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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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symphoniccacophony posted:Any Koreans or non-Korean living in Korea who have views they want to share? In my previous post I mentioned how US has seemly co-opted what should have been foremost, a Korean affair. Especially since they just elected a president who favors a more peaceful approach to the north. It seems like if they have a take on the whole situation. it's already drowned out by all the gun blazing, cowboy rhetoric that the US is favouring. The bolded is wrong, because it implies that the issues on the Korean peninsula have ever been considered a Korean affair to begin with. South Korean media is really weird about this. Even though the news constantly reports on North Korea stories, there's almost never any sense of agency. It's never been "what will our country do about North Korea?", "it's what will the United States do about North Korea?". I've only lived here since 2011, so I can't go back too far, but everything I've seen and read about previous administrations indicates they had the same basic policy of deferring to American discretion regardless of whether they were on the left and right, and Moon Jae-in is continuing that policy. This was true even during Sunshine, and it's the main reason Sunshine fell apart and why North Korea has no interest in starting it up again. Approachment with South Korea is pointless as long as the American military alliance is maintained, and the Americans are refusing to consider any kind of negotiation at all. All it would take is a single election to wipe out all the gains of the policy, which is what happened when Lee Myung-bak was elected back in 2007. Also bear in mind that North Koreans are still pretty cheesed that Kim Dae-jung got all the credit for Sunshine when Kim Jong-il had to overcome about the same amount of internal domestic opposition* to get it moving. If Moon Jae-in did manage to start it up again, odds are he'd get to be the peacemaking hero while Kim Jeong-eun, just like his father, would continue to be mocked and belittled worldwide as a funny-looking violent Asian cult leader with a tiny penis. It's also always worth noting that, because of his education Kim Jeong-eun was exposed to Western propaganda about North Korea. He saw that the main way we mocked Kim Jong-il was by making him out to be the leader of an incompetent backwards country incapable of any technological development. Their being able to develop ICBMs so quickly just through sheer effort renders that talking point incomprehensible. Not that this stops the usual idiots (some of which are even in this thread) from repeating it. *Ironically said opposition was mainly from the military, which is why Kim Jong-il had to placate them with a military first policy in regards to domestic resources. Which was of course refitted into American propaganda to declare that Kim Jong-il starves his own people in order to put the military in charge. Seriously- for all this talk of how we have no good options for dealing with them, they have no good options for dealing with us either.
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Jul 6, 2017 05:11
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maskenfreiheit posted:What are the chances one day some rando just walks out onto a balcony and accounces kim is dead, the military is in charge now? Fantastically unlikely. Any coup leader would have to decapitate the entire family. And that's even harder than it sounds, because no one actually knows how many of them there are, let alone where to find them. It's the North Korean version of designated survivor, and it's why there's so little public information about the Kims' personal lives. The only people who know what the line of succession is are the ones who can be trusted one hundred percent to adhere to it. That's why the Kims execute people instead of just firing them- it's to keep them from trying to start a revolution in their spare time. It's also why fantasies about ending the stand-off by assassinating Kim Jeong-eun are stupid Clancy-esque bullshit. Imagine North Korea trying to solve the stand-off by assassinating Trump. That wouldn't end any better than pulling off the reverse. Ragingsheep posted:Seems to me that the main issue with NK having nukes isn't that they're suddenly just going to start launching them at SK, Japan and the US but now they can start pressing their interests with more conventional means, backed up by an implied threat that they could use nuclear weapons if there's anything other than a very limited response by the US. If by "conventional means" you mean normal diplomacy, sure. Like, the main thing people tend to miss in the North Korea standoff is that their demands are actually pretty mild. They want official diplomatic recognition by the United States and a peace treaty. That's it. Russia gave that to South Korea without even asking once the Cold War was over. For a sense of perspective, this is also why they do the kidnapping stuff. They're intentionally creating problems that could very easily be solved if there was an American ambassador in Pyongyang, but are unnecessarily difficult without one.
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Jul 7, 2017 02:42
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WampaLord posted:Uh, don't they also want total control of all Korea, though? The official policy of the North Korean government since the eighties has been the creation of a confederation that would slowly merge both governments. It would start with just the combining of sports teams and then move on to more substantial changes. Some movement was made on this in the early nineties with the united ping-pong team, and more recently the rival Taekwondo federations in the North and the South have been making overtures to eventually merging their rulesets. Moon Jae-in has talked about Korea fielding a united Olympic team in 2018 for these same reasons. "Total control of all Korea" is actually the South Korean conservative plan for reunification. Bear in mind that, as is usual for their North Korea policy, South Korean conservatives expect the United States to do all the actual work in regards to that. I guess technically it's the American plan too, although we don't really like to talk about it since North Korea supposedly having this policy is one of the reasons why they're supposed to be unreasonable. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 03:10
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JFK had sex parties in the White House with teenagers. I don't see what possible standard you could have that says Trump is an impulsive childish idiot but JFK wasn't.
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Jul 7, 2017 03:45
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Azathoth posted:The two political systems are diametrically opposed to each other, and at some point either the North would have to accept democracy and capitalism or the South would have to renounce both since any transitional period would necessarily either be for taking the North to a liberal democracy or the South to a totalitarian Stalinist-but-without-the-Communism Juche state. The idea is that after maybe a decade of regular interaction between the North and the South mutual decisions could be made about which system works better. South Korea's better economic situation coupled with its larger population means that any such process would almost certainly be tilted in the favor of the South Korean system, which is why it's weird that North Korea is the one more interested in pushing it. Azathoth posted:Oh, you're either crazy or trolling, got it. Look, I hate Trump as much as the next guy but throwing up JFK of all people as the ultimate example of the sensible adult in the room is such a nonsensical idea I couldn't let it go without commentary.
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Jul 7, 2017 08:45
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Halloween Jack posted:In the past, "Let the Korean people solve their own problems without outside interference" has always been a pretext to militarily dominate the South as soon as the U.S. withdrew its troops. It's always been a really weird and tenuous prospect since the DPRK avoids recognizing the ROK as a legitimate state. That's literally happened exactly once, a long time before anyone in this thread was even born. Times have changed. The reason Kim Il-sung changed the policy in the first place was because he realized a military solution wasn't possible anymore. I don't see how anyone could look at the South Korea's current military strength and conclude that the North could take it over even on their best day.
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Jul 8, 2017 02:18
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Oh yeah, that reminds me. South Korean news media coverage has been taking a different track lately because of the G20 summit. The short of it is, there's a lot of imagery of Moon Jae-in and the people he brought with him and the stuff they're saying. They're not really saying anything different than the Trump policy we're already familiar with. All options are on the table, and if North Korea keeps being mean, we and our allies will respond with more vaguely defined "bad stuff". What's interesting is that Moon Jae-in is now taking the point as PR guy instead of Trump himself, both for the press and with other foreign powers, be they Chinese or European. The immediate obvious reason for this is of course just a matter of reputation. Everyone likes Trump, and for the moment at least, everyone has a positive opinion of Moon Jae-in. In Korea anyway. His approval ratings are still sky high. The subtler motive I think might be at play here is that both Trump and Moon Jae-in may be trying to transition to having South Korea be the spokesnation on North Korea instead of the United States. It's consistent with both of their stated positions of how South Korea should be taking the lead, even if, as already mentioned, their opinions on the proper response to North Korea's nuclear tests are virtually identical. Has there been much coverage of the G20 summit in the American press, or anywhere else for that matter? South Korea as a country tends to obsess about the opinion of the global community, so it wouldn't surprise me to learn that this is a local quirk. I seem to remember that way back when George Bush didn't even know what the G20 was. Somehow I doubt times have changed in that regard.
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Jul 8, 2017 08:52
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I feel compelled to point out that the South Korean entertainment industry, much like the entertainment industry in most countries, is absolutely massively abusive. Likewise life for most defectors sucks, less because they're defectors and more because South Korea in general sucks right now for low level workers who can't luck into a good job. If Lim's story about leaving North Korea and eventually getting involved with South Korean variety shows is a lie, it's an exceptionally detailed and plausible one. I guess you kind of have to take my word for it on that since the video doesn't have English subtitles, but she's not spending thirty minutes saying "Death to America" again and again. Hell, she doesn't even really talk about politics at all. It's mainly just her life story with specific examples of her TV appearances explaining how the story she told on TV was different from what actually happened and why she made the changes. Ironically this is a much more complete version of Lim's story than has ever appeared in South Korean media, for exactly those reasons. These kinds of variety shows are soft propaganda and make a special effort to avoid discussing anything that happened to the personalities outside of North Korea. Propagandistic nature notwtihstanding these variety shows are by far the best source of firsthand testimony about what life in North Korea is like, so it's really weird how foreign reporters, even ones who are specifically supposed to specialize in North Korea, are barely even aware that they exist. For the sake of completion, I also read the Korean article linked at the bottom of the Vice piece that was offered as a rebuttal. The only real relevant information the Canadian defector offers that I hadn't thought of is that Lim is probably still under investigation for proof she's not a spy, going by her apologetic tone and staging. Everything else is just the usual speculation. I find it rather telling that no one in English language media is going after the actual content in the video, of which there is a lot, instead honing in on a few lines that sound vaguely brainwashy out of the context.
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Jul 20, 2017 09:27
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Hey let's talk about something else for awhile. http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/17/asia/park-geun-hye-south-korea/index.html quote:
This has been big on South Korean news lately. To my great disgust and outrage. While in power Park Geun-hye regularly abused state power to go after political dissidents and put them in far worse conditions than this. But good loving luck finding any articles on CNN about the Gangjeong naval base, or anti-THAAD protests, or the horrific government response to Sewol, or arrests against anyone who defies the narrative of the great Red Menace of the North, or the attempts made by conservative governments to stack major television networks in their favor. MBC reporters just had a strike about this to force action, since without resignations the new government can't do anything. But no. Why would CNN discuss leftist issues like that, when they can wax poetic about the poor daughter of a dictator who has to clean her own room without the help of a maid for the first time in her life and is shocked, shocked at how hard it is. Disgusting. For what it's worth, the South Korean press is skeptical of the allegations. A cursory survey of Park Geun-hye's treatment versus similar criminals, let alone common ones, show that she is being treated fine. I'm mainly upset because this is a perfect example of how South Korean media will treat any idiotic thing American media says with serious gravity but they will never, ever show the slightest interest in any of the country's actual major domestic issues. One of the funnier points under discussion is confusion about who exactly the MH Group even is, and why they have any interest in human rights in the first place. They're Park Geun-hye's "international counsel", who don't have any lawyers in South Korea, so what they have to do with the case at all is sketchy to begin with. They can white knight for her in front of the United Nations and CNN, is all that I'm getting from it.
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Oct 19, 2017 12:18
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Warbadger posted:Out of those 4 topics my wife, who isn't at all interested in politics, has read random articles from the South Korean news on everything but anti-North Korean arrests from her news feed. Oh, I knew I shouldn't have used that pronoun- by "they" I meant American sources, like CNN. These issues are absolutely covered in the Korean press. My frustration stems from how the tone of articles like this gives the impression to ignorant Americans that this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot when hard evidence of Park Geun-hye's wrongdoing was really just the last straw of a long list of grievances. Right up until the protests happened American sources were acting like Park Geun-hye was a sensible centrist to be admired for breaking the glass ceiling and that most criticism of her was totally overblown. An article like this which acts like she's the victim of political persecution feeds perfectly into that narrative. But it's all such obviously flimsy bullshit- anyone who's read the prison thread knows that even by the most generous interpretation, Park Geun-hye is being treated like a queen compared to the typical African-American awaiting trial in the United States, but good luck getting CNN to post an article expressing sympathy like that for someone who's not a rich rear end in a top hat. I'm mainly just annoyed that South Korean news now has to cover this article if only to debunk it. If CNN had given half this many shits about Park Geun-hye's actual crimes her impeachment likely would have happened several months earlier. It's legitimately really sad the way the South Korean press assumes anything published in the American press must have been written by someone with some minimum standard of competence.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:05
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Grouchio posted:North Korea wants to 'peacefully develop' outer space with use of 'many more' satellites Well, he's completely right that the United States sends out more satellites than anyone else on the planet and even if you could sort of technically argue that these are stealth missile tests, satellites have a wide variety of usage beyond just weaponry. Even corporations regularly send out satellites without anyone accusing Elon Musk of being a supervillain whose long term evil plan is to blackmail the Earth with rockets dropped from the moon. Well, anyone not an idiot I mean.
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Oct 20, 2017 04:36
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You know, I just want to throw this out as a hypothetical. Is there anything Kim Jeong-eun, or any other leader of the North Korean state could do that you'd be willing to let North Korea launch satellites into space like everyone else? Because if the answer is yes you are now willing to deal with the regime to an extent American political leadership has not been willing to. And if the answer is no, maybe you can see why they've decided it saves a lot of time if they just give up any pretext of negotiating with us on anything at all.
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Oct 20, 2017 05:48
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Fojar38 posted:Substantial and verifiable political reforms and the dismantling of their nuclear program. Also which "American leadership" are we talking about? Yeah no. "substantial and verifiable political reforms" could mean drat near anything. After what happened with the Agreed Framework North Korea would never agree to anything that wishy-washy. Allowing them to launch satellites in exchange for them dismantling their nuclear program is not something they would likely agree to, but it would at least be a bargaining position which is a far sight better than anything we have right now. I'm referring to the American leadership we have right now, not that there's been any appreciable difference with election turnovers. As far as I know our position is still "North Korea has to give up nuclear weapons and then maybe we'll make a concession if we feel like it". If your understanding is different, I'd love to hear how my impression is wrong.
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Oct 20, 2017 06:03
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Fojar38 posted:Oh, you want me to write a giant 500 page treaty as for what precisely is meant? That's not what you asked, you asked what I would want from North Korea in exchange for allowing them to launch satellites. First and foremost I'd want them to stop being a fascist autocracy. This is something nobody wants to ask of them though because apparently it's expecting too much and it infringes on the rights of dictators to murder millions of their own people, and usually just spawns a shitload of whataboutism because the US has problems too. The reason we don't ask countries to stop being fascist autocracies isn't because it's expecting too much. It's because we run the risk of someone actually playing ball with us. Imagine if instead of demanding that Saddam give up his non-existent WMDs, we demanded that he transition to a democratic government. Let's say that he has "fair" (actually rigged) elections where he only wins by 70% instead of 99%. Now all of a sudden diplomatic pressure is working and it makes more sense to keep trying that instead of destroying the entire country and starting from nothing, which is what Bush and co. actually wanted to do in the first place. There's also the matter of how dissidents in our fascist autocracy allies might start asking why they aren't held to the same standards as our enemies. But that's a bit beyond the scope of the thread. quote:The reason North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons is non-negotiable is because North Korea isn't supposed to have them in the first place. Independent of any bilateral relations with South Korea, Japan, or the USA, North Korea is also in violation of a laundry list of UN resolutions from both the general assembly and even from the security council. Saying "Okay their presence is negotiable and we'll give up this if you give up that" is not only a bullshit false equivalence between North Korea and its negotiating partners but also undermines what little credibility multilateral institutions still have and sends the message that the only thing that really matters is if you have nukes or not and would set the stage for a massive acceleration in nuclear proliferation, something that apparently goons have become fine with over the past 6 months for some reason the reason is Trump OK, great. Now North Korea has no incentive to negotiate with us at all. That horse already left the barn door. Either you negotiate, you invade, or just accept that North Korea has nukes and there's no way to get rid of them. Those are your options. There's no appeal to decorum. edit: by the way, thanks for admitting that the United States was violating the Agreed Framework. Usually the way that argument goes is that our refusal to adhere to our side was retroactively justified when we discovered "proof" several years later that the North Koreans were violating it all along. You do appreciate that any acknowledgment of any bad faith effort on the part of the Americans at all is closer to the North Korean position than the American one, right? Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 20, 2017 06:57
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Fojar38 posted:I do think that there's another option in the form of starting to pressure China to outright cease trading with North Korea and to actually implement what it says it is, but everyone clutches pearls at that option too because it disturbs a bilateral status quo that should be increasingly obvious can no longer hold. Now you just have the same problem with a different country. Because why should China stop trading with North Korea? What's in it for them? Obnoxious as North Korea is right now, the prospect of North Korea turning into a legitimate failed state with a refugee crisis spilling into China is infinitely worse as far as they're concerned, and the United States would have zero incentive to prevent that from happening because we're happy when China's miserable. Which incidentally is also why China helps prop up North Korea in the first place. Because it makes us miserable. quote:Maybe, but the truth is I don't really give a gently caress about "bad faith" negotiations when dealing with people who are so reprehensible, especially when the sum total of the bad faith is "Bush made a mean speech." Uh...you do realize the United States never implemented its side of the Agreed Framework under Clinton either, right? And this happened because North Korea was experiencing a famine and US leaders were hoping it would get bad enough to cause a collapse? That's a bit more serious than "Bush made a mean speech". It also provided a mechanism by which North Korean leadership could very plausibly blame us for their domestic problems. And now that those problems are largely gone, they have successfully transitioned that into their modern day propaganda position of "we succeeded in spite of those Yankees trying to starve us all to death, and if they think they can tell us what to do we're shoving a nuke up their rear end in a top hat!" Call them reprehensible all you like. That doesn't solve the problem. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 20, 2017 07:37
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Lum_ posted:"Attica is the same size as Auschwitz, therefore America is just as bad." I'm curious. What horrible things do you think happen inside North Korean prisons that are completely unheard of inside American prisons? Because we don't even need to drag Sheriff Joe into this to find regular examples of inmate abuse, rape, murder or enslavement. People literally go insane in American prisons, to the point they want to commit suicide. Frequently innocent people, and the state will go to ridiculous efforts to force people it knows to be innocent to stay in that environment. We have quota systems designed to keep prisons overcrowded solely so some sick rich capitalist fucks can make money. There are documented cases of judges intentionally oversentencing juveniles to get kickbacks. And this is just the stuff we know about, that's public information that the media doesn't report on because the idea that American prisons are several times worse than the gulags were at their height is just too horrifying to contemplate, especially considering almost all of the abuses in our system have been legalized. And when it's not for profit, the purposes of our prisons are explicitly racist, designed to maximally gently caress over African-American communities. If that's not a torture factory, I'm hard-pressed to see what is. Whereas most of what we know about North Korean prisons, by contrast, is just speculation. It's not verified information. We don't actually know that they incarcerate as much of their population as we do, that's just the most liberal interpretation of the limited information we have access to. But even if we assume the most singularly lurid accounts of North Korean prison camps are one hundred percent true, say we choose to interpret Yoduk Story as a documentary, we're still talking the same general ballpark of abuse as what happens in American prisons, not anything anywhere near approaching Auschwitz. So the idea that North Korea deserves special treatment on the international scale because of bad prison conditions, of all things, is just so fundamentally baffling that I'm left wondering if you even have the slightest idea what you're talking about. Like, you do realize that even if we did invade North Korea, we'd probably still have to keep the prison camps open, right? They're not filled to the brim with democracy lovers. Even the main political dissidents are in there for plotting to take more power for themselves. They don't care about democracy, except to the extent they'll probably pretend that they do to pull one over on occupying American forces, which is what happens pretty much every time we try to make friends out of our enemy's enemies. And that's not even getting into how we'll have to put all the hardcore Communists somewhere, further adding to the population of the camps. Well, them and anyone unscrupulous assholes pretends was a hardcore Communist because they want a bounty. Guantanomo Bay 2.0 anyone? fake edit: yeah I know that was kind of a tangent but good lord, I came back here mainly to post that story about CNN dipshits thinking Park Geun-hye is suffering from political persecution because she has to make her own bed. Horrible American prison conditions, and the way American media straight up ignores that they exist, are a pretty sore point for me right this minute. North Korean abuse tends not to make me so angry simply because at least they're not complete loving hypocrites on the subject.
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Oct 23, 2017 03:12
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You call my post dumb, yet you think East Germany, of all the possible geopolitical examples, is the most relevant one here. But then again you're assuming my United States/North Korea prison comparison is intended to make the latter look good rather than the former look bad, so I'm guessing you're reading my posts with blinders on. edit: gently caress it I'll just spell it out for you. Communist East Germany voluntarily relinquished power. There was do dramatic build-up about the need to punish Communists for crimes against humanity. They cooperated with the changeover. For such a situation to happen on the Korean peninsula would require such a dramatic reversal of the current situation of political brinkmanship that we might as well be talking about an alternate universe. My post was assuming a situation where current North Korean leadership is removed by force, and probably sets up a successful insurgency against foreign invaders. Not exactly far-fetched, when we factor in that considerably less competent political factions in the Middle East have managed to do the same. ↓ That's only an assumption in commonwealth legal systems, not Napoleonic ones. South Korea uses the latter, for reference. I don't have a clue what kind of legal system the North Koreans use. Like most of their secrecy, this is no doubt intentional, since it would make any kind of power transition hopelessly difficult without their express cooperation. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Oct 23, 2017 |
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Oct 23, 2017 10:00
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...Although if you're wondering what he meant by freeing people who are in prison for the crimes of their family members, that's in reference to collective punishment. In the North Korean context it's a Communist legal idea where the theoretical basis is meant to prevent family members from committing crimes to benefit the rest of their family, but only the one who directly committed the crime faces consequences, which is a problem in any capitalist system. See- rich families that are impossible to take down since only one ever gets convicted at a time and the rest remain rich to commit crimes another day. In theory we deal with this through the civil damages system which is...imperfect, at best. Neither is the North Korean system, obviously. My point here isn't that the North Koreans are great for having lofty moral standards, it's that they do indeed have moral standards they just don't bother adhering to them when it's inconvenient and that's where the real evil in the system lies. Which again, makes them a lot more like us than the Nazis. The technical purpose of the North Korean camps is re-education, after all, which is just a more evil sounding Communist word for rehabilitation.
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Oct 23, 2017 10:25
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I never defended North Korean prisons either. You seem to think explaining why the system exists in the form it does is tantamount to justifying its existence. I know it's a lot more morally comfortable to pretend like North Korean leadership is motivated entirely by the number of evilgasms they get by smashing baby heads against hard rocks, but that kind of attitude is how we got to our current situation. By refusing to consider the situation from their point of view. Consider for a moment that the North Korean state came into existence in the wake of the Japanese Occupation, and that the issue of Korean collaboration with the Japanese was a big one. The prevailing belief was that extreme punishment, to the extent of punishing entire families, was the only way to act as a substantial deterrent against past and future collaboration with foreign invaders, since such collaboration was typically motivated by a desire to provide for the family unit long term. The ethical ramifications of this are horrific and wrong and evil, which I apparently have to explicitly state since you lack enough understanding of nuance to think that explanations are tantamount to endorsement. But as far as the North Koreans are concerned, history has justified this policy. South Korea, which did not enact any kind of serious punitive measures against Japanese collaborators, ended up being almost immediately and entirely run by former collaborators. The influences of this are still felt in South Korean culture to this day, where all the major power players can trace their influence back to the Japanese Occupation- not that they want to do this. Until recently discussing Korean collaboration with the Japanese was very verboten in South Korean culture for exactly these reasons. This also is why North Korea has a strong sense of Korean nationalism while South Korea does not. It's not a matter of the specifics of Juche, it's that they even have an ethos at all. Right-wing nationalists in South Korea have to fall back to waving American flags to express their patriotism because even they don't have the slightest idea what Korean identity is supposed to be. Hilariously, left-wing nationalists have historically always been accused of being closet Communists even when they were nothing of the sort (see Kim Dae-jung, who did austerity measures before they were cool) because North Korea has effectively monopolized the idea of Korean exceptionalism. This is the real danger of an invasion where we're expecting South Koreans to do the heavy lifting. They won't want to. Mandatory military service is already massively unpopular here, and that's just when it's two years of mandatory PTSD in the best years of your life that you can't do resume building. You will see massive street protests against the war that would make the Park Geun-hye protests look like a joke, and that's not even getting into the plummet in morale South Koreans will face every day as North Korean soldiers and civilians alike will mock them every day for fighting the Yankee's war for them. This is why North Korea has toned down their anti-South Korea rhetoric over the past few decades. It's become increasingly incomprehensible to the populations of both countries why they would even want to fight, except for the sake of American interests in East Asia. Lum_ posted:Note: in North Korea people are imprisoned for throwing away newspapers with Dear Leader's picture incorrectly. Cumings goes on to say that Kang's surviving off of rats caught in the prison grounds was a feature, not a bug. But maybe I'm wasting my breath. You seem more interested in pithy generalizations than trying to understand how North Koreans actually think and why they are unlikely to be impressed by our getting on a moral high horse about how bad their prison system is.
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Oct 24, 2017 03:08
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Kthulhu5000 posted:Nationalism and supposed monopoly on defining Korean identity mean nothing, though, if the authority claiming to represent the nation and uphold those ideals can't keep meaningful promises or make nuanced threats to ensure loyalty from its population. All that North Korea has to hold its population in line is a volatile mix of outside pressure from its neighbors (who don't want to be overrun with waves of refugees and defectors) and chains of repressive and totalitarian authoritarianism from the top down. Take that away, and it has no leverage to enforce compliance. These exact same arguments have been made for the last seventy years. The political leaders making these arguments die or go into retirement. The regime stays. You, like our leaders, underestimate the regime at every turn. That's why we're in this mess. quote:I could see protests if South Korea initiated a conflict or let itself be dragged into a US-initiated conflict, but the minute that they see an unjustifiable North Korean attack on South Korean territory (within the context of peninsular conflict being understood to be "hot" again, if just between the US and North Korea), you'll probably see more support for a reprisal. Perhaps out of national pride, perhaps out of cynical bitterness from past South Korean military reservists who want their suffering in service to finally mean something (I kid?). Now this much I agree with. South Koreans (eventually) rallied behind Syngman Rhee in the face of invasion. They'd do the same with anyone. quote:But I think you're underestimating South Korean soldiers here. South Korea still has a social contract, and has managed to deliver on it pretty well over the past few decades. Democracy, economic development, some social liberalization, and all the attendant trappings of such that Western capitalism is lauded and touted so much about for spreading across the globe. This means (as I've mentioned before in this thread) stuff like McDonalds, Xbox Live, high-speed Internet, K-pop idols, and a million other shallow, dumb, crassly materialistic things that Westernized (and even some not-so-Westernized) young men around the world dig. You have this entirely backwards. People do not conscript because they're happy the government is giving them creature comforts. To the contrary- if you're happy flipping burgers and playing Xbox Live, nothing will piss you off more than the prospect of being sent off to a foreign country to risk your life fighting for nothing while a drill sergeant yells at you. This is is why nearly all of the men in South Korea hate, hate military service. There's no sense of patriotic duty And that's just in context of the disaffected slacker. Most young South Korean men have stronger ambitions than that- and are frustrated at every turn by an increasingly stressful society where it is getting harder and harder to get a decent job, where they are made to feel ashamed for failures and offered no means of self-improvement, and who are so used to abuse in the crappy burger flipping jobs they do have access to that there's a special term for how South Korean millennial feel about this country. Hell Joseon. People describe wanting to escape from here and live in the West, as if that's any better. And need I mention the highest suicide rate in the world? Some social contract. quote:So anything that disrupts that functional stability, that undermines the illusion of there not having to be bigger cares in the world than busting your rear end at work to pay for a lifetime of lattes...I think the results of such a shock would be like those of Americans after 9/11. And once the South Korean government and military authorities (likely in conjunction with the US military and entertainment industry) start ramping up the propaganda with cinematic dramatizing of war, start pushing an affiliation between military shooters like Call Of Duty and actual service, and start making war seem "fun" (especially to the bored, desperate, curious, thrill-seeking, or psychotic in South Korean society), then you'll see South Korean militarism and enthusiasm for war go up. I disagree. The factors you describe are uniquely American, and have been built up in our culture over the last several decades. 9/11 was just the powder keg that set it off. The only thing here that's even close to that level of military worship is Descendants of the Sun- a drama which has already been mostly forgotten about, because its main novelty was that heroic soldiers are almost never depicted in South Korean media. You're more likely to get a popular movie about a con artist than you are a South Korean soldier. quote:Throw in the certainty of better equipment, better training, better support, and the prospect of being more likely to return home alive, and it just seems ridiculously laughable that South Korean soldiers would feel ashamed and embarrassed because the North Korean population developed the most wounding "Yankee dog lackeys" rhetoric ever. That only works, logically, if they somehow share a same "Korean" mindset that transcends ideology, experience, and perception. Again, you might want to read up on this Hell Joseon stuff. Young South Koreans are not happy with their lot in life. They already feel like society is pushing them to impossible standards to no apparent purpose. Forcing them to fight a war in that context would be the last straw. quote:And if North Korea has set the tone for native Korean nationalism, while South Korea can only define its national identity through its relationship with the United States, especially militarily...then there's a contradiction here? How can South Koreans somehow recognize a shared Koreanness with North Koreans, if their national characters and identity are so different? It's not as if shared ethnicity or familiar coexistence stopped what happened in Cambodia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, or for that matter in the American Civil War and during the Nazi regime in Germany. My point is not that the superiority of Juche ideology will allow North Korea to overwhelm South Korea with cultural defections. It's that the Juche ideology is very, very well-suited to encouraging the citizenry to stick up for their culture no matter how lovely the material circumstances, especially in the context of a defensive war. South Korea have nothing worth fighting for. Soldiers aren't robots. If morale is poo poo, you lose the war even if you win the battle. ...And I suppose I should clarify, since you think South Koreans are impressed by the wonders of electricity. Nationalism as we know it became a defining force in World War I, where the common citizens on both sides lived in much worse material conditions than anyone in North Korea today. If blinding nationalist patriotism could be unleashed in that context, in an explicitly pointless purposeless war that accomplished nothing except dick-waving, you better believe the North Koreans could do the same in a defensive context. poo poo, the Taliban managed to pull it off. Surely you can't be underestimating North Korea that much. quote:And this isn't getting into the potential dynamics of South Korean soldiers dehumanizing the North Korea population through victim-blaming, both to cope with the conflict psychologically and also to justify unleashing their anger, rage, and pent-up frustrations from home on them. If mandatory military service is unpopular with South Koreans because it seems rough and like a waste of time, imagine how unpopular North Koreans would be if a South Korean conscript was not only dealing with the stress of their military service, but now also the stress of possibly dying in a conflict and returning to a ruined nation and economy if they do survive. This only happens that way if there's something the North Koreans can be blamed for. Again, the main probable prospect for South Korea going to war with North Korea right now is if the United States, currently represented by Trump, forces them to do so. If you really think South Korean soldiers are going to hold North Korea 100% to blame for that, I don't know what to tell you. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 10:46
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I appreciate you taking the time to seriously explain your position instead of shitposting. Really I do. But honestly, at this point it's obvious that we have views of patriotism and war weariness that are just fundamentally irreconcilable. Even the United States, in the aftermath of 9/11, did not see a significant enough surge in enlistment numbers to achieve even the most modest of goals. American culture has legit full on military worship, they were unambiguously attacked, and even that wasn't good enough to completely shut down nascent anti-war sentiment. The very idea of a draft terrifies interventionists in the United States, because even if it's the only way they could realistically achieve their goals, the backlash would be so horrific they'd all be out on their asses just as soon as the next elections were held. That you sincerely believe that South Korea, a country with nowhere near as many factors working in the miltarists' favor as the United States, a country that still has cultural memory of how destructive the last Korean War was, a country with genuine deep-rooted anti-military sentiment, a country that is mainly kept together by a high standard of living that would implode under the stress of demands of full-on war...I honestly don't know how to respond to that. You genuinely seem to believe that South Korean people are stupid and are just going to forget all this stuff once their leaders transition to blaming North Korea for everything. You don't seem at all aware of how for the last ten years successive conservative governments already tried to play up the threat of the North to solidify domestic power, and all they managed to accomplish was pissing people off so much that they were thrown out of office on their rear end several months before anyone realized Park Geun-hye was in throe to South Korean Scientology. What's worse, the main people they pissed off are the under-thirty demographic- that is, the ones who would have to fight in any hypothetical war. Bear in mind that even though South Koreans believe all the same negative things about North Korea that you do, they simply don't care because it's not relevant to their current situation. As an oh so evocative South Korean punk band puts it, North Korea eats poo poo so why should we eat piss gently caress you gently caress you gently caress you. Current attempts by the conservative and centrist parties to wrap themselves in the flag against the threat of the North have only succeeded in further torpedoing their already miserable approval ratings. There was a legislative boycott a couple of months over Moon Jae-in not being enough of a hardliner. It did not go well. Mind, I'm not saying North Korea has any kind of meaningful advantage. They'd be just as hosed were they to attempt an invasion of the South as the other way around. But then, that's why their propaganda constantly emphasizes defense, how the nukes are to protect themselves, and how they will fight to the last man to defend the motherland. That is a vastly different pitch than making an offensive push to unify Korea by force which, as I have mentioned in the past, stopped being North Korea's official policy on reunification some thirty five years ago. That's not something they can flip flip on overnight any more than the South Koreans can flip flop their anti-military sentiment. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 25, 2017 00:56
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Upon further reflection I realize I really need to address this part specifically-quote:And conversely, you're arguing that South Koreans will whimper and shirk away at the first sign of conflict and sue for peace because they have become Westernized and soft, and have no sense of national purpose or personalized relationship to the South Korean nation that will make them willing to fight. They're just US lackeys who might as well be puppies for all the fighting good that can be expected from them. The South Koreans are not soft. They are an intelligent people, who have free expression having fought for decades to have that right. My impression from the current domestic political landscape is that they have realized, correctly, that war with North Korea would wreak havoc and destruction on their lives, and that only unscrupulous assholes (namely Trump) would see any benefit from sacrificing South Korean lives in the name of a war where every plausible outcome would be substantially worse than the current status quo. For these reasons, and others already discussed, I do not believe they would have any kind of patience for a new Korean War, barring ridiculous hypotheticals like North Korean soldiers crossing the Demilitarized Zone. Maybe my previous posts haven't made this clear. Nationalism is a destructive, monstrous ideology and I am glad that the South Koreans don't have it. That you think my appraisal of their disliking the prospect of the abomination of war makes them "soft" is, quite frankly, disgusting. That is fascist language, and you should be ashamed of yourself for using it. At least the guy who posted before you had the sense to phrase it as a joke. Baronjutter posted:Any defensive war would be fairly short. South Korea not having the stomach for a long term invasion and occupation of the north is believable, but just giving up defending against an invasion?? It wouldn't even be their call to make, the US would be instantly and heavily involved and the war would be over when the US said it is. As I have mentioned repeatedly, an invasion by North Korea is unlikely. It would go against their official policy and nothing in state propaganda recently has even vaguely hinted that this is something they're considering- in stark contrast to Trump's tweets, which all but explicitly state that they're now considering invasion. The bolded is what I'm talking about in terms of South Koreans not being willing to go to war or having the nationalist will for it. These people came out in the millions just to force a corrupt president out of office a few months earlier than she was going to leave anyway. Do you seriously think they're just going to sit around and twiddle their thumbs at home while a foreign power forces them to go war against fellow Koreans against their will?
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Oct 25, 2017 02:28
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 These are from the anniversary rally a couple days ago at Gwanghwamun Square to commemorate the rallies which forced Park Geun-hye from office.  This prominent display is a list of all foreign American military actions. They're a bit hard to see, what with being gray text in the background, but they were all translated into Korean. Upper left corner for huge, although the last image is better if you want to try to actually read the text.  Half an hour before the official start time. I didn't stick around because I was busy. So not human wave style crowds like we saw last year, but still a pretty big deal.  My point in showing all these is to demonstrate that explicit anti-American sentiment is now common enough in South Korea that such imagery can now be seen publicly. A couple of years ago this would have been unthinkable- not even the candelight rallies this event was commemorating ever went anywhere near this far. What's more, Weeks before the rally took place I found a random Trump = Hitler flyer on the street.  These displays appear to have been organized by the People's Democracy Party. They're new- I'd never heard of them before. They formed after the last election, so they have no seats. Considering how the next legislative elections are in three years, it looks like they'll be competing with the Justice Party for the far left section of the local vote, and are concerning themselves with activism at the moment.  Trump = Hitler wasn't the only issue covered. A lot of "arrest Lee Myung-bak" banners were floating around. But given Gwanghwamun's location right next to the American Embassy, it's pretty clear a lot of this was sending a clear message that a significant portion of the South Korean population are fed up with Trump's bullshit. My main concern is that US Embassy personnel did not get the message, because they are idiots who do not look out their own window or talk to anyone who is not a rich reactionary rear end in a top hat. Unfortunately this is a more likely circumstance than you would think. edit: bonus image-  It's not much- just a normal public manner with the same "Trump bad" message you see everywhere else. But yeah, that's the main problem for US Korean policy right now. Obama had a good enough public image that nobody paid attention to his poo poo North Korea policy. Having been given a two year primer on how uniquely terrible Trump is, South Korean leftists are much, much less shy about vocalizing their disapproval of American actions on the Korean peninsula using him as a lightning rod anywhere they can get the message out. Because what are we going to do? Suggest that Trump isn't an existential threat against the human race when our own news media say that he is every single day? Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 08:57
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What anti-North Korean human rights abuse protests have you been going to? I've never seen one of those that was any larger than the Sewol display that has been at Gwanghwamun literally every day for the last three years. As far as the commonality of anti-American imagery goes, I disagree. Yes, it has always been a thing, but it has always been relegated to whatever specific incident was being protested at the time. I've never seen a large display suggesting the whole of American foreign policy is an inherently imperialist project before, and certainly not in such a public setting. And the idea that such thought hasn't been hidden for "quite a long time now" is just plain ridiculous. Park Geun-hye banned a political party outright. The reason why the kicking out Park protests were such a big deal is because before it happened no one was sure protests on that scale could be managed again. Lee Myung-bak and Parlk Geun-hye were notorious for using the police to bully protesters. It was big factor in why the giant protests happened in the first place. edit: come to think of it I can't remember ever seeing any anti-North Korean protests here for years, at least. I've seen more Falun Gong protests since I've been here than anything about North Korean atrocities. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Oct 31, 2017 |
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Oct 31, 2017 03:20
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The Obama era policies you're implicitly coding as "sensible" are the exact same policies that led to the current standoff. The policies you're suggesting Hilary would have spearheaded are not any functionally different than the ones Trump is trying and failing to spearhead right now. The only meaningful difference between the two is that you seem to think Hilary would have some sort of respectability advantage over Trump that would allow her to pursue them farther. The problem with that is, the only reason why the Chinese have even gone as far as they did this time was because they thought they could use Trump's clean slate to push their own agenda, and now that this isn't happening, they've simply gone back into their normal "who gives a gently caress" posture. Clinton was all but explicitly running on being Obama's third term. Why would they treat her any different than they did Obama? Besides that North Korea doesn't consider our power transitions to be as meaningful as we do. From their perspective, the exact same series of events play out regardless of whether the Republicans or the Democrats are running the show. I do believe their plans were influenced by 2016, not in the sense that they cared who won the 2016 election or when exactly Park Geun-hye was leaving office, but in the sense that both events exposed awful fractures in the United States and South Korean governments that left them with major legitimacy issues. I don't know where the posters in this thread got the weird idea that protest doesn't matter or that it can be shut down with a snap of a finger by just pushing out kitschcy propaganda posters, but it doesn't work like that. Public leftist protest is at a high ebb in South Korea, and public attitude on Korean peninsula issues in the United States is so ambivalent that even the comments sections of conservative websites are filled with people wondering what exactly our stake is in the Korean peninsula and why we shouldn't just leave. These are major systemic issues that have been building up for over a decade that are not in any meaningfully way abated by the replacement of one unpopular political figure who makes dumb tweets with another one who does not. And good grief, if starving the country to death during the actual long march didn't work, what in the world makes you think it's going to work now without a natural famine and with the North Korean food system better set up to deal with harvest shortfalls? fake edit: your continuing use of fascist language to discuss not just South Korean political leadership but also our own is seriously starting to creep me out by the way
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Nov 1, 2017 08:00
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Kthulhu5000 posted:And respectability matters. It matters a lot, I think, in international politics. Because the world has been trained through decades of US power swaggering, military action, and political meddling to consider the US response and reaction to what might happen if they pursue a certain course of action. Our reliable predictability for most geopolitical matters is important; consider all that talk about global banking systems being coded to assume that the United States will always make debt payments, and no one being quite sure how they'll handle a missed payment across the board. Again, you are making the assumption that Trump's stupid tweets represent a significant break from existing American policy. They don't. So far everything he has done has been completely in line with what we've already been doing. He's just moved on from implicit threats to explicit threats. I've seen no evidence that anyone in the region considers this new distinction to be meaningful. Even Moon Jae-in, the one ally we would most likely expect to see react differently in such circumstances, continues to parrot the same America = Allies line that every South Korean leader elected or not has done since the Korean War. quote:And I say "badly miscalculated", because North Korea may have thought that Trump was ultimately rational (if a bit wimpy-seeming and politically naive, which they could use to their advantage) and would have the US come to the negotiating table in good faith to make a deal to settle whatever grievance North Korea had. North Korea gets some concessions (likely a lifting of sanctions), Trump looks presidential and wins, all would be well. If you think North Korea is losing the propaganda war right now, I honestly don't know what to tell you. As far as I can tell the situation is going exactly the way they want. You yourself admit that war is fantastically unlikely at this juncture. quote:Well, great - what are the terms of the US withdrawal from the Korean peninsula going to be, and when's the deadline for it to be complete? Since it sure sounds like it's right around the corner? What will the US' defense commitment be between its enacting and deadline? Should North Korea be brought into the loop on all this? Now who's the one demanding a five hundred page treatise? All right all right, not you, I just couldn't resist pointing out the irony. No, nobody has a plan. That's because no one needs one right now because no one believes Trump is going to through with his threats. That will change rapidly if extreme hypotheticals like what have been discussed in this thread come to pass. quote:Deprivation and hardship happening again in living memory for many North Koreans? A resource crisis exacerbating existing political tensions and factionalism in North Korea, as fuel supplies are used up and agricultural productivity suffers? Deaths from cold, sickness, injury, childbirth and the like because there's no heating oil and no medicine, taking a psychological toll on survivors? North Koreans being more worldly and cynical about the North Korean government today than in the past? Suffering is hard-baked into Korean culture. Even South Koreans have a concept of Han. The idea that life sucks and that they are going to forever be bullied by stronger neighbors or even incompetent governments is a strong one. All the same, Korea has not broken as a concept under much harsher invasion conditions in antiquity, let alone living memory, and I remain extremely skeptical that the North Koreans are going to break down and lose morale any day now when they've already made it this far. quote:Fascist? Really? Seriously? Because it's strange that no one else but yourself appears to be seeing that or commenting on it in my posts in this here thread. So maybe it's just you with the problem here, and I really don't appreciate you pinning a disgusting label like that onto me so casually. Dude, your post made explicit reference to how Hilary was a "strong" leader, who other leaders would have taken seriously, unlike that fake little weakling Trump. That's Mussolini 101. The entire Putin cult of personality, which has even infected gullible conservatives in this country, Trump the most prominent among them, relies on the same premise to suggest that Putin was winning the new Cold War against Obama. I'm not sure I'm more surprised to see a professed Sanders supporter buying into that bullshit, or that you were using it, of all things, to suggest that Hilary would have been a better president than Trump foreign policy wise.
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Nov 1, 2017 11:14
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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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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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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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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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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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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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maskenfreiheit posted:Wapo has a good longread out: It's weird reading articles like this where half the stuff they're talking about is also emblematic of lower class economic issues in the United States, South Korea, or most of the developed world really, but the tone of the article acts like these are completely alien concepts that are unheard of outside of the dystopian North Korean nightmare. Even when Western journalists can get their heads out of their asses long enough to do some actual reporting it's painfully obvious that they come from totally different backgrounds than the rest of us. I mean, hell, "no one expects the government to provide things anymore"? This country has an entire political movement slavishly devoted to the idea that the government should never provide anything, to anyone, under any circumstances, and they currently control the government. How in the world is that supposed to be any kind of super slam against the North Korean regime? If the people telling these stories were from Africa, we'd have horrible thinkpieces praising their entrepreneurial spirit. Hookworm chat is more of the same thing. Legitimately bizarre that we're way more likely to hear about North Korea's parasite problems than our own, when the latter is obviously a lot more relevant to our daily lives. But there's also one of my favorite ironies- anyone voicing negative opinions of the Kim regime in any context is sent off to jail, yet at the same time "everybody knew that Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un were both liars". Simultaneously the North Korean state is so all-powerful as to render free thought impossible yet any actual North Korean person anyone can find has no trouble expressing ambivalent opinions about the Kims. Through a constant shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Read any North Korean article with that thought in mind and all of a sudden they make a lot more sense rhetorically.
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Nov 18, 2017 05:42
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TsarZiedonis posted:Defectors from any regime exaggerating their stories is a well studied and common psychological phenomenon. That doesn't mean their stories aren't all rooted in fact, and especially doesn't mean they should all be smugly dismissed as charlatans. Yeah, it's this. To be clear, I think most of the stories mentioned in the Washington Post story are true. The main issue I have with them is that the author is presenting them in such a way as to imply that North Korean people are suffering uniquely evil problems. If you were to ask, say, typical Mexican or Indian immigrants about why they left their country they'd tell you very similar stories with a very similar slant if they thought they would be paid more for talking poo poo about their governments. More than their being lies, though, the main issue with these stories is that they're very unpersuasive to people suffering similar problems. The main source of anti--North Korean propaganda in South Korea right now takes the form of variety shows tih large panels of defectors. While there's an obvious slant at work that's sending the message that the North Korean is evil and should be thrown in thye dust-bin of history, all the stuff the defectors talk about is just perfectly relatable stores about lacking money or dealing with official corruption or just generic Korean culture problems like arguing over which relatives should be prioritized for getting oranges for presents. It's one reason why any sentiment toward war is met with such hostility right now. If your main face for North Korea is not an evil government stooge, but a normal friendly housewife who could be your neighbor, why in the world would you want to declare war against them?
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Nov 19, 2017 04:24
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Difference is, if I want other coverage of goings on in Mexico, I can read local media, or foreign correspondents of international media, and get a different slant. The North Korean government makes this impossible, so state propaganda and defectors is all we've got. There are some foreigners who are able to get stories in and out of North Korea. The Propaganda Game (available on Netflix) is probably the single most accurate documentary about what North Korea is like to date, but most people assume that simply because the regime cooperated in its creation it must inherently be propaganda of the regime. On the flip side, Under the Sun, because it was made explicitly while deceiving the North Korean regime, is instantly assumed to be credible simply for that reason alone, when it's painfully obvious to anyone with the slightest amount of television production experience that the crew for that documentary was being manipulative as hell in the way they were presenting behind the scenes footage and, intentionally or not, were probably incorrectly describing the film-within-a-film as being a documentary when it was actually an educational film. Honestly, considering how often people try to pull one over on the North Korean government for the sake of getting an expose, I don't blame them for being paranoid. Although that's really a chicken-or-egg question about what caused what there.
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Nov 19, 2017 04:55
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I don't know that this is the most practical environment to do that, considering that lately most independent media outlets are regularly accused of being Russian stooges for printing anything the Washington Post disagrees with. The North Korean regime is also unlikely to be convinced of the efficacy of such actions considering that allowing foreign access didn't do Saddam or Gaddhafi any favors.
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Nov 19, 2017 05:04
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I don't dispute that and I find it legitimately weird that everyone assumes I am when all of my posts literally state "I think what they're saying is mostly true but there's an obvious slant at work here in the presentation when you apply any kind of lateral thinking to the situation". Again, every horrible story we ever hear about North Korea could be 100% true, but it still wouldn't be relevant to our foreign policy which officially doesn't even treat the human rights abuses as a relevant bargaining chip and would, if the hawks got there way, probably result in even worse conditions somehow since they don't actually care about the human rights abuses either, they're just mad that the guys in charge of these specific human rights abuse aren't on Team America.
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Nov 19, 2017 09:21
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Whether sanctions can be ethically justified and whether they're actually useful to the situation at hand are completely different questions. Look at Venezuela. This was a country primed to hate its current leadership in the context of an actual functioning democratic system- and the incumbent government managed to win re-election handily on account of the fact that sanctions were a massively unpopular issue, to the point that people were willing to vote against the pro-sanctions party solely as a "gently caress you" to the United States for trying to use the ongoing economic crisis to install a government friendly to American interests. I've no doubt that the typical North Korean citizen views our use of sanctions as a cudgel in the exact same way, to the point that even people critical of the North Korean government are more likely to side with them rather than the rear end in a top hat foreigners.
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Nov 19, 2017 10:26
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Has any evidence ever actually been released proving North Korea was behind that? Because all I've ever heard is that WannaCry and the SonyHacks (along with other hacks) were probably by the same group of hackers, since they share the same signatures. But no clear evidence was ever released that North Korea was behind the SonyHacks either, and we're long past the point where national security is a plausible excuse for intelligence agencies to keep holding their cards so close to the vest. Even ignoring the extent to which intelligence services have lied to us in the past, North Korea is such an obviously good target for hypernormalisation that's really the first thought that should pop into our minds whenever they're accused of something this exotic. Hypothetically they might be able to pull it off, but there's probably a dozen independent hacker groups in China alone that would be better qualified, more obvious suspects.
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Nov 21, 2017 02:07
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