挂路灯人

Taking bias and interests into account when evaluating how much stock to take in a piece of information and it’s source is a media literacy problem in your eyes?

Are you sure you’re not the one with the problem?

When media admits things that runs against their interests/narratives it is more believable than when it fits in with their narratives and interests generally yes. Is that really a controversial idea?

Outside of the content which is abhorrent in its own right, I hate how he goes about speaking on this topic:

His choice not to fight

He is not peaceful

He isn’t able to stop from knowing

As if President Xi is some emperor or god king reigning over China as opposed to the reality of being an elected politician alongside hundreds of others.

American centric much.

Liberals are pro capitalism (sometimes with minor treats or reforms for their ingroup). Democrats, Republicans, Social Democrats, Greens etc. all liberals.

I’m not sure the president of Ireland is a good analogy since they don’t sit for life.

Theoretically the Kim’s don’t either hence the elections, they’re just that popular and whether you like it or not that’s how democracy works the person the most people like wins.

All the sources I can find say that the General Secretary of WPK is a de facto power position, not a ceremonial one

Given the republicans are in power in America right now would you say Joe Gruters is central to state power? (Obviously not). Also I never said they don’t hold power just that they weren’t central and spent the majority of their time on LARGELY ceremonial and advisory tasks.

Yeah that’s why I didn’t want to make that particular analogy because it appears to have whizzed over your head even when I included the end bit to try solidify the actual point at hand. The point is the roles they are elected to (which they are in stark contrast to a monarchy of any kind) are high ranking but not central to political power or work. Largely ceremonial and advisory.

The burden of proof is on you. You’re making the claim. Also it’s not an adhominem you should look up what words mean if you don’t know before using them.

ad hominem

Attacking a person’s character or motivations rather than a position or argument.

I did no such thing. I simply said you need to provide evidence for your claims instead of demanding others prove a negative.

Pointing out you are throwing a tantrum does not an ad hominem make.

The comparison I’m about to make isn’t 100% accurate but it’s close enough to make the point I hope. The British royal family theoretically due to their position swears in the pm and leads the country etc etc, whereas in reality it’s the parliament that is the actual central political power. The Kim family is habitually elected high positions like general secretary due to the legacy they hold but in reality most of their time is spent on more ceremonial work like inspecting new developments etc while the Supreme People’s Assembly is the actual central state power. Another similar analogy is the president of Ireland as I understand it signs the laws and swears in politicians but is generally a ceremonial role this analogy is probably more accurate as like the Kim’s it is an elected position however the general point remains.

You’re just hear to debate the quality of evidence! Of course that must be it!

No I’m simply saying you should provide evidence for your claims instead of crashing out and throwing a tantrum demanding others prove a negative.

The DPRK people you met are part of an elite class connected to the regime. Of course they support it.

I never realised farmers learning agricultural science in a neighboring country were an elite class. (Also I don’t think you know what the word class really means). Regime is a silly word (“government I don’t like”).

Great. I also don’t love any country having nukes, so there’s already two of us.

I think it has been proven repeatedly by the US that if you wish to truly be sovereign nukes are non-negotiable which is a great tragedy. (Libya, Venezuela, Iraq, Yemen, etc.)

I was well aware that your point was not about Iran, that’s why I made the cynical counterpoint I made.

Your cynical counterpoint was still stupid as it was about a related but entirely different situation. A country having nukes and being able to bypass MAD are 2 vastly different scenarios.

As for your second paragraph it’s all irrelevant to the point at hand which is that if there is a risk of a country (especially one with a history of attempting to) bypassing MAD against you frustrating that attempt by any means necessary is the logical step to take.

As I understand it after the dissolution of the position of President, Kim Jong il and Kim Jong Un have held positions that are while important certainly not central such as General Secretary of the WPK. The Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly is the central state power and it’s members are elected by the Supreme People’s Assembly who are in turn elected through direct nationwide blind ballot.

workers paradise

Great strawman of what others are saying very impressive.

You’re replying in support of this workers paradise, are you not?

Not at this moment no. What I’m responding in favour of is people who make claims providing evidence instead of telling others to provide evidence to prove a negative. You’re making the claim the DPRK is a shithole you have to provide the evidence that proves that (and ideally can survive some scrutiny of backing, bias etc.)

The DPRK is an authoritarian shithole. Why are you so offended by this statement?

I’m not particularly other then the fact that the people from the DPRK I met during my time in college were always so nice and proud of how far they’ve come as a nation and seeing you disparage that and generally be kind of an asshole is distasteful.

You’re the one making claims. The burden of proof is on you. Why are you surprised you’re being asked for evidence?

Ukraine did have nuclear weapons and gave them up only under broad guarantees of continued independence… so… yeah.

I wonder what country has a history of not only using nuclear weapons but using “allied” (vassal nations) on the borders of competing nations to host their arsenal to threaten first strike capability. Might want to look into what actually caused the “Cuban” missile crisis. American nukes in Turkey threating first strike capability and the breakdown of MAD.

Also your Iran strawman was fucking stupid and I shouldn’t have bothered responding to it. It was completely unrelated to what I said, even if Iran developed nuclear weapons they wouldn’t have first strike capability on the US so it isn’t relevant to doing whatever necessary to frustrate those attempting to destroy MAD by achieving first strike capability.

so… yeah…

Also also pointing out what is logical for a force to do in the face of certain situations doesn’t mean I support it and especially doesn’t mean I generally support any other force taking related but different actions. Really reminding me why I hate deabtebros.

Not a single dprk source. Please post a DPRK source saying the things you claim they are saying not westerns asserting this is what they say.

Stealing from @RiverRock@lemmy.ml

I’m not an expert on DPRK history, so instead I’ll try and speak to the prominence of the Kims:

Think back to the enormous popularity the Kennedy family enjoyed in the US for decades. For a good thirty years, if you had a guy named Kennedy on your ticket, he was gonna win. Even Capcom, as recently as 2004, named their heroic American protagonist Leon S Kennedy, because the association of “Kennedy” with “Heroic/good/representative of America’s better angels” was strong in pop culture. It’s an incorrect association, but what matters is it existed.

But what did John, the one people remember most fondly, actually do to earn his reputation? Give a couple well-received speeches, have sex with a trafficked actress, propose a drawdown in Vietnam that never happened, and then get his shit blown smoove off? That’s not much of a legacy when you put it on paper, but here in America our standards are very low. with that in mind, let’s imagine a different history:

The Nazis win WW2. Doesn’t matter how, they just do. After cannibalizing Europe to rebuild their military, they cross the Atlantic with a massive fleet and start systematically dismantling the United Stated via carpet bombing. First electricity goes, then water, then food as every farm, dam and railway is destroyed. After all the infrastructure is gone they start leveling apartment blocks and houses, and entire towns are wiped off the map with few survivors every night. The bombers never stop coming, hitting even ruins where people might be hiding, scouring nearby forests with incendiaries, and allegedly (though I believe it) dropping viral and bacterial weapons with knowledge given to them by Japanese war criminals. Somewhere between one fifth and one quarter of the population is dead, starvation and disease are rampant, every single building has been leveled, and the traumatized survivors are hiding in caves. At this moment John F Kennedy shows up, leads the military in pushing the Nazis out of the northern states with help from Canada, and organizes the rebuilding of the liberated area. When the Nazis consolidate their hold on the southern states and create a military puppet government there to serve as a foothold for invasion, he oversees preparations to drive them back again. Obviously he becomes an instant folk hero, and his descendants both enjoy great political goodwill by association and experience great pressure to live up to the accomplishments of their fathers. //End hypothetical

In the US, a place that has not been touched by war in living memory, we very easily fall into the trap of thinking of other peoples as somehow sillier and more emotional, or more prone to irrational thinking. This is the message that our corporate media has always given us, through careful implication, picture choice, orientalist framing. The unspoken message is always: look at the latest inscrutable conflict these primitives have gotten themselves embroiled in now, aren’t you glad to live somewhere civilized where rule of law prevails?

Of course, the truth is that we export our instability: more than that, our stability depends on constantly destabilizing others and collapsing entire societies into nightmares from which can be easily siphoned cheap labor and resources. These aren’t random conflicts: almost always, they’re our conflicts, our proxy wars, our coups and propaganda drives. “Our” prosperity (mostly the prosperity of the capitalist class, but we do still get the crumbs) is inextricable from their suffering, it depends on it. If other societies are able to stand up for themselves, they can’t be threatened into extortionate “free trade” deals that let western corpos make an insane markup on some tv assembled with rare earth minerals from Vassal Country A by wage slaves in Vassal Country B. That sounds random but it has to be stressed that almost every supply chain for everything in the entire “first world” is built on that relationship, all the profitability of western companies is built on that relationship, and they have before and will again kill untold millions if that relationship is ever threatened.

To tie it all together, my thesis about the apparent popularity of the Kim family (and I say apparent because I can’t know for sure from outside the DPRK either way, but haven’t seen any signs of internal struggles, which you know our western press would pounce on) is this:

-The US and it’s co-belligerents visit an untold amount of conflict and misery on the global south as a matter of course

-Those who stand up to them are remembered fondly by their society, especially if they succeed, especially if they succeed and survive to old age

-Those who stand up are demonized in the western press, especially if they succeed, especially if they succeed and survive to old age

-The people we in the US are conditioned to view as lesser are if anything much more level headed on average than we are, and if the armageddon we made over there happened to us over here the result would probably look less like a socialist republic and more like a loose confederation of death cults

-With this in mind, and knowing that they aren’t actually central to the government of the country, I cannot possibly begrudge Korean society and the Korean state their affinity for the Kim family as a national symbol

https://lemmy.ml/post/50962606/27092779

Yeah that’s not a citation. Please post a link to any official DPRK source to back up your claims of what they say.

I wish I knew as little as you about world events. Iran had a fatwa against nuclear weapons the idea of them trying to make them was as true as Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.

Watching people get mad at Trump for the few good things he’s done is always interesting. Trump destroying the US ability to rampage around the globe with impunity destroying millions of lives is objectively good, him dodging the draft is objectively good (even if the good is entirely incidental caused by his arrogance stupidity and cowardice). It’s what he has in common with the rest of the US presidential cohort that makes him bad, the violent imperialism and racism etc.