the ex-Presidents aren't getting a get out of jail free card down the line. I mean good lord that guy really exemplifies everything that is wrong with foreign reporters in this country. A normal person could watch local political news for maybe half an hour and immediately have a better grasp of the current political situation than any foreign reporter does. The catch is, you have to speak Korean to watch local news, which is the bridge too far for most of these people. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Nov 13, 2017 |
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Nov 13, 2017 05:59
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Yeah I love how he prefaces his segment by saying he doesn't actually know anything about politics or economics. But he's a white dude expat and that makes him an expert on the mental workings of the inscrutable Oriental Even as someone who doesn't speak the local languages and follows politics and economics there casually I always found it incredibly striking how widely accepted blatant, explicit racism towards East Asians is in the American/Anglophone popular discourse. People make claims and statements that are just straight up false, and easily shown to be false, more frequently than literally any other context I can think of. It's absolutely surreal. I've basically concluded that the idea of a fully nonwhite, nonwestern modernity that shares no cultural heritage with Western Europe, is just brain-breaking for a whole lot of white people. They feel instinctively that it's unnatural and should not exist, so they perceive it as evil, the way a homophobe reacts to gay people, and feel that there must be some trickery or coverup going on to make it look like these Asian countries are more or less equally well functioning liberal capitalist democracies as Western countries icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Nov 13, 2017 |
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Nov 13, 2017 06:09
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icantfindaname posted:Yeah I love how he prefaces his segment by saying he doesn't actually know anything about politics or economics. But he's a white dude expat and that makes him an expert on the mental workings of the inscrutable Oriental I want to read a dumb loving South Korean expat's blog about the inscrutable westernness of some midwestern shithole.
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Nov 13, 2017 08:08
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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whatever7 posted:Every former SK president end his/her career in jail so no surprise there. man korean politics are so loving cool
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Nov 14, 2017 11:10
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A NK soldier was shot while defecting at the JSA but made it through and should be able to recover. Thankfully this didn't escalate despite the Northerners firing at least 40 shots at him as he was making his run. It would be interesting to see if there's any video of this - the area would be definitely under surveillance, wouldn't it? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41979423
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Nov 14, 2017 11:44
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Fired 40 shots and hit with two. Wonder what range he was at?
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Nov 15, 2017 05:19
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More importantly, I wonder how many of these 40 shots were trying to hit him instead of just being shot in order to show they are doing their job.
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Nov 15, 2017 08:33
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Aramis posted:More importantly, I wonder how many of these 40 shots were trying to hit him instead of just being shot in order to show they are doing their job. He was hit 7 times according to the article, so probably all of them if they were firing on automatic. They've removed 5 bullets and found 2 more still in him.
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Nov 15, 2017 13:21
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Looks like the recent sanctions etc may be starting to have an effect on North Korean food security: Food insecurity riles North Korea's poorest provinces http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=14767&cataId=nk01500 quote:An increasing number of North Koreans are suffering from the effects of food insecurity and malnutrition, according to inside sources who spoke with Daily NK. A rumor is circulating in Ryanggang and North Hamgyong provinces that the body of someone who starved to death has been seen near the train station in Hyesan City.
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Nov 16, 2017 18:50
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Singapore has cut of trade with North Korea: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-northkorea/singapore-suspends-trade-relations-with-north-korea-idUSKBN1DG0OY
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Nov 17, 2017 00:51
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mediadave posted:Looks like the recent sanctions etc may be starting to have an effect on North Korean food security: who could have seen this coming?!?!!
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Nov 17, 2017 03:23
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The good news is that food insecurity will surely cause the North Korean people to spontaneously rebel against their oppressive government, just like what happened in all the other countries where we externally created food insecurity problems.
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Nov 17, 2017 04:04
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Some Guy TT posted:The good news is that food insecurity will surely cause the North Korean people to spontaneously rebel against their oppressive government, just like what happened in all the other countries where we externally created food insecurity problems. Perhaps they're just being softened up for the attack.
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Nov 17, 2017 04:13
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Chadderbox posted:Perhaps they're just being softened up for the attack. Normally dictatorships tend to make sure they feed their armies really well, so no worries on that end.
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Nov 17, 2017 04:16
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Chadderbox posted:Perhaps they're just being softened up for the attack. Unfortunately that's probably what they think we're really doing yeah. Grapplejack posted:Normally dictatorships tend to make sure they feed their armies really well, so no worries on that end. They also think we're really dumb so the fact that this plan wouldn't actually work for that purpose isn't a contradiction.
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Nov 17, 2017 04:37
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Seems like when you're not starving you're literally eating human poo poo. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42021373 quote:The North still uses human faeces as fertilisers. If these faeces are untreated and fertilise vegetables that are later eaten uncooked, the parasites get into the mouth and the intestines of the person. 
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Nov 17, 2017 16:05
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Negrostrike posted:Seems like when you're not starving you're literally eating human poo poo. I mean, that describes the entire planet and the entire history of agriculture. Pretty much every culture that had a farm figured out that when you muck out the outhouse that if you throw it in the field it grows better, even a bunch of first world countries do it but add a science step in the middle to turn the sewage into fertilizer more abstractly. Worms are still super common on the planet earth! Only really avoided in the firstest of world countries.
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Nov 17, 2017 16:29
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Thanks I didn't know sky is blue
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Nov 17, 2017 16:39
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Negrostrike posted:Thanks I didn't know sky is blue It just seems like a weird story. Like a story "Seems like when you're not starving you're literally eating the muscles of animals" or something. Using poop as fertilizer is in general where food comes from with different countries mostly varying in how much processing they can afford. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosolids In the United States, as of 2013 about 55% of sewage solids are turned into fertilizer
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Nov 17, 2017 16:47
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Negrostrike posted:Thanks I didn't know sky is blue It used to be bluer a hundred years ago 
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Nov 17, 2017 17:20
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It just seems like a weird story. Like a story "Seems like when you're not starving you're literally eating the muscles of animals" or something. Using poop as fertilizer is in general where food comes from with different countries mostly varying in how much processing they can afford. We're talking about a regime which promotes itself as a self-sufficient modernized country, that still uses untreated poo poo to fertilize its fields. I'll admit I'm not sure how common is that specifically, maybe India? Seems like North Koreans have way more intestinal parasites than they should according to that BBC story. Also holy poo poo operating a guy with poo poo and worms crawling everywhere. 
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Nov 17, 2017 17:27
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Wapo has a good longread out: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/north-korea-defectors/
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Nov 17, 2017 18:30
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