North Korea goes full retard

I think China would've freaked out if it happened earlier, as it is now they seem to be distancing themselves quite a bit.

MsBehavn_sl said:

Stupid question I'm sure; why haven't we just... attacked them?

I would suggest nuclear warfare but I'm well aware many of the citizens are innocent in all of this. So... just attack them, it shouldn't be that hard to just mobilize and destroy their leadership and leave - letting South Korea take them over.

Again, stupid question I'm sure. :/

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I doubt South Korea has the resources to take over NK via an occupation after an attack by the US even if the populace wasn't hostile.

MsBehavn_sl said:

Stupid question I'm sure; why haven't we just... attacked them?

I would suggest nuclear warfare but I'm well aware many of the citizens are innocent in all of this. So... just attack them, it shouldn't be that hard to just mobilize and destroy their leadership and leave - letting South Korea take them over.

Again, stupid question I'm sure. :/

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yeah, its kindof been over. but there are basically 3 reasons. Give or take the order of importance over the years.

1. China would declare war. This used to be #1. But currently, China is sick of their shit now too. China STILL doesn't want US having control over NK. so some kindof deal would need to be made to hand NK over to a third party or something, or even hand it over to China itself.
2. Court of world opinion. Sovereign nation and all. We really can't just attack and break a cease fire because we don't like them. Even with most of this posturing. NK needs to be a believable threat to justify invasion. They were not credible in the past. The more time we give them however. the more it becomes credible. hence now, where the talks have really started getting people talking.
3. Cost. we can't afford to prop up another puppet country. NK is such a shithole, its giant black hole of a money pit.

a 4th, was we were busy with other wars in the past too. But at the same time, public opinion etc. We KNOW something needs to be done with NK. but after Iraq/Afghanistan, no one wants to do that again. we just got out of there. As many will note, all that time and money wasted in Iraq, SHOULD have been targeted at NK in the first place.

Screamfeeder_sl said:

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.

And no, that was not meant to be a sarcastic response.

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You of all people KNOW I'm blonde so that response solicits only one response; you're a dick. <3

Screamfeeder_sl said:

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.

And no, that was not meant to be a sarcastic response.

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Do they Speak English in What?

hodj_sl said:

Self determination can't exist when your nation no longer exists, and the Korean nation no longer existed for all intents and purposes it was part and parcel of the Japanese Imperialist cult, subsumed to it, and controlled by it. There was no one to lead, except revolutionary governments, of which there were two, one Communist and the other Capitalist. Both were backed by larger powers. A stalemate was the result. There is no one to self determine themselves in that situation, because you have ongoing conflict. If the US had just said "Meh, let the South go to the North" then today, all you would have, is the entire peninsula in the state North Korea is in.

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If we had had the north and south get together and vote on what sort of society they were going to have (without an implict U.S. threat to cripple them if they didn't choose the way we wanted) that would have been self-determination for a single country. Moreover, if the US had just said "Meh, let the South go to the North" then today Korea would be in a much better state than North Korea (of this universe) is in. North Korea wouldn't be the way it is if the U.S. hadn't deliberately fucked it.

hodj_sl said:

Second statement: You're arguing a point that I did not and was not making. It was not in US or Soviet interests to spend their economic strength during the Cold War to build nations which were friendly into competing economic and governmental systems. The Soviets did not go around making "capitalist" states, and the "capitalist" states weren't going to go around making "communist states".

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I don't know what you're talking about. I'm saying I wouldn't have given a shit if Korea had fallen under Soviet control. That's a WAY better scenario than what actually happened.

hodj_sl said:

Its the justification of a real world fact that governments take actions which they perceive to be in their best interests at any particular moment.

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That's not a justification. That's not what justification means.

hodj_sl said:

To pretend that they can do anything but, is naivety of the highest order. States exist to promote their points of view, their interests. That's why they are states to begin with. That's all they exist to do. To care for their interests.

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This is demonstrably false. It's true that the preponderance of history isn't one of governments subverting their own interests in the name of benevolence, but to suggest that they CAN'T do so (or that they never have) is just flat out fucking wrong. Since they clearly have the ability to do so, that means they also have moral obligation to do so.

hodj_sl said:

Not to do "right" or "wrong" which are wholly defined by the individual's perception

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The subjective nature of moral aesthetics doesn't make morals any less real (or more deserving of scare quotes). That dog-shit tastes bad is subjective inexactlythe same sense.

hodj_sl said:

and which states redefine solely based on their interests on a daily basis anyway. In the mind of the State, it is always doing "good" when it is working in its own interests.

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You're anthropomorphizing "the State" in a way that's completely nonsensical. The State is made of people and like any other group of people can be held accountable for the immoral decisions they make.

hodj_sl said:

So there is no moral argument to make here, because morality in this situation is defined by the powers involved in the conflict. To the Soviets, they were the good guys and the US the bad guys, to the US, they were the good guys and the Soviets were the bad guys, to all the little people around the world, there are no good guys. Never has been. Never will be.

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Hey can I borrow your crystal ball sometime?

hodj_sl said:

How does it prove your point? What point do you have? That the US should be held responsible for not spending precious resources to build up hostile nations during a global conflict? Nonsensical, and the Soviets didn't do it either. Its not our job to build up enemies.

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We made them enemies. They didn't have to be enemies. We were hostile to them. My point is that they never had a real choice in what sort of economy they were going to have because if they didn't choose right, we were going to fuck them. It proves my point because that's exactly what happened. It has nothing to do with "spending precious resources." We've spent precious resources punishing them for not choosing a subservient role to us.

hodj_sl said:

It may be wise in some cases, like when those nations come to you and make concessions which are actually reasonable, like China did in opening up its economy to growth.

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Why the fuck should anyone have to make concessions to us about how they're going to run their own fucking economy? If the answer is just "because we can punish them economically if they don't" THAT IS NOT A FUCKING JUSTIFICATION. THAT IS HOW A FUCKING SOCIOPATH THINKS.

hodj_sl said:

North Korea has not done that.

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NOR SHOULD THEY HAVE TO.

hodj_sl said:

The most they've done is promise to stop building nukes, then keep building them anyway, and then when caught, threatened to launch those nukes at their neighbors. The United Nations voted to sanction them UNANIMOUSLY over this latest nuclear test. Meaning China, the Russians, everyone is on board because everyone knows the North Koreas are being obstinant and just confrontational enough to keep things interesting, because that's the way the military government stays in power over there.

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Everyone is on board because we've crushed everyone until they've fallen into line with our economic order. That's it.

hodj_sl said:

I don't have a definition of communism. Because there is no singular valid definition of communism. Which type of communism? Marxism? Bakuninism? Leninism? Trotskyism? Stalinism? Maoism? Juche? What about Pol Pot's agrarian communism? What about the communism that exists at a local level in tribal societies? Or the Anarcho Syndicalism in Spain before they were massacred by Franco's forces? Or the Communism of the Paris Commune during the French Revolution? Which one? I know which one I prefer (hint: the one that actually worked for two hundred thousand years minus the 12,000 years since the advent of agriculture), but there is no singular definition of communism which could be applied equally across the board. I'm merely using the terminology as it is commonly understood to define East and West polarities as they existed during the Cold War. I don't have a problem with communism or employing communist thought in finding ways to run a society, to make things more equitable. If it weren't for critical theory, which is heavily predicated on Marxist thought and post Marxist thinking, archaeology and anthropology and sociology would be decades behind where they are today. I'm not anti communist so please don't strawman my statements into one because it serves your rhetorical desires.

All that said, however, to argue Mao was not a "communist" because he wasn't "your kind of communist" is a no true scotsman fallacy, and just wrong, historically and factually. Mao was a Communist. His entire ideology was based in Communism. Everything he did, from the start through the Cultural Revolution, was predicated on Marxist and Communist thoughts and ideas as they existed in that realm of ideology at the time. Mao was one of the most prolific writers of Communist theory. His entire book on guerrilla warfare is predicated on Communist ideology. Its absurd denialism to say Mao was not a communist, or that the Chinese government "weren't really communist" because he wasn't "your kind of communist" which is what you're doing when you claim your special definition of communism is the only valid one. The problem is you've got a mythical notion that theory and reality are in harmony, and they are not. Communist theory allows one a very specific and very useful world view, when one is looking at concepts of power relationships, social status, etc. but as with anything good, taken too far it can go off the rails, as it has when implemented time and time again. All ideologies are, fundamentally, burgeoned by this reality, it is not unique to Communism or Marxist based thought, unlike what some conservatives and what have you may assert to the contrary.

Let me ask you something: Was Lysenkoism a communist idea? Or a capitalist one? Do you know what Lysenkoism was? Do you not realize that Lysenkoism is a really good argument that Communist theory can lead to really bad results, just like fanatical adherence to a free market ideology can and do? Purism is unreality, and impossibiliity, fanaticism draped in near religious devotion to theory versus practice. Robert Heinlein I think said it best when he said "One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority."

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It's not my claim that Mao (or most of the ideologies you've listed as "communist") were merely "not my kind of communism." They were anti-socialist in character. They were movesawayfrom communism (in spite of labeling). Socialism is, at its core, about putting capital in hands of workers (really in the hands of all sort of users of capital, but workers are the most direct and obvious group to point out). It is a fundamentally anti-authoritarian philosophy. Any sort of "communism" which operates by giving control of capital to some other group is not "communist" AT ALL in any rational sense. That's not revisionism. In fact, when you look at the history of the Soviet Union, this is one of the oldest arguments made against it (well predating the rise Lenin or Stalin). If you keep looking at that history, you'll notice a long war waged against the left by the Soviet government. I mean, it's not an accident that labor unions were fucking violently crushed. But why should that be the case for an actually communist society? Who would a labor union even negotiate with under not-total-bullshit-communism? Themselves?!? But they did have to be crushed because control over capital wasmorecentralized and more out of the hands of workers than fucking ever. I mean there's this HUGE backdrop of internal left-wing uprisings against the Soviet Union. You have these little rebellions popping up all over the place with people demanding not some kind of capitalist society but instead over and over the demands reiterate that they want workers to control the capital they use without instituting wage-labor and the fucking Soviets still rolled over them in tanks. And it's no different in Maoist China or any other authoritarian "communist" society you can point to. They all, 100%, suffer from this problem of being the kind of "socialists" who can't allow workers to exercise real control over the means of work.

hodj_sl said:

Really, RAPE their labor pool?

Which economy is having their labor pool raped?

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China, with the worst fucking pollution on earth and where they put out nets because they're not even allowed to kill themselves?

hodj_sl said:

Why should they (North Korea) do it (get with the times and join the rest of us in the globalized economy)? So they can stop being in a situation where the entire world hates them and fears their unstable and inconsistent choices and actions, and so they can stop being forced to use starvation as a population control mechanism and creating the closest thing to hell on Earth imagineable. It was not our responsibility, nor in our interests, to throw money hand over fist at nations which had declared us mortal enemies during the Cold War.

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You understand that we didn't just turn up our noses at them and decide not to give them aid, right? We've been actively blocking them from developing (so long as they persist in not opening themselves up to US exploitation).

hodj_sl said:

Especially when, since the end of the Cold War, we HAVE thrown money, food, and other aid at them hand over fist for two decades, and in the end they've only gotten more aggressive, more wanton, and more malicious.

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Have the sanctions ended?

hodj_sl said:

You're blaming it on the US, but its really the Soviet's and the Juche leadership's fault, who were fighting a losing battle and dug in their heels for decades

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They shouldn't have had to fight anything. That they had to do so at all was absolutely our fault.

hodj_sl said:

Deng Xiaoping, upon taking power after Mao's death, quoted Mao saying "Shi shi qiu shi" ( ????) "The time has come to seek truth from facts" What he meant by that was that China could no longer afford to be ideological in its economic relations. This is the example North Korea should be following, if they desire similar prosperity as Japan, China and South Korea have. But that would undermine the credibility of the military run government they have, and by undermine I mean completely destroy, because it would call into question the entire purpose of their existence, because they have existed solely to "oppose the evil American imperialists" for decades now.

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What would really call that purpose into question would be to cease being evil imperialists.

Holy shit... I am so not reading that.

khalid_sl said:

Holy shit... I am so not reading that.

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I'll live.

BrutulTM_sl said:

Good lord dude, I had to spin my scroll wheel 9 times to get past that post.

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Sorry. That was a response to all one post.

Tuco_sl said:

The worst part is he has a couple useful points in their but it's mired in a shit-show of pedantic and useless arguments.

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What's the weather like in the peanut gallery?

Also, the word you're looking for is "there."

Mikhail, I did a little wiki-fu and I failed to see what the US did to turn North Korea into what it has become (other than opting for elections in the south after WWII instead of turning toward the korean government in exile that was deemed too communist for their taste). It's also a little unclear what North Korea did to turn into an economic disaster considering it was about on par with South Korea up until the '70s (a mix of the 'military first' doctrine and poor central planning?).

Szlia_sl said:

Mikhail, I did a little wiki-fu and I failed to see what the US did to turn North Korea into what it has become (other than opting for elections in the south after WWII instead of turning toward the korean government in exile that was deemed too communist for their taste). It's also a little unclear what North Korea did to turn into an economic disaster considering it was about on par with South Korea up until the '70s (a mix of the 'military first' doctrine and poor central planning?).

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Heh. So this goes back to my first post on like the second page:

Mikhail Bakunin_sl said:

I think the US stance towards Korea (which was basically that they didn't have a right to self-determination) starting even prior to 1950 ensured no other possibilities for their political system. It completely validated the right-wing hardliners and lent legitimacy to the political philosophy of Juche. They were never going to be allowed to reunite with the ability to even possibly choose of an economic system that didn't suit our ideological and economic ends and we've punished the people of North Korea (most of whom hadnooptions under the military dictatorship) with grinding sanctions ever since. When you ask if North Korea is anything but completely responsible for the situation they're in, I don't even know what you mean (and not because of the odd syntax). North Korea isn't a monolith. Sanctions didn't hurt the right-wing rulers of North Korea. They hurt the people who were already the most vulnerable (as they always do).

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Screamfeeder_sl said:

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.

And no, that was not meant to be a sarcastic response.

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-Donal Rumsfeld, 2002

Cite your sources son.

MsBehavn_sl said:

You of all people KNOW I'm blonde so that response solicits only one response; you're a dick. <3

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Long story short, we have no idea what the fuck would happen if North Korea were invaded. For all we know they'd nuke Seoul, gas Tokyo, and kick off a major regional war. It could be catastrophic.