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Do you know what the DPRK is? It commits human-rights violations on a pervasive basis and massive scale (relative to the size of its populace). The US is nowher

by fouric 7y ago

Do you know what the DPRK is? It commits human-rights violations on a pervasive basis and massive scale (relative to the size of its populace). The US is nowhere near as bad as it. The only viable options we have for pressuring them to stop their atrocities are sanctions and an actual war. Unless you either support their human-rights violations or actually losing lives in a war, then you should be applauding those sanctions.

jessaustin 7y ago
We need more imagination than this, and more hope. Lots of situations have been defused through dialogue rather than aggression. Maybe DPRK is uniquely awful. However, we've been aggressive for nearly seven decades now. When our goofball President tried dialing back the aggression a few notches, he was pilloried for it. How many more decades must the aggression continue with no good result before we can stop "applauding"? Before you repeat for the nine-trillionth time that KJU is a bad guy... yes, we know. He might suffer for his sins, in this world or the next, he might not. He might be a lot worse than other autocrats, whom USA supports, he might not. Why is it important that we distill every situation into the most cartoonish good-guy/bad-guy terms? Cui bono?
- wpietri 7y ago
  Kim, et al, are certainly awful, but what makes North Korea unique is how dangerous they are. They could kill an enormous amount of people in Seoul: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL200/TL271/RAND_TL271.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL200/TL271... And they have been eagerly pursuing nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare capacity for decades, complete with long-range missiles: https://www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/ https://www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/ The goal of sanctions (which are part of extensive dialogue) is to limit the DPRK's ability to threaten even more people, and to push them back toward more discussion and more engagement. I'd love it if that had been even more successful, but if you think "no good result" has been achieved, you haven't been following the situation.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    The idea that anyone, Kims included, in DPRK wants to transition from the current luxurious situation of absolute personal sovereignty to a more glassed-over desert type situation is an example of the cartoon thinking I described above. No one in DPRK with a hand on any button is insane. (Can USA make that claim?) I agree that the absence of nuclear destruction is better than its presence, but let's not be cute. It is the warhawks like Bolton and HRC and Elliott Abrams who always want to ratchet up the pressure because the sky is falling, whether that's the sky over Libya or Korea or Venezuela or wherever. Many people without a financial interest in the inexorable conversion of USA resources into armaments are fine with less: less pressure, less haste, less aggression, less isolation, less single-mindedness, less faux "certainty".
    - wpietri 7y ago
      Good thing I don't believe that then. What I do believe is that Kim, like many dictators, is aware that there's no falling from #1 to #2. He won't go from absolute monarch to being like Queen Elizabeth. Maybe he gets a modestly comfortable exile in China with an ongoing risk of trial or revenge killing, but more likely he goes like Gaddafi or bin Laden: him and his heirs shot and dumped in unmarked graves, forever reviled. So he doesn't have to be insane at all to be willing to shell Seoul or nuke Fairbanks. He just has to believe that might be enough to save his life and let him hold on to power. (Or, if he thinks he can't, to want revenge.) And of course to believe that other people's lives are entirely unimportant compared to his, which is pretty obvious given how he treats the people he rules. Or how he treated his half brother. I agree that Bolton and the warhawks are nearly as monstrous. But that doesn't mean that the widely agreed policy of containment through sanctions is driven by them. Indeed, Bolton publicly argued for a first strike. Which to my mind makes him as sociopathic as Kim.
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        Sure, it might be true that DPRK is a uniquely threatening situation. It might be true that the right way to deal with this unique situation is constant aggression, over the decades even unto centuries. That's certainly what we've read in the papers. Except, we've read that of at least ten other situations in the last two decades. Over the last seven decades, we've read that of probably thirty more. As history has unfolded, that claim has never been true. The war media might be right eventually, and maybe DPRK will be the place. It's just that they've been wrong so much, at least since the Mexican-American War. Mainstream journalism's war on the American people is not only an assault on peace, on innocents in other lands, or on our wallets. It is primarily an attack on epistemology. We have been gaslit our entire lives. If the world were not dangerous enough to require vast nuclear and other lethal arsenals, how would we know?

by fouric 7y ago

jessaustin 7y ago

We need more imagination than this, and more hope. Lots of situations have been defused through dialogue rather than aggression. Maybe DPRK is uniquely awful. However, we've been aggressive for nearly seven decades now. When our goofball President tried dialing back the aggression a few notches, he was pilloried for it. How many more decades must the aggression continue with no good result before we can stop "applauding"? Before you repeat for the nine-trillionth time that KJU is a bad guy... yes, we know. He might suffer for his sins, in this world or the next, he might not. He might be a lot worse than other autocrats, whom USA supports, he might not. Why is it important that we distill every situation into the most cartoonish good-guy/bad-guy terms? Cui bono?

wpietri 7y ago
Kim, et al, are certainly awful, but what makes North Korea unique is how dangerous they are. They could kill an enormous amount of people in Seoul: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL200/TL271/RAND_TL271.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL200/TL271... And they have been eagerly pursuing nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare capacity for decades, complete with long-range missiles: https://www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/ https://www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/ The goal of sanctions (which are part of extensive dialogue) is to limit the DPRK's ability to threaten even more people, and to push them back toward more discussion and more engagement. I'd love it if that had been even more successful, but if you think "no good result" has been achieved, you haven't been following the situation.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  The idea that anyone, Kims included, in DPRK wants to transition from the current luxurious situation of absolute personal sovereignty to a more glassed-over desert type situation is an example of the cartoon thinking I described above. No one in DPRK with a hand on any button is insane. (Can USA make that claim?) I agree that the absence of nuclear destruction is better than its presence, but let's not be cute. It is the warhawks like Bolton and HRC and Elliott Abrams who always want to ratchet up the pressure because the sky is falling, whether that's the sky over Libya or Korea or Venezuela or wherever. Many people without a financial interest in the inexorable conversion of USA resources into armaments are fine with less: less pressure, less haste, less aggression, less isolation, less single-mindedness, less faux "certainty".
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Good thing I don't believe that then. What I do believe is that Kim, like many dictators, is aware that there's no falling from #1 to #2. He won't go from absolute monarch to being like Queen Elizabeth. Maybe he gets a modestly comfortable exile in China with an ongoing risk of trial or revenge killing, but more likely he goes like Gaddafi or bin Laden: him and his heirs shot and dumped in unmarked graves, forever reviled. So he doesn't have to be insane at all to be willing to shell Seoul or nuke Fairbanks. He just has to believe that might be enough to save his life and let him hold on to power. (Or, if he thinks he can't, to want revenge.) And of course to believe that other people's lives are entirely unimportant compared to his, which is pretty obvious given how he treats the people he rules. Or how he treated his half brother. I agree that Bolton and the warhawks are nearly as monstrous. But that doesn't mean that the widely agreed policy of containment through sanctions is driven by them. Indeed, Bolton publicly argued for a first strike. Which to my mind makes him as sociopathic as Kim.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      Sure, it might be true that DPRK is a uniquely threatening situation. It might be true that the right way to deal with this unique situation is constant aggression, over the decades even unto centuries. That's certainly what we've read in the papers. Except, we've read that of at least ten other situations in the last two decades. Over the last seven decades, we've read that of probably thirty more. As history has unfolded, that claim has never been true. The war media might be right eventually, and maybe DPRK will be the place. It's just that they've been wrong so much, at least since the Mexican-American War. Mainstream journalism's war on the American people is not only an assault on peace, on innocents in other lands, or on our wallets. It is primarily an attack on epistemology. We have been gaslit our entire lives. If the world were not dangerous enough to require vast nuclear and other lethal arsenals, how would we know?