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Demiurge4 posted:How is the progress with South Korea going anyway? Are they just freezing out America, or both? Not frozen out, but chilly. North Korea thinks South Korea is being laggard in negotiations and has been publically criticizing them for it. But this is probably less due to a change in policy as it is a consequence of Moon Jae-in being weirdly conservative in pushing his agenda since the election. There's been a lot of domestic criticism of that too, mostly from the left. The new leader of the conservatives has publically stated that they need to start working with Moon Jae-in, and it seems like Moon jae-in is now trying to triangulate to the center to gain their support. This isn't quite as ludicrous as it sounds, since conservatives have enough seats in the National Assembly that Moon Jae-in needs them to pass legislation. It's just really frustratingly counter-intuitive. Imagine if Republicans lost the midterms so badly that their total number of governors and state legislatures put together only ranked in the single digits. That's how badly the conservatives lost, and the obvious interpretation of those results at the time was that South Korea was charging ahead to Full Communism Now, not triangulation and game theory.
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Jul 24, 2018 03:42
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My impression of Moon is that he was always a fairly centrist-y, Obama-type idealist left-liberal, not a radical leftist, is that accurate?
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Jul 24, 2018 05:29
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icantfindaname posted:My impression of Moon is that he was always a fairly centrist-y, Obama-type idealist left-liberal, not a radical leftist, is that accurate? and that's if you're being charitable. Having to survive the institutionalized character of SK politics means you can't do a lot of radical lefting, even had you wanted to.
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Jul 24, 2018 08:24
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Tias posted:and that's if you're being charitable. Having to survive the institutionalized character of SK politics means you can't do a lot of radical lefting, even had you wanted to. I mean, he's going to end up in jail at the end of his term anyway, might as well go for it.
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Jul 24, 2018 14:39
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https://twitter.com/Americas_Crimes/status/1022602777153994753 Happy anniversary of yet another US massacre
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Jul 27, 2018 20:39
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Chomskyan posted:https://twitter.com/Americas_Crimes/status/1022602777153994753
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Jul 27, 2018 21:05
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Chomskyan posted:https://twitter.com/Americas_Crimes/status/1022602777153994753 Look, they had to do that otherwise communism might have killed them.
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Jul 27, 2018 21:06
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icantfindaname posted:My impression of Moon is that he was always a fairly centrist-y, Obama-type idealist left-liberal, not a radical leftist, is that accurate? Tias posted:and that's if you're being charitable. Having to survive the institutionalized character of SK politics means you can't do a lot of radical lefting, even had you wanted to. Uh, he literally got arrested and imprisoned by the dictatorship for organizing protests when he was younger. I don't think he was ever part of South Korean communist movements but he did his share of radical lefting back in the day, in a relative sense wrt his society at the time anyway. He's more on the centrist side these days though yeah, especially since South Korea has slowly shifted left in the decades since he was a protester. Also the "all South Korean presidents get imprisoned so Moon will too" thing that comes up every now and then sort of misses that...nearly all South Korean presidents have been corrupt as absolute poo poo and totally deserved to get imprisoned, which so far is a trend that Moon seems to have bucked. Whether dirt on him'll come out later on though, who knows. I wouldn't take it as a given though, politics there have been shaken up pretty dramatically since the impeachment. And it's worth noting that there'd normally been rumors of the corruption for past presidents swirling around even before it came to prominence, which (as far as I'm aware?) there have not been for Moon. This might be wishful thinking though, Korean politics are still pretty drat corrupt. Koramei fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jul 27, 2018 |
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Jul 27, 2018 22:46
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https://twitter.com/AbbyMartin/status/1023232210969587712
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Jul 28, 2018 16:47
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"War of aggression" is sure an interesting take. If only we had left plucky North Korea alone, while it was only minding its own business.
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Jul 28, 2018 16:50
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:"War of aggression" is sure an interesting take. If only we had left plucky North Korea alone, while it was only minding its own business. If inserting yourself into a civil war to maintain your imperial buffer states isn't aggressive, certainly pushing past the 38th to the Chinese border and killing as many people as you can doing it is. Also stating definitively which side "started" the war is a good way to identify yourself as someone who has not read one book.
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Jul 28, 2018 16:58
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Plucky US just minding it's own business, colonizing Korea, when the Korean aggressors attacked
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Jul 28, 2018 16:59
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Antares posted:Also stating definitively which side "started" the war is a good way to identify yourself as someone who has not read one book. This is false: I have read Go Dog Go. "War of aggression" is interesting in this context because it has seemingly no meaning. North Korea reaches the bottom of the peninsula: not waging a war of aggression. UN forces pushing past the 38th parallel: waging a war of aggression. Maybe I'm just not clear on how you guys define "aggression" so that socialists are incapable of it.
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Jul 28, 2018 17:04
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Cool thanks chomp, any other hot tweets you want to derail the thread with or are you spent for now.
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Jul 28, 2018 17:07
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Sorry I'll try to stop derailing the Korea thread with tweets about Korea
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Jul 28, 2018 17:09
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You don't post them with any commentary or purpose besides "America bad lol". Like, alright, we get it. And? E: so I'm not making it worse: http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=3051171 A lot of the article is bait-y but the interesting bit is further in quote:
It's important to note that the scale down is happening, which means Moon is confident in the way the peace process is going. Grapplejack fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 28, 2018 17:13
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I mean, it was a pretty dumb tweet.
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Jul 28, 2018 17:16
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:This is false: I have read Go Dog Go. I checked and I actually aimed too high by suggesting books, even Wikipedia is better on this than most Americans so you could start by googling "korean war" and work your way up to actual histories. I'm sure if the United States deliberately bombed villages until their pilots could no longer find intact structures to bomb, or rounded up everyone in town and murdered them SS-style, it was in self-defense and it's normal to brag about it.
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Jul 28, 2018 17:57
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Antares posted:I checked and I actually aimed too high by suggesting books, even Wikipedia is better on this than most Americans so you could start by googling "korean war" and work your way up to actual histories. I have no idea what you're talking about, because I checked too just now, and Wikipedia claims that the North Koreans were the aggressors. As in, they decided to push past the 38th parallel with military forces in an operation that was planned months in advance with the support of both the USSR and China. Was this an Iraq-like preemptive strike? I'd enjoy reading your sources. As to the notion that, after you invade a place, your previous border ought to be sacrosanct, I can find no precedent for that in human history, but maybe you can provide a few. The combination of WWII total war logic, plus severe anti-communist sentiment, made the actual execution of the Korean War a grotesque moment in American history. But, as you tankies are so fond of saying, tu quoque. It's impossible to accept moralisms from people who utter them in a purely one-sided manner.
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Jul 28, 2018 18:27
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I imagine if the US/UN hasn't pushed north past the original border, it would've played out like in Vietnam anyway i.e. not any better.
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Jul 28, 2018 18:32
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You see, the real crime was Koreans crossing a line drawn by foreign powers in Korea. After that anything done in response is self defense. Also all the massacres we did before that were also self defense. I am a smart person with serious opinions.
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Jul 28, 2018 18:49
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Chomskyan posted:You see, the real crime was Koreans crossing a line drawn by foreign powers in Korea. After that anything done in response is self defense. Also all the massacres we did before that was also self defense. I am a smart person with serious opinions.
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Jul 28, 2018 18:51
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Chomskyan posted:You see, the real crime was Koreans crossing a line drawn by foreign powers in Korea. After that anything done in response is self defense. Also all the massacres we did before that were also self defense. I am a smart person with serious opinions. This just in: anschluss was good and justified and not at all an aggressive act.
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Jul 28, 2018 18:52
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Ethnonationalism is extremely bad, except when it's good, like when it's done by nominal socialists. Then they have the right to reunite the nation by force. Then it's amazing and shouldn't be questioned.
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Jul 28, 2018 18:56
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Whatever happened, we can all agree that it was good to intervene and make it worse.
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Jul 28, 2018 19:04
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Antares posted:Whatever happened, we can all agree that it was good to intervene and make it worse. I dunno, by comparison, the South Koreans came out OK. You may cry out, "That's not fair! The Americans bombed North Korea so badly they were necessarily destined to be poor!" Only NK was better off than SK until what, the mid-70s? 1980? The thesis that America is to blame for North Korea's ills doesn't hold up to a second of inspection. South Korea was poo poo for decades and has arrived at a place where a seemingly decent man is president. North Korea continues to be poo poo. "Make it worse" is predicated on two possible counterfactuals: one, that the Kim dynasty would have been better if their rule over the peninsula was unchallenged; or two, that triumph in the war would have led to a less dynastic, more breathable and flexible system of socialism. OK, maybe. The tweet is still stupid.
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Jul 28, 2018 19:18
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I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say things would have been better, had the US not murdered millions of Korean people (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 28, 2018 19:26
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Chomskyan posted:I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say things would have been better, had the US not murdered millions of Korean people I assume you mean "killed." Murder is necessarily extralegal, and the carpet bombing campaigns (immediately in the aftermath of WWII) weren't illegal until decades later. It's not a trivial point. Presumably you think that everyone killed in Allied bombings during WWII were "murdered" also, putting you, amusingly, on the side of the wehraboos. And then there's the favorite phrase of tankies everywhere, tu quoque. Granted that murder extends to warmaking, how many millions did your favorite states murder also? Moralism does not work when you deliberately excuse some parties a priori. America bad, OK. Who else bad?
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Jul 28, 2018 19:43
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Chomskyan posted:I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say things would have been better, had the US not murdered millions of Korean people Wow maybe Kim Il Sung shouldn't have killed a bunch of people for no reason first in a clear act of unprovoked aggression.
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Jul 28, 2018 20:43
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fishmech posted:Wow maybe Kim Il Sung shouldn't have killed a bunch of people for no reason first in a clear act of unprovoked aggression. Um, I think you'll find -- if you read a book -- that this was a war of southern aggression. I know this, having read Green Eggs and Ham.
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Jul 28, 2018 20:54
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:Um, I think you'll find -- if you read a book -- that this was a war of southern aggression. I know this, having read Green Eggs and Ham. But how can it have been the south's fault if the Americans are secret colonizers and thus it has to be America's fault? I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT GUYS
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Jul 28, 2018 21:00
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This is my last response to a comical post: I just realized that the tweet attributed literally every civilian death in the Korean War to the US, in our war of aggression and extermination against the people of Korea. Sounds extremely plausible!
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Jul 28, 2018 21:14
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:I have no idea what you're talking about, because I checked too just now, and Wikipedia claims that the North Koreans were the aggressors. As in, they decided to push past the 38th parallel with military forces in an operation that was planned months in advance with the support of both the USSR and China. Was this an Iraq-like preemptive strike? I'd enjoy reading your sources. I mean, I read the same article and it says that NK claimed it was in response to southern aggression. Obviously North Korea would be unlikely to claim they fought a war of aggression, but given the history of the US's evil poo poo during the Cold War, I feel it's rather naïve to assume that the western canon in terms of who fired first is necessarily true. It's certainly a better argument to say that North Korea had been planning this stuff in advance, but what's our source on that? Internal documents?
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Jul 28, 2018 21:15
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Tesseraction posted:I mean, I read the same article and it says that NK claimed it was in response to southern aggression. Obviously North Korea would be unlikely to claim they fought a war of aggression, but given the history of the US's evil poo poo during the Cold War, I feel it's rather naïve to assume that the western canon in terms of who fired first is necessarily true. There were border skirmishes and incursions well before the war, but one of them escalated because both sides became convinced it was a general attack. ROKA say they were minding their own business and KPA say they were responding to an attack from ROKA, while some ROKA accounts suggest they captured a Northern position before the KPA attack began. No one knows who "started it" and anyone who claims to know for sure is either ignorant or so immersed in their respective propaganda that they aren't worth listening to.
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Jul 28, 2018 21:36
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Tesseraction posted:I mean, I read the same article and it says that NK claimed it was in response to southern aggression. Obviously North Korea would be unlikely to claim they fought a war of aggression, but given the history of the US's evil poo poo during the Cold War, I feel it's rather naïve to assume that the western canon in terms of who fired first is necessarily true. Antares posted:There were border skirmishes and incursions well before the war, but one of them escalated because both sides became convinced it was a general attack. ROKA say they were minding their own business and KPA say they were responding to an attack from ROKA, while some ROKA accounts suggest they captured a Northern position before the KPA attack began. No one knows who "started it" and anyone who claims to know for sure is either ignorant or so immersed in their respective propaganda that they aren't worth listening to. Troops are not pieces on a chessboard, as much as generals want them to be. A campaign consisting of support units, infantry, armored units, and an airforce can literally not be supplied on a whim. In WWII troops, tanks, and aircraft ran out of supplies often on both sides. Logistics demands preparation. The mere fact that they engaged in a successful campaign (until the US arrived) is very, very strong evidence that the offensive was planned. The alternative -- leaving aside altogether Kim's meetings with Stalin and Mao -- is that the South Koreans arbitrarily decided to send a unit to capture a position north of the 38th parallel, without any support units or plans, and that North Korea happened to have everything it needed for a campaign, like fuel trucks, ammunition, foodstuffs, etc., all at hand, so they were immediately ready to move on the south. Note that this is far separate from merely having the logistics to man the border, which requires a lot less of everything. Even if you can't decide between the two based on your reading, try to assign a probability to each of them. Which is more plausible? (I know the tankie answer already.)
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Jul 28, 2018 21:48
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Antares posted:There were border skirmishes and incursions well before the war, but one of them escalated because both sides became convinced it was a general attack. ROKA say they were minding their own business and KPA say they were responding to an attack from ROKA, while some ROKA accounts suggest they captured a Northern position before the KPA attack began. No one knows who "started it" and anyone who claims to know for sure is either ignorant or so immersed in their respective propaganda that they aren't worth listening to. Might as well be claiming that the Poles really did attack Nazi Germany first and Hitler's troops simply had to sweep across the border in a coordinated attack. It's super clear who was attacking who and there's absolutely no reason to pretend like it's up in the air.
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Jul 28, 2018 21:56
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:Troops are not pieces on a chessboard, as much as generals want them to be. A campaign consisting of support units, infantry, armored units, and an airforce can literally not be supplied on a whim. In WWII troops, tanks, and aircraft ran out of supplies often on both sides. Logistics demands preparation. The mere fact that they engaged in a successful campaign (until the US arrived) is very, very strong evidence that the offensive was planned. I mean, I'm not disputing that NK were preparing for an invasion south, but given KIS was meeting with Stalin and Mao this could easily play in to a standard paranoia of the time - Stalin was invaded by his supposed ally less than a decade prior, and the US was likewise an ally who then turned on him. Given KIS was a Soviet-educated Korean it isn't beyond the boundaries of doubt that he was preparing based on a paranoia of SK invasion that put him on a hair trigger. Is this justifying the invasion of SK by NK? Absolutely not. My view is that given the history of conflicts world-wide I can absolutely see that the potential of the south overreaching a border skirmish and causing a war is absolutely plausible. Humans are really kinda bad at not causing wars.
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Jul 28, 2018 22:03
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Most South Koreans would have rather lived under communist rule in a unified Korea than in a US puppet state. Kim was doing the right thing when he invaded to free the South Koreans from their US masters. However the US also did the right thing by counter-attacking and trying to wipe out communist North Korea, because there was a legitimate fear that the entire world was going to go communist and that the US would not be able to win a war against a united communist world. Remember that thermonuclear weapons were not invented until after the Korean War.
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Jul 28, 2018 22:04
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Reading actual histories and saying its ambiguous is being a tankie while repeating whatever caricature your famously ignorant culture produces in defense of the series of dictators we propped up in ROK is just being logical. Given the role of race science in the UN campaign in Korea i guess that's appropriate. KPA attack (or counterattack) was more coordinated which is suggestive but the KPA was superior in every way to ROKA. Again actual scholars using primary sources can't determine who started the attack that day. Antares fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 28, 2018 22:07
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:It's not a trivial point. Presumably you think that everyone killed in Allied bombings during WWII were "murdered" also, putting you, amusingly, on the side of the wehraboos. weeelllll
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Jul 28, 2018 22:13
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