rant about North Korea


jts

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"North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-Il, is the most repressive prick on planet Earth."

There's no supermarkets in North Korea, no cell phones, no world wide web, no cable tv. no electricity at night, but every single home or village has an audio speaker that's hardwired to pre-set frequencies that starts broadcasting at 6am each morning telling the people how lucky they are, the gov't propaganda tells them their in paradise.

Every home in North Korea displays two pictures on the wall. Jong-Il and the other his father, Kim Il Sung whose still President even though he died 12 years ago. Inspectors visit the homes on a regular basis to make sure the portraits are well cared for.

The U.S.Commission on International Freedom reported in 2005: "There are no personal freedoms in North Korea." Any and all civil liberties are considered a threat to the regime.

Domestic opponents are murdered. Crimes in North Korea include slandering Kim Jong-Il or the government you go to the gulag, listening to foreign broadcasts is a crime, reading "subversive" material -- is a crime, even sitting on a newspaper that displays Kim's picture is a crime.

Failure to play by the rules means time in Jong-Il's hard-labor camps that hold more than 200,000 men, women and children. The North Korean Freedom Coalition estimates that 400,000 to 1 million North Korean political prisoners have died from starvation, torture, execution and some in gas chambers since the camps were set up in 1972.

Not only are real or imagined dissenters imprisoned, but so are their relatives, including the elderly and children under a guilt-by-association system. A single person's offense gets the entire family -- sometimes up to three generations sent to the gulag.

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"North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-Il, is the most repressive prick on planet Earth."

There's no supermarkets in North Korea, no cell phones, no world wide web, no cable tv. no electricity at night, but every single home or village has an audio speaker that's hardwired to pre-set frequencies that starts broadcasting at 6am each morning telling the people how lucky they are, the gov't propaganda tells them their in paradise.

Every home in North Korea displays two pictures on the wall. Jong-Il and the other his father, Kim Il Sung whose still President even though he died 12 years ago. Inspectors visit the homes on a regular basis to make sure the portraits are well cared for.

The U.S.Commission on International Freedom reported in 2005: "There are no personal freedoms in North Korea." Any and all civil liberties are considered a threat to the regime.

Domestic opponents are murdered. Crimes in North Korea include slandering Kim Jong-Il or the government you go to the gulag, listening to foreign broadcasts is a crime, reading "subversive" material -- is a crime, even sitting on a newspaper that displays Kim's picture is a crime.

Failure to play by the rules means time in Jong-Il's hard-labor camps that hold more than 200,000 men, women and children. The North Korean Freedom Coalition estimates that 400,000 to 1 million North Korean political prisoners have died from starvation, torture, execution and some in gas chambers since the camps were set up in 1972.

Not only are real or imagined dissenters imprisoned, but so are their relatives, including the elderly and children under a guilt-by-association system. A single person's offense gets the entire family -- sometimes up to three generations sent to the gulag.

The late Christopher Hitchins onces pointed out that N. Korea has one advantage over the Kingdom of Heaven: He said (and I quote) "At least you can fucking die, and leave it"

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The late Christopher Hitchins onces pointed out that N. Korea has one advantage over the Kingdom of Heaven: He said (and I quote) "At least you can fucking die, and leave it"

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  • 4 months later...

It truly is hell on earth. I saw an interview with one escaped North Korean girl who said she thought that Kim Jong Il could read her thoughts and that if she thought anything bad about him she would be punished so she never let herself think negatively about them. It's sick. She said even when she was in South Korea for a while she thought he could. She said it's amazing now that people ask her what she wants to do with her life, what is her opinion, how does she feel, and what she wants from life, she said she's alive for the first time. You see, she grasps the very essence of it. She's alive now. Life truly is impossible under communism.

You know what makes me sick on top of it. The United States sends aid to that vile country helping to prop it up. And that rice goes straight the million man army. It would collapse under the weight of its own evil if the west would stop helping it. It's disgusting. The west is the only reason it's been able to survive so long. You don't feed evil!

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Yup, NK is a socialism country. At least according to:

Constitution of North Korea, 2009 version

Skip to article 20. DPRK = Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Article 20. In the DPRK, the means of production are owned by the state and social cooperative organizations.

Article 21. The property of the state shall be the property of all the people. There shall be no limit to the property which the state can own. All the natural resources of the country, railways, air transportation, telecommunications and postal organs, as well as major factories, enterprises, ports, and banks, shall be owned solely by the state. The state shall protect and develop on a priority basis the property of the state, which plays a leading role in the economic development of the country.

Article 22. The property of social cooperative organizations shall be the collective property of the working people belonging to the organizations concerned. Such property as land, farm machinery, ships, small- and medium-sized factories, and enterprises may be owned by social cooperative organizations.

etc. etc. etc.

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Screen%20Shot%202013-06-20%20at%201.41.5

The red line is the paradise on Earth. It is scraping along the bottom. The black line is the same people under a different political system. It is going up up up. Maybe that's a bit of a hint.

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  • 3 years later...

I tried to listen to the Brook video, but I had to stop after about 12 minutes. He is so full of hatred--he projects nonstop hatred in large stretches of the video, he just turns me off. What's worse, a lot of his hatred (not all, but a lot) is directed at the wrong people and things. He hates our side unless it follows Rand.

Also, I know from other talks of his that his idea of collateral damage is to pronounce that it is the entire moral responsibility of the enemy and not worry about it anymore. Life is not his standard. Not fundamentally. Being able to say he's morally right is. I should qualify that. If it's his life, that works for him as a standard. But if it's your life, well, too bad... Don't expect much effort from him to save you once he feels he's right. :) 

This is a man who doesn't understand how to win at high-stakes negotiations. Our former presidents going back to Bush the senior didn't either for the most part, so that's not so remarkable. But all of them profited from the endless war for profit system. And Brook wants to talk about morality...

President Trump does know how to win at high-stakes deals. No stake is higher than nukes. And he doesn't make his money from war or death.

Instead of demanding that he lose, that we lose, our side should pipe down and let him get the job done. He knows what he's doing. They don't, they didn't and couldn't if they wanted to, which they don't. Now they want to tell him he can't, too. 

Whose side are they on, anyway?

Friggin' losers...

Anyway, I disagree with Brook, but I wish him well and hope he finds some serenity one day.

Michael

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1 hour ago, jts said:

Maybe Kim Jong Un's bad health and bad health habits will soon kill him. That would be easier than assassinating him.

 

Jerry,

I think it's the exact opposite. I think the biggest threat is the hardliners from his father's generation assassinating him and taking over. Then sending off the nukes...

They can't be pleased with him making peace overtures and agreeing to dismantle their deadly toys.

Michael

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20 hours ago, jts said:

Yaron Brook explains why Trump should not talk with Kim Jong Un.

I'm waiting for the episode about "Now that North Korea has made some steps to a peace with its armistice partner, South Korea, I revisit my Objectivist remarks of June."

In my mind, Brook's after-the-fact is kind of off-topic and a bit sad. If he'd said "Let's now be careful and Reagan-ish trust/verify like hardnosed Israelis at the airport about the steps and stages that are to be expected if we can indeed "trust" Kim in his pre-Deng moments," then I would listen to him on this subject.  Saying Trump shouldna shouldna shouldna talked is fine, and that claim could be supported by a hundred man-hours of testimony from North Korean defectors, but. But they did talk, Yaron. They will talk. But you are in a wheelchair, Blanche, you are. So let's move on to expectations, nu?

Here's someone who doesn't run or head an institute or suck the lifeblood of humanity through a Patreon tube -- the relaxed and charming Scott Adams.  On a head-to-head, point-by-point, which smart angles on the North Korea topic do the gentlemen share, and where do they wildly diverge?

[I've watched a lot of "Inside DPRK" videos and read a lot of material that shines a light on what happens inside the gruesome "system" that was built under dad and grandpa and brought to nuclear orgasm by the young Un.  If the propaganda system in the North is as efficient as say, 20%, and that percent is spread out in the governance structure, it will form an inside-opposition to liberalizing human rights to any degree. Why? Because the zomblies don't have real-world information access,  and because information is the most precious commodity in North Korea beyond food and water to people who struggle against the system (the 80%). There is zero welfare state (except in assigned housing, assigned work with lunchroom, and worthless vouchers for imaginary state food supplies, and in subsidies given to the highest strata of workers/loyalists), so the breakdown of the food system led to a profusion of survival markets, now tolerated though outlaw.  Dengism has already begun outside of 'official' economy and its fantasies.

But information?  DPRK people pay money from what they have scratched together to watch outside information on USB memory sticks, DVDs, etc. Doing so can land them in gulag with all their relatives if caught, but they still do it, being humans with volition.  Since news of the outside world is presented in sole state media as if North Korea was the greatest economic success on earth, information as simple as that encoded in South Korean TV ... disrupts the whole edifice of control: "They are lying to us."]

-- sorry for the digression. Here's an opportunity to compare and contrast. Brook above, Adams below. (I've cued-up the embedded video to 17:00 when he starts to shift to the North Korea topic. Like many a guru before him, he can go on for hours. Here he wraps it up at 48:49)

 [ If you click on the title link within a Youtube video, you will be taken to the Youtube page devoted to the video, where you can (hopefully) find links to articles or media discussed. More importantly, you can -- if you are a better reader than a listener (even at 2X or faster using Michael's technique/application) and you don't use something like Voicebase to transcribe the audio, Youtube offers a feature called "Transcript." Clicking on "open transcript" opens up a sidebar where all the automated captions are displayed beside their timecode. Moreover and more fun, not only do they leap to the correct point as chosen in the video, the transcription itself is live -- meaning if you are speed-reading instead of listening-watching, a simple click on the caption moves you to that exact place in the video, where you can listen repeatedly, checking for tone, context, etc. Here in an Eyes Only spoiler division, I place an experiment to show you. It shows the DJ sampling effect but wasn't otherwise usable as an aid to learning. Styx agrees with Manafort going in the slammer for bail violations. So what.

Oh, and a picture of how you get to open up the Youtube transcript and the transcript as it shows. It's Helpful Sunday in my house.]

Spoiler

Here's how to get to the written automatic voice-recognition caption transcripts on Youtube. One and two, three for fun. Click and go and try it out yourself. You can even copy-paste from the transcript if you wanted an eventual archive the size of Peter Taylor's.

AdamsSnapKIMtranscript.png

 

 

Edited by william.scherk
Too much coffee, too much "going on" ...
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This is a case study of "loaded language." Even a stone-cold Canucki zombie can perceive this ...

biddleDPRKrant.png

Scraping away the loaded, emotive language, what does Biddle got left in terms of formal argument?

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Craig Biddle's argument is at first as compelling as YB's: nothing new, the moral principle is never to sanction evil people by negotiating with them, in short. One lends them moral credibility, as well as letting down those citizens who are repressed by their dictator. However, in this context, is there not a bigger moral principle? Surely, above everything, is self-interest - the president's duty of protection for the American homeland (followed by the citizens of allied and friendly nations)? The Americans' rights and freedom is number one concern, not the North Koreans. 

When the stage was reached just recently that Jong Un was testing ballistic missiles over Japan, after several decades of NK having nuclear capability (which no previous POTUS wanted to directly take on, and so tacitly appeasing North Korea), clearly the time had arrived when something drastic had to be done, or something different tried. One can kick the can down the road only so far, finally other people are going to have to bear the consequences - and they will be painfully worse. The first and only action was to remove the nuclear threat, and Trump's tactic of rattling his sabres louder than Jong Un's, showing the big stick backed up a little later with some carrots, might just work. In the mean time, President Trump hasn't given away anything as far as I know (except some moral high ground, temporarily). No doubt Trump will punish any deal-breaking and back-sliding by NK with the harshest sanctions available, if it comes to that. KIm must be well aware of this. From here may well follow greater detente with S. Korea and a slow opening up of North Korea to the West.

But top of the list is US self-defense and avoiding an escalation of belligerence into a war nobody wants. 

I agree that morality Is "essential to the politics of freedom" and also think that principles and realpolitik are seldom easily meshed.

 

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Exactly, Peter.

After NK de-nukes, opens, and reunites with the South, more will be known about its actual history.

Trump is at war with a cabal that almost totally took control of the entire world. It infiltrated the UK, May is a puppet of this cabal. Also Canada, Germany, France and many more. It ininfiltrated NK and tried to use NK to start WWIII. Trump is defeating this cabal. Has defeated it, in NK. We will find out how much of NK’s notorious evil was due to the Kims and how much was forced on them and/or utterly faked.

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1 hour ago, william.scherk said:

This is a case study of "loaded language." Even a stone-cold Canucki zombie can perceive this ...

biddleDPRKrant.png

Scraping away the loaded, emotive language, what does Biddle got left in terms of formal argument?

I think you are quite right, William. There is some hint here from YB and CB of making the issue fit the principle. While I've respected Biddle's reasoniing in some other articles, the old tendency of Objectivist rationalism keeps creeping in.

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22 minutes ago, anthony said:

In the mean time, the USA hasn't given away anything, as far as I know

The biggest trumpets in North Korea celebrate the suspension of so-called war games.  This is of course a tripartite step by step dance. The essential actors are North and South Korea. Their detente is at the centre of the drama, while they used President Trump effectively as convenor and guarantor.

In effect, North Korea is on moral probation while Kim implements stages of the journey to peace ... we non-experts simply cannot yet know where he may want to take his society as an end-state goal.  We can be satisfied with the interim lowering of bellicose behaviour, even if the North Korean society, the most closed and oppressive on earth, is no step closer to freedom than ever.  Right now.

I think the USA has done what it can to pull a blanket of mutual security over the intra-nation deliberative process to a peace treaty.  By not "provoking" the DPRK with further war games, the DPRK can have an orgasm of "We Got What We Wanted."  Of course, "we" is a pitiless totalitarian fiction.

The only thing I retain from Biddle once the emotive language is stripped away is a big whinge about Freedom. It is just too overwrought for the circumstances.  Detente between Nixon and Brezhnev, for example, was a fitful and depressingly fruitless endeavor at times ... but we know how that turned out for everybody.  Gorbachev, shock therapy, Yeltsin, and a return of the Strongman system.

The worst I have heard from the whingers is that Trump praises Strongmen. Well, thanks for that detail, wow, what a surprise, Craig, this is astonishing! 

Not.

And while I'm on the subject, what side is Putin on?

Edited by william.scherk
Grrrrrrrammar
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Putin is on the wrong side of history. Can you believe that after all these years of Western Civilization, a totalitarian asshole can still hijack Russia's constitution? Despots still abound. Yet I am ever optimistic for "the globe." After all, America exists. And it wasn't through luck.  

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2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Trump is at war with a cabal that almost totally took control of the entire world.

Jon,

I have an out-of-the-box idea about this.

I was (and am still) going to write a long post on the Conspiracy Theory thread (as a follow-up to Korben posting the Eisenhower talk about the military-industrial complex), but I've taken time because I just read two books that turned everything upside down for me. Four actually.

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies by M. Stanton Evans

American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character by Diana West

Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance deHaven-Smith (I haven't finished this one, but it is a fascinating deep dive into how propaganda works.)

The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West by Michael Walsh (A fascinating cultural deep dive into the Frankfurt school and how it successfully sold leftie ideas into the American mainstream.)

btw - M. Stanton Evans has a famous law about researching the government: The Evans’ law of inadequate paranoia: “No matter how bad you think something is, when you look into it, it's always worse." :) 

I am totally appalled by what I have read so far. I cannot recommend the first two books highly enough. And the third is really good so far, but it is more cultural and about framing. So it is not appalling, just enlightening.

Here is the process M. Stanton Evans used in his research. He looked at what people now say about McCarthy, including the modern biographies. Then he looked at the sources for the negative conclusions and comments. Then he traced the sources to their roots and found they were often nothing more than the opinion of someone. Then he looked at the Congressional records and transcripts, what was actually printed in the newspapers of the day, transcripts from the Verona Project, FBI records, CIA records, and on and on. He generally found the modern view is the exact opposite of what is on record. It's brutal. And it's worse because of the sheer volume of things he presented. As you read the book, it seems like it will never stop.

Ah... And there's this little goodie. Often he looked for a record in, say, the Library of Congress, because it is listed as being on file. Guess what? Nothing or an empty file is what he encountered. So he did the donkey-work of running down the people involved at the time and found many instances where, say, a Congressman kept a carbon copy. But there is still a crap-load of missing official documents from that era.

Diana West continued his work and started looking into the records of a bit earlier using the same methodology. What she found out was even worse. You should see all the free stuff the US sent to Russia during WWII, starting with one half a million Jeeps and Dodge trucks. That's 500,000. And that just scratches the 8th layer of paint on the surface. It's ugly ugly.

(Just two topics alone, Harry Hopkins and his relationship to Stalin, and the Lend-Lease program and how they cooked the books, are enough to make the hair on the nape of your neck stand on edge. I never knew anything about these things before I read this book. What's worse, what little does trickle out into the mainstream is based on the propaganda versions, not based on the records West has uncovered. Old record-keeping and correcting records is boring for most people.)

It seems like Stalin knew what the hell he was doing. I know this muh Communists stuff doesn't sound sexy these days, but the penetration of the Soviets in the US government and culture was far deeper than anyone today realizes.

With that much money flying around, a citizenry of crony corporatists was formed. How could it not be? These are people who supplied the massive giveaways. For instance, when butter was being rationed in the US during WWII, a shipment of 2 million pounds of butter went off to Stalin for free. That's 2... million... pounds... while Americans went without.

When I read that, though, I didn't think "for free." US taxpayers paid for it. But I did think about the people who sold it to the US government. 

The offspring of those business people and the politicians of the era are presently the American part of the globalists. They are the cabal you are talking about. They have their counterparts overseas, too, of course.

Now here's the rub. Since the Soviet empire collapsed and Putin is not on a quest to conquer the world the way Stalin was, the descendants of the same people who used to work for Stalin are now demonizing Russia. Nothing succeeds like success, but losers always get kicked in the teeth by the public.  (I think some real bad shit went on backstage, but I'm still reading and learning.)

So the cabal cronies have shifted their focus to establishing a one world governing organization bolstered by an army of technocrats. It doesn't matter where it's based these days. It's just no longer Russia. 

Seriously read those first two books. They are not boring, the fear of which is what took me so long to get to them. Talk about shining a light on a very dark corner of history that went down the memory hole... This is important because it relates to what is going on all around us these days.

Even the mainstream fake news media of today are, in essence, the offspring from hell. :)  

For me, it has been a life-changer. Also, I have a view from our subcommunity: that Ayn Rand was living during this time and had a good idea of what was going on. Not details, of course. But she saw things daily in the news and in conversations with important people she knew. A lot of that must have made her so angry she could spit.

Now I understand how Obama could have become elected after Reagan and just how sleazy and nasty the Bushes and Clintons were.

And I understand where the violent mind-numbing hatred of President Trump is coming from, even in people who know little of these things. They thought they had killed this can-do archetype in American culture. Yet here he is in control and, probably, knows the things I just wrote about. They fear...

Michael

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4 hours ago, anthony said:

Does anyone here say Kim Jong Un is not a monster? If so, how do you support that statement?

Calling Yaron Brook and Craig Biddle hate mongers to prove that Kim Jong Un is not a monster is not valid reasoning. (Even if they are hate mongers. (which I don't believe))

 

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3 hours ago, jts said:

Does anyone here say Kim Jong Un is not a monster?

Jerry,

I doubt it.

People on OL are intelligent.

He's still a human being, though. And human beings, monsters or not, make deals. If boxed in correctly, they also uphold the deals they make. They have to.

Does anyone here think this guy does not pose a clear and present danger to the world?

If one thinks he does, how do you propose to neutralize him? With a syllogism from philosophy? Maybe calling him immoral? Shunning him? Getting intellectuals to say bad things about him?

That'll show him, huh? (As he pulls out a nuke...)

:) 

Or how about a direct military attack on him while he wipes out half of South Korea before succumbing?

That's a great idea, unless you live in South Korea...

(And if you don't mind provoking the annihilation of half a peaceful country and don't look, because it's not your moral responsibility, you can even congratulate yourself on not being an enemy of human life... :) )

I don't see any other alternatives.

Part of living in reality is recognizing real threats and the alternatives for action. One worries about the storytelling after the threat subsides.

btw - Remember when Peikoff said the only moral course was to vote Democrat across the board because voting Republican was evil? Somehow that didn't age well, but he still said it. So do you really think the ARI folks are the best choice to inform your political opinions? They are the ones to judge the morality of others? Heh.

I mean, have at it if that's your thing.

I've hitched my wagon to a producer who is changing the world for the better (President Trump). His actions speak louder than anyone's bitching...

Michael

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15 hours ago, jts said:

Does anyone here say Kim Jong Un is not a monster? If so, how do you support that statement?

Calling Yaron Brook and Craig Biddle hate mongers to prove that Kim Jong Un is not a monster is not valid reasoning. (Even if they are hate mongers. (which I don't believe))

 

What? I have not called them hate-mongers. They hate the guy and are right to do so. They are dismayed also at a president dealing with him and that's understandable, as is their moral principle. But their emotions are not any argument, and has no place in "valid reasoning". 

jts, do you wish to punish the monster with a possibly nuclear conflict and an invasion which could be self-sacrificial to US interests and cause mega-death to civilians, in the course of overthrowing him? In that region (China) nobody can tell the outcome or the long-term involvement. 

And forget about trying to win over the populace with counter-ideology as Craig Biddle suggests. We can see N. Koreans are a greatly subservient people to their leader and won't change in a single generation, or two.

So, you got any alternative bright ideas? It is this, or it's war, the way Kim was going. If this deal works out, and NK opens up a little, in 5 or so years everyone will say it was a stroke of genius by the president. (As much as that is consequentialism, I admit). 

 

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