GarbageShoot [he/him] @ GarbageShoot @hexbear.net

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3 yr. ago

I think you'd probably need to pay reparations for the many decades of time under sanction, and even then it would be foolish of them to accept (and indeed they probably wouldn't). Gaddafi showed them how the US treats its "allies" in the third world.

Also, if you think the US does anything outside of Europe* and the anglosphere** without mobsters, then you probably have US-paid mobsters to blame for the crack you're smoking

*Obviously it also sometimes does things inside Europe with mobsters, see it's longstanding support of a certain neo-nazi paramilitary

**I don't have specific knowledge on this one beyond gangs within the US, but surely, right? The NYPD is a mob and they've got an office in the UK, anyway

The DPRK is in an unusual and tenuous position, and there is very little that can be usefully gained from speculation that doesn't involve considering that. At the same time as trying to develop a [dictatorship of the proletariat/highly unusual set of political economic arrangements], they bear constant acts of sabotage from the South and the US that are at times extraordinarily depraved, have endured sanctions for decades, and suffered from regional poverty since long before the WPK took over, all the more so after the US bombed them back into the stone age.

Given this context, and probably also the Otto Warmbier incident, we can begin to understand why they would be vigilant -- some would say hypervigilant -- towards various security issues, and don't want some jackass tourist going rogue and causing an international incident. Since they never made a ton of money from tourism -- especially discounting Chinese tourism -- sacrificing some level of profitability to their tourism industry to keep tourists on a short leash and prevent incidents isn't so inexplicable.

Complete aside, what nationality is your tourist friend? I assume not American because -- due to US passport law -- it is very difficult for a US citizen to gain access to the DPRK since the Warmbier incident.

Of course the DPRK is strange, even its most ardent supporters would tell you so, but the fact of the matter is that what westerners think about the DPRK isn't "The DPRK is weird", it's "This is a completely backwards place with absurd laws and propaganda which considers human life worthless," right? "State propaganda says the Kims don't shit and Kim Il-Sung invented the hamburger. Kim Jong-Un had his uncle eaten alive by dogs for being rude to him. The rats eat the kids and the kids eat the rats." etc. My biggest point of emphasis is that every one of those stories, which have agglomerated together to create the hazy cultural consensus that I mentioned, is unambiguously false and you have very little left that you've ever actually seen about the DPRK if you subtract all of that.

Here are some things to look at if you like. Obviously I would not tell you to take anything uncritically and I have my own issues with things here and there. I'd be happy to discuss any of them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V4Hnl7J9H4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBqeC8ihsO8

And of course, you can actually look at statements that they put out:

http://kcna.kp/en/article/q/5a9ffe6e4d6704ac1838b14785365295.kcmsf

Or the fact that the Korea-watching industry is just completely shameless about putting out the most harebrained nonsense with very little pushback (including things that don't make it to the headlines), which really does not lend credibility to the idea of serious-minded criticism of the DPRK having any strong presence in anglophone media and therefore anglophone culture. On this point, because it is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation, it's really just a question of how many examples you want.

I've seen a tiny bit of reporting on the South discarding past deescalation agreements, but neoliberal press are generally silent on the belligerence of their favored children (see all the fucked up policies Ukraine has adopted that no one talks about).

the DPRK is planning on going the China route and properly using the productive forces that occupied Korea has to build socialism....does that sound correct?

It seemed like they were saying that this has historically been their position but that they believe it needs to be reconsidered on account of the stubborn belligerence of the South, which seeks to instead have only its own system in reunification.

I don't read enough from the DPRK to say if this is accurate to their past statements, but it seems like it would be since they have learned a great deal from China, already have an interest in things like Special Economic Zones, and generally hold that the principle hostility is not towards the South but the US (which implies to me that they would be willing to compromise with the South so long as the US is not allowed to hijack things).

I completely missed this comment, sorry.

Yeah, they are definitely restrictive with tourists, but that's not the same as how citizens live. Your story sounds more extreme than others I have seen (where the general consensus is more generically that the visit was "on rails"), but I'm not about to call your buddy a liar. Citizens, it probably won't surprise you to know, are not moved around in windowless vans (beyond the case of arrest, where I imagine they might be since that would be pretty normal for most countries).

"Post-Open Source"

Overly-teleological modernist framing has hopelessly fucked up tech discourse. Too much declaring things the future and hoping people will just believe you.

Start Again is a really cool mini-JRPG and I'm surprised it's one of the last ones left

I think you ask a valid question, though it's also worth asking if the people in charge just don't like grappling the the prevalence of users on other instances that they can't moderate, since they are emphatically anticommunist and lemmy, while way more liberal now than it once was, maintains a relatively strong contingent of communists from its past life.

Good riddance, Beehaw is terrible. It was maybe the single biggest exporter of concern-trolling about lemmy.ml and to my knowledge still entertains absurdly reactionary comms for no reason (though I haven't brushed up on my lore in a while). Go make your blue Raddle.

More constructively: Having your "Northern Star" be "intentionally vague" is not a good practice. Having clear rules is a much better way to avoid falling into "what did the mod who reviewed the report feel like doing at the time?" arbitration issues. If you want to serve disenfranchised communities well,* then have that be the foundation and clearly define what that means and why you are doing it.

*My experience with this was that Beehaw was more about first world radlibs patting themselves on the back, but I digress

Not the answer you are looking for, but I think the world is generally getting better. What is getting worse is life in the imperial core, which has been rotting for a long time now as western capitalists cannibalize their own states to keep profit growth up. There are dangers associated with this for the rest of the world, and other places where things are also definitely getting worse (western Ukraine, Argentina, etc.), but I think for most of the population, besides the mounting threat of the US starting World War II 2, things look okay.

Obviously true, but I initially read it as the shitpost title "Neither Mario Party in the US [etc]"

It's much easier for someone who is functionally just a centrist conservative to "reject" everything, tar them all with the same brush, and then do nothing but whatever self-soothing prepper crankery they like to do in their basement or on forums or whatever, without any attachment to a real political movement because all real alternatives are "just as bad". It's a very self-satisfied approach to things.

This is underselling it. At its peak, post-Soviet Ukraine was the surrogacy capitol of Europe, but now it's not "merely" women's wombs but the women themselves are for sale as Ukrainian women are being trafficked at easily one of the highest rates ever (though a lot of it is refugees who are outside of Ukraine). I don't know if it's higher or lower than Ukraine ca. 1993.

Neoliberal hegemony and shock therapy have caused more suffering than anticommunists can pretend the Soviets did.

You are probably right, I was really just trying to talk about how, as it currently stands, the people who use the term are basically just expressing either that they fell for a thought-terminating cliche or are expecting their audience to fall for it.

I think it's probably better to simply say that "authoritarian" is a buzzword, though your implied argument that all states work by exerting authority on (at least some portion of) their population is certainly true. Anyone who uses a term like "authoritarian" rather than even a marginally more-descriptive negative term like, idk, "bureaucratic" or "state capitalist" (which gets misused, but I digress) is immediately demonstrating themselves to have untrustworthy judgement on the topic

Our friend here is being irony-poisoned, I think

I think flat-earthers would contend that that's a very political lie

You do know that the question is phrased in reference to Nazi propaganda in general and a famous quote from Goebbels in particular, right?

It always weirded me out that people believed what the marketing implied. Like, it's a problem with the eye, no change in the color your eye is exposed to will somehow fix a problem that is within the eye. If those glasses were able to make you see blue or whatever, you wouldn't be color-blind!

It's what I was taught in American public school ~15 years ago