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Synthbuttrange posted:And the two women assassins may have been duped. I've been seeing this story go around a lot, but it's worth being skeptical about it for now. North Korea's agents have a history of lying their asses of when they get captured, sometimes for weeks.
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Feb 18, 2017 14:56
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Any reason they couldn't have produced it? If a Japanese cult can do it (although I may be misunderstanding that) I don't see why it'd be beyond the reach of a state like North Korea.
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Feb 24, 2017 05:04
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Wow, I had no idea the cult was that well supported. I do think you're underestimating North Korea on this though. This is exactly the kind of thing they would invest an inordinate amount of resources into, and they do have quality engineers and scientists, even though they're in short supply. I don't think it's worth assuming another state had a hand in all this unless something else comes out.
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Feb 24, 2017 05:34
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Yeah that's Jeolla. It's always been more left wing; as for why, well, the explanation I've heard is that it and Gyeongsang (the region in the southeast) were the two dominant regions in South Korea, but all but one of South Korea's presidents have come from the latter, and so massively developed Gyeongsang while leaving Jeolla and its people out to dry. The people of Jeolla, being upset about this, generally vote against the candidates from Gyeongsang. This explanation incidentally comes from my friends from Gyeongsang, so I'm sure there's no bias there.
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Mar 10, 2017 18:10
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Of course there's a plan, there's probably dozens of them for a whole range of possibilities, and provisions in place for some of the more likely ones. Even setting up money and stuff has been vaguely attempted although considering how much would be involved and just sitting there maybe not ever being needed, you can see how it hasn't gone far. Jazerus posted:yeah boy howdy i'm glad we're all in agreement that the reasonable thing to do is bury any sense of humanitarian responsibility and actively maintain a lovely little autocracy to save a hojillion dollars When it's that or potentially having hundreds of thousands/ millions of your people killed, it's not really so unreasonable. People in North Korea are living, even if it's not a life any of us would choose.
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Apr 14, 2017 03:04
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Uncle Jam posted:Created the same way? So East Germany was in a war with West Germany and pushed them back from the Polish border to what would be armistice lines? North and South Korea weren't created with the Korean War, huge sweeping internal changes had been going on in both since almost immediately after partition. The war just solidified things. I'm not really familiar with how the German partition went though, although I imagine considerably more thought was put into it than for the "two dudes and an evening with a tiny map" approach that Korea got. quote:Korea was the economic powerhouse of SE Asia for hundreds of years? loving hell, they were hardly ever an independent state completely detached from China. Germany hadn't really been Europe's power economy for especially long, and Korea was plenty independent, just under the constraints of the Sino-centric world order that'd defined East Asia for more than a thousand years. When Qing tried to redefine the relationship according to the western model (i.e. make Korea into an actual vassal) in the late 19th century, Joseon flipped a poo poo. Not that they could do much by that point. fishmech posted:Everyone involved when the first division was made in 1945, and the readjustment after the war in the early 50s, was under the impression that one side would quickly take over the whole thing This is definitely true for both Koreas at the time, but not really the US or Soviets, especially not when the partition was first introduced. It was supposed to be a temporary trusteeship and from my understanding, at the start the US had every expectation of it being just that, followed by peaceful reunification. Not that the US had much of any idea what they were doing in Korea at the time.
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Apr 15, 2017 04:28
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Kind of a dangerous thing to assume on though.
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Apr 15, 2017 04:51
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R. Guyovich posted:yes the us expected the trusteeship to presage peaceful unification which is why they refused to acknowledge the peninsula-wide provisional government and forced sham elections under military fiat I never said they had the best interests of the Koreans in mind, quite the contrary. FDR wanted trusteeship to last for 60 years. But the US mismanaging the division doesn't mean they had an expectation of it devolving into war. Also that's really not how the elections went down but considering your name and avatar, I don't really feel like arguing that point. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 15, 2017 05:25
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mcmagic posted:Am I wrong to not care at all that North Korea has nukes or ICBMs? I just don't see any way they are going to start a war with the US or South Korea or anyone else. They just want to ensure that their ruling class stays in power which seems to be what SK and China want to happen anyway... Why everyone is all of a sudden crazy about North Korea is really beyond me. Nothing has changed. It promotes proliferation (there's genuine talk in South Korea about pursuing their own nuclear program, especially if something changes wrt US support), there's the huge uncertainty about where those bombs will go with regime collapse (plus the possible danger, however unlikely, of NK selling some off), and most importantly it means if there is a resumption of hostilities (which, no matter the intentions of NK when they set up the program, is never not going to be a possibility) then any stray missile has the potential to kill millions. While I understand it not mattering to you (unless you're in SK or maybe Japan then I don't think there's much danger of being vaporized), it does matter.
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Apr 17, 2017 01:52
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mcmagic posted:If they have ICBM's it's just as likely to impact me personally as anyone else... It's not remotely as likely to impact you personally unless you're in South Korea or Japan. It opens up the possibility, that's all.
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Apr 17, 2017 01:54
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Trump starting poo poo is not remotely popular in South Korea, and people there are way more concerned about him than they are about Kim. But then Trump started his presidency forgetting South Korea even exists so I'm not sure that factors in for him. Apparently Xi Jinping also managed to convince Trump that Korea used to be part of China which is mildly hilarious. Let's learn what we should do in East Asia from China, what could go wrong.
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Apr 18, 2017 12:33
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Ron Darling posted:lol are you serious? I know that he "counseled" Trump about China and East Asia relations (and in 10 minutes Trump flipped from "China is bad and evil" to "China is cool and good") but is he really that much of a dumbass to believe it? quote:He then went into the history of China and Korea. Not North Korea, Korea. And you know, you’re talking about thousands of years …and many wars. And Korea actually used to be a part of China. And after listening for 10 minutes I realized that not — it’s not so easy. I dunno why I was surprised after everything else, but Trump really manages to outdo himself every time.
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Apr 18, 2017 17:04
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Whitlam posted:Granted, Korea is pretty small This isn't really to do with your post, but it comes up a lot so it's worth establishing- Korea isn't actually that small. It has more land area than Great Britain, with a population almost as high as Germany's. It's small compared to China, but then so are most countries.
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Apr 19, 2017 05:30
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Telsa Cola posted:Depending on where he lives it actually is tiny in comparison to his base of reference, California is almost twice the size of the entire peninsula for example. So is Great Britain, is the point, but we don't think of it as small, or of Germany as having a tiny population. I guess maybe some people in California or Texas have a different base of reference for those too (and yeah, those states dwarf most European countries in most metrics) but that's not generally the case in my experience.
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Apr 19, 2017 06:37
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icantfindaname posted:my impression is that Korea's got stamped out by the dictatorship and by its affiliation with the North, is that accurate? a lot of your impressions seem to be based on (rightly, in my opinion) fighting tooth and nail to defend Japan from general orientalist criticism that's so endemic to it on the internet, but then not caring to extend the same thoughts to Korea. The Korean left runs the whole gamut, from overt tankies to people in it by circumstance like you said. To an extent the dictatorship if anything reinforced it in some places like Gwangju, although it obviously had a pretty deleterious effect too.
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Apr 20, 2017 05:17
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war on the peninsula is going to hurt a hell of a lot more people than the status quo
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Apr 30, 2017 00:01
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Was it America, for partitioning the country in an ill thought out, arbitrary and unstable way, against the wishes of the entire population; the USSR, for going along with it; Japan, for annexing it in the first place? The whole bold faced war of aggression narrative we have towards the North Koreans for trying to reunify their nation after half a century of occupation is lacking a hell of a lot of context.
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May 3, 2017 03:12
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There are some dumb as hell attitudes in this thread, but the notion that the Korean War was started as naked aggression akin to Hitler rolling into Poland is also incredibly one dimensional.
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May 3, 2017 03:28
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fishmech posted:It was naked aggression though. It was a Kim Il Sung vanity project that he only barely got approval for from Stalin and Mao. It was planned for months in advance, although the North Koreans ended up forgoing several of the elements from prior plans. Kim Il Sung essentially grossly underestimated what a UN/US response would be, and so did Stalin in approving it. Bold faced opportunism sure, but naked aggression (although looking it up, I'm not sure there's a definition for what that actually is, so maybe this is all just semantics) implies no justification. There was definitely a justification. We look at Korea today as 2 separate countries with incompatible identities, but at the time, they'd been separate for just 5 years after more than 1000 years of unity. This wasn't some pet project for Kim Il-sung, reunification was seen as important to pretty much every Korean, from top officials all the way down to peasants, both in the north and south. Kim leveraging it to his political advantage in every way he could doesn't mean that's the reason the war happened. You kind of argued outside of my point though, so I guess I must have not explained it as clearly as I should have. When you're looking at stuff from the perspective of Koreans back at the onset of the war, you have to remember that the partition that was to their perspective imposed on them by a foreign power wasn't legitimate, the governments installed by a foreign power weren't legitimate. We see UN intervention as us stepping in to stop an aggressor attacking a sovereign nation; to them, it wasn't sovereign, it wasn't legitimate. Koreans were bewildered and furious when they learned about the partition, there were enormous protests and a huge amount of resentment towards the US that wouldn't abate until the war. Reunification was the only acceptable future and there was nothing aggressive about it. This is stuff we tackle all the time when talking about post-colonial partitions in places like Vietnam, but for some reason, maybe since the history is still happening today, it's hard to wrap our heads around with Korea. Obviously in hindsight the DPRK is poo poo awful and it's a great thing the UN intervention happened, and probably the partition too, since it meant at least part of Korea got spared from turning into a post-Soviet hell. At the time though, especially before the war and all the atrocities and cementing of power and so on therein, the attitudes and perception (among Koreans) was different. Grouchio posted:Also, how could've the Korean War been avoided? A more soviet-friendly president perhaps? The US leaving troops in the peninsula, outfitting the ROK army with anything, not explicitly leaving out the ROK on a list of nations the US said it would fight to protect. The attitudes that led to the war were inevitable among Koreans but the war its self didn't have to be. Alternatively, not partitioning the country in the first place. There really was no basis to it at all beyond great power politics. Koramei fucked around with this message at 06:14 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 06:11
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I never said it's okay, I just said it was justified, at least to the perspective of Koreans at the time. and leaving as in "leaving troops in", i.e. having them stay. all but a handful had already gone by the time it started
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May 3, 2017 06:31
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fishmech posted:Stop writing "Koreans" when you mean "Korean military leadership". Disdain for the partition went well beyond the military leadership; you're right that I'm painting the attitudes with an overly broad brush (obviously people had different perspectives), but the partition being unacceptable was an attitude that permeated every level of Korean society at the time- from the top of the governments and military, down to student movements- and they'd seen diplomatic channels repeatedly fail. Not everybody wanted war (and doubtless when it touched people personally, many changed their outlooks) but the vast majority considered the cause of reunification justified; everything I've read, and the handful of older Koreans I've been able to talk with about this corroborate it, so if you have some different accounts then I'll be very interested. It's not a stretch to say "Koreans" in this instance, and this is something I'm generally very conscious of, thank you.  quote:It was North Korea specifically, at the orders of Kim Il Sung. Because he was in a position to do it. If Rhee had been able to, you can bet he would have pushed for reunification at any cost too; in fact, he did, when the war developed to the point he could. Rhee with a single minded fanaticism, to the point he tried everything he could do to stop armistice talks and keep going after everyone else wanted out, but the South Korean establishment backed him for a while, and had been very belligerent even before the war. quote:There was nothing that required a war with Korea. It could have just limped along and eventually reached a point of peaceful reunification, likely once the Soviet Union collapsed or was about to do so. Dude, come on. I'm guessing you hold this belief fundamentally, because it explains why you keep ignoring my point. This makes sense to us now, with the benefit of knowledge on how devastating the war there was, and that the USSR would fall apart, and that America eventually developed an attitude where it's willing to go to some lengths to support self determination. With this all in mind, yeah, the war was dumb as hell, reunification carried too steep a cost. But that's all with the benefit of hindsight; to the perspective of most Koreans at the time, there was no reason to believe any of that, or that the partition would ever end. This was a country and people that had been united culturally and politically for more than a thousand years, who'd just endured decades of being a colonial subject, and just witnessed the most devastating war in history. "Limping along" with the vaguest of hopes of reunification is a kind of poo poo deal. You can't look at reunification in the 1950s with the attitudes of today. Incidentally, since it's apparently impossible to say there were multiple dimensions to the Korean War without being an apologist, I should probably clarify that I'm actually extremely glad of the UN intervention, and the DPRK can go gently caress off. Koramei fucked around with this message at 18:57 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 18:53
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fishmech posted:how Vietnam was originally supposed to be unified from the start after French withdrawal. This is probably where our disagreement is coming from (I do fundamentally agree with your "war is bad" point, by the way). Why should outside powers' intentions for a country's future carry more validity than the intentions of those within the country? A unified Vietnam is now legitimate because colonial powers decided on it, but because they also decided that Korea should be partitioned, there's no legitimacy to the notion it should be reunified? If the Korean war had been preceded by undeclared conflicts (beyond what there already was...), reunification would have been more "justified"? lol. fishmech posted:they surely didn't want it via themselves and their homes being plunged into war You'll find there's a common theme to these sentiments in most conflicts through history. As for Korean attitudes of the era, you realize it's not some mystery we can only surmise at right? There's plenty of writing from Koreans about it both before and after the war. Even in lyrical form if you're into that! Reunification being seen as a necessity was not remotely unique to Kim Il-sung.
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May 3, 2017 20:06
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Fishmech this "alternate history" is exactly the thing- you're still looking at it from the perspective of today rather than from Koreans at the time. Is a war only legitimate if it gets won? If the South hadn't survived at Busan, and ended up capitulating, would it have been a justifiable invasion? (I agree that capitulation there isn't as likely as it's often portrayed, but there's no reason people at the time knew that.) I get the impression you think I'm saying the war was a good thing, and that hasn't been my point at all. Just that, to the Koreans at the onset of it, it was preferable to partition, and to an extent an inevitability. That's not to say they were chomping at the bit to go to war (although some were, particularly among the military- and not just in the North), but people haven't historically shied away from war if they think the cause is just, which from everything I've read at the time, they did, both at the top and the bottom of society. If you've read something that contradicts that, that isn't just how you think Koreans at the time ought to have been feeling, I'd be very interested to read it. Main Paineframe posted:Why? How is the Korean War somehow a decisive factor propping up North Korea today? Because it created "extra bad feelings" between two utterly incompatible governments that completely loathed each other from the very beginning? It consolidated Kim Il-sung's power enormously, and provided propaganda fodder for years to come that have cemented feelings to the present day. Relations were strained at the time but there's no reason that had to be the case forever. I don't think peaceful reunification would have been likely either way, but fishmech's not wrong that the war flushed its chances down the toilet for good.
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May 3, 2017 20:45
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Warbadger posted:Also appreciate that, apparently, unified Korea should have definitely been under the government created from wholecloth by the USSR, led by Red Army troops and a ton of Imperial Japanese collaborators. I don't think anyone other than Mr. Soviet over there is actually arguing that Korea would have been better off under DPRK control or in the Soviet sphere, if that's what you decided to take out of this dumb argument. edit: in other, more relevant news, it hasn't gotten much mention here but the election in South Korea is coming up just within the next week, here's a blog post with an overview of the candidates. Although since that was written, Hong Joon-pyo has made a worrying amount of headway considering how seriously the conservatives hosed up, so it's not impossible he'll pull through. Political surveys are banned in South Korea in the week leading up to the election though so it's all a bit of a mystery. Koramei fucked around with this message at 04:21 on May 5, 2017 |
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May 5, 2017 04:07
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Samurai Sanders posted:Is 金 the only Chinese character that gives the family name "Kim" in Korean or are there more? Watch there be some really rare exception, but yeah, I think Kim is always 金. Korean last names come from the same sources originally with peasants eventually taking the names from local nobles and so on so there isn't the big variety in their Chinese characters and meaning like there is for Korean first names that get chosen more individually. There's subdivision within the last names though- something like two thirds or whatever of all Koreans are Kim, Lee or Park, but that's divided into various clans like Andong Kims and Gimhae Kims, Gyeongju Lees and Jinseong Lees, and so on for every last name based on whatever local region it was based out of like a thousand years ago or whatever. Generally that doesn't come up much today though, although historically it used to be forbidden to marry within your clan regardless of how distantly related you actually were. As for the romanization, it is 80% bogusness, but there is like 20% different dialects and so on going into it too. Lee (이) is pronounced Yi today but a hundred years ago it was pronounced (and maybe spelled, I forget) Rhee/Lee (리), so the romanization for that isn't as completely stupid as it looks on first appearance. Likewise Kim/Gim (김) is just a sound that's not totally analogous to either G or K, Park (박) should be more like Pak/Bak, but probably has the R so native English speakers give it a long A sound rather than making it sound like paek or pack, which sounds too close to Baek/Baik (백), another Korean surname. And so on. There's normally a logic to it. e: some of the pronunciation varies between North and South too; I think 이/Yi might still be 리/Rhee up there. I don't know much about that though.
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May 7, 2017 18:22
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https://twitter.com/annafifield/status/861907009716731904 lol Anyway yeah he won  first three (i.e. the important ones) candidates from left to right (in the table, not politically) are Moon Jae-in, Hong Joon-pyo and Ahn Cheol-soo. Moon is left wing, Hong conservative, and Ahn centrist. Moon Jae-in won everywhere except for the Gyeongsang provinces and the city of Daegu (all the red in the southeast), who went to Hong Joon-pyo. Gyeongsang's traditionally been conservative so that's not that surprising. Koramei fucked around with this message at 17:21 on May 9, 2017 |
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May 9, 2017 17:05
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The Japan thread has been practically dead for the past year, and this one's only kept limping along by whatever missiles North Korea launched that month. Asia discussion in SA just imploded over the past couple of years after that GBS thread drove half the posters away.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:21
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If the US just unilaterally launched a strike they'd draw condemnation from a lot more places than just RussiaGobbeldygook posted:"That GBS thread"? to be honest I forgot the name of whatever the current incarnation is, it used to be called china.jpg though e: i'm being a little melodramatic about it but it does feel like all the Asia threads have nosedived in quality compared to how they used to be Koramei fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 20:08
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uh, gonna go for "no" on that one
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Jun 6, 2017 20:12
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OXBALLS DOT COM posted:Didnt we drop more bombs in the north than in all of ww2 Not the whole thing, but more than the whole Pacific Theater. ~600 thousand tons on Korea is (even including the nukes) like three times as much as was dropped on Japan or around as much as was dropped on Germany by the Americans, which considering the size discrepancy is pretty staggering. The Vietnam War is where it gets ridiculous though, something like three times as much was dropped on Indochina as in the entirety of WW2. No lasting consequences there, no siree.
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Jun 9, 2017 17:34
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Bluedeanie posted:Dennis Rodman has landed in Pyongyang and within hours NK releases Otto Warmbier. The man is the key to world peace. drat, well, about that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...m=.34ac16da847f quote:Warmbier fell ill from botulism sometime after his March trial and fell into a coma after taking a sleeping pill. The Warmbiers said they were told their son has remained in a coma since then. He's been in a coma for more than a year. I didn't have much sympathy for him at the start but that's rough, I hope he'll be okay in the end.
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Jun 13, 2017 16:54
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They have another article here that goes into more detail about the medical stuff Long story short, yeah, the claim seems unlikely.
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Jun 14, 2017 04:59
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Religious reasons? Or just personal ones. Autopsies are a pretty disturbing thought to plenty of people. Although them wanting to cover up that his state could be the result of attempted suicide is possible I guess but there's no reason to assume something like that. Warbadger posted:I can't think of many crimes where it would be more impressive to falsely claim the guy stole a $5 poster off the wall than whatever he did. it's vastly different cultural values dude, it's not just a $5 poster to the north Koreans. I'm sure it's been entwined with bullshit but I don't really see a reason to doubt the whole trespassing/ stealing side of the story. Koramei fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Jun 23, 2017 |
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Jun 23, 2017 15:12
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There's a difference between a poster you buy at a shop and one that's already up. You can buy an American flag at any old gas station, that doesn't mean stealing one off a flag pole is functionally the same thing. Besides, the point is more that neither you nor me really knows the cultural significance a poster like that has; maybe it really is just junk to them too, or maybe (as indicated by them sentencing him to 15 years of hard labor because of this) it's very much not. We're not really in the position to know, but applying our own cultural understanding of the situation to something happening in North Korea is extremely silly.
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Jun 23, 2017 17:03
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I think you're making a pretty massive leap there But I also don't think this is worth arguing about really, especially from our positions of not really knowing poo poo all about it. Incidentally, I'm not saying they were right to incarcerate him for it, regardless of the cultural values.
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Jun 23, 2017 17:13
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Yeah, my hunch is some people lower down got carried away and the whole thing spiraling out into nonsense is because everyone else has been trying to do damage control and have no loving idea how.
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Jun 23, 2017 17:20
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It's kind of a heartless thing to say right after he got back but yeah, based on the nothing that we know, I agree. Everyone's leaping to waterboarding or something like that but an attempted suicide right after he found out about his verdict fits the timeline better and frankly makes more sense than the North Koreans torturing the guy practically to death after they'd already got everything they wanted out of him anyway.
Koramei fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Jun 24, 2017 |
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Jun 24, 2017 00:17
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It'd make sense, but can't they test for that? It seemed to be basically unanimous opinion that the botulism story was bullshit, but I didn't even see the length of his coma get questioned in the articles I read.Warbadger posted:Also kinda heartless to assume the dude attempted suicide Yeah, that's what I was saying was heartless. Also, since you seem to have come to this conclusion, I assure you I have no love for the North Korean regime, lol.
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Jun 24, 2017 01:59
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I'm not spilling any tears over the guy, particularly when there are hundreds/thousands of innocent people in North Korea's prisons that die every year that, unlike Otto, had no control over their situations whatsoever. But he definitely didn't deserve what happened to him.
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Jun 26, 2017 14:23
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Well, he definitely went to North Korea as a tourist and was attested to have gotten drunk there (although apparently that was also part of the point of the tour, which also seems incredibly stupid) by other tourists. Whether or not he broke North Korean law/ whether doing so warrants an impossibly hard sentence, he did definitely do something pretty dumb.
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Jun 28, 2017 00:06
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