GarbageShoot [he/him]

Tibet was de facto independent for a while, but it re-joined China voluntarily circa 1950. About 10 years later, with some help from western agitation and assets, the theocratic ruling class felt too threatened by development empowering their serf population and sought to secede in order to maintain their fiefdom. Mao sent in the PLA and crushed the secessionist revolt.

You really can’t “no u” this one because of Imperial China, the PRC’s claim to Tibet is completely valid. You’d probably have more luck trying with Xinjiang, though evidently that is viewed as slightly played-out now.

It’s countless layers of hypotheticals away from reality and I think recommending bourgeois governments liquidate their bourgeoisie is silly in the way that, in medieval times, recommending the kings of the world abolish noble titles and the monarchy is silly, you aren’t going to get these institutions to just kill themselves. What I support is the proletariat, by reason of having class antagonism with the bourgeoisie, fighting a war against the former’s control of the state.

What do you support?

That depends on if you do or do not want to fight a global revolutionary war against the bourgeoisie, since they would never allow such a thing to succeed in their liberal republics

No, the 2% is for the ones who obey the law, and is enforced with something more like 100% for those who break the law.

Capital flight only exists where it is allowed to exist. It is possible and, in fact, advisable to have laws allowing for the seizure of assets in such a scenario.

Russia did hold elections and is “liberal democratic” but Russia has hardly been turned into a warzone in the same way. There are probably other examples worth citing.

No need to resort to incoherent name-calling.

Russia invaded Ukraine, but war is not genocide, as much as the banderite government likes to turn everything into genocide to minimize their history of the original Banderites and other collaborators perpetrating the actual Holocaust.

If Russia wanted to carry out the war in a way that involved genocide, just carpet-bombing cities or things like that, it absolutely could, it has maybe the second or third strongest air force in the world. Luckily for everyone involved (other than perhaps frontline Russians), Russia knows that it shouldn’t do that, and so it isn’t.

I don’t see why you feel the need to so readily call people who disagree with you fascists. I don’t think you’re a fascist, I just think you’re a well-meaning individual who was tricked by the PR of a liberal-fascist alliance. What would make me a fascist? I certainly don’t like Russia, I don’t have some fantasy of the Eurasian peninsula united under the Russian Federation. I’m not here to tell you that Putin is a good guy, he’s a mafioso like you see at the head of most liberal states. I’ve got no problem with people speaking Ukrainian, though I sure wish they’d find a better national hero than, it must be repeated, a literal perpetrator of the Holocaust, but I also think those weirdos in Russia who worship the pogromist Tsar Nicholas II should get a better idol as well. Please, tell me what kind of fascist I am.

The closest thing to genocide in Ukraine is the conscription carried out by the banderite government for the meat grinder of an unwinnable war.

Me too, but I’d guess that it’s because Ukraine is a somewhat younger country, since the US stopped using the draft in '73, about two decades before the current Ukrainian government was established, so they are operating on very different standards. Just a guess, though.

In fairness, the US isn’t drafting people, let alone consigning draftees to certain death like Zelensky here is doing. It’s probably my prejudice from the US draft age, but I’m surprised the minimum is so high still in Ukraine considering how desperate they are to field more men.

Obviously the US consigns plenty of people to certain death, but not by drafting them.

The article is worthless, turns out, and looking at the report, it doesn’t really help because so many of its critical claims (i.e. actual, specific instances of collective punishment that weren’t countered by Chinese courts) just have citations to other reports by the same group. I’m just here to procrastinate on school work rather than read through a collective 500 pages of histrionics (seriously, the stylization of this whole thing is laughable).

The link 404s for me, so I can’t really look at the details, but more information would be required to establish it as actually being criminal. Saying, and I’m just producing an arbitrary example, “Come here to attend a court case or you will be tried in abstentia (and therefore probably found guilty), which will result in fines that, if ignored, will be satisfied by asset forfeiture in the form of us seizing your shit” is consistent with your description of “asking under threat of harm” while also being an extremely normal thing for a country to do and not a crime.

What list? The state sponsors religious celebrations, but surely you think they are Potemkin festivals. This sort of cold war bullshit is beneath any decent person.

Your reading comprehension remains sorely lacking. The whole point is that it’s not newsworthy, but you can still collect information on it happening by looking up extradition statistics or w/e

Your definition of abduction apparently includes persuading people to go somewhere, so I think there are many lacks in terms of definitions here.

Iran had a consulate bombed and wants to establish to Israel that it’s not allowed to do something like that. I don’t see how anyone is “being played” by that.

A brutal crackdown on the ability of the bourgeoisie to influence elections, buy politicians, and hold office, such that liberals will crow about “human rights” and “freedom” being violated. We can draw fine distinctions between different systems, but fundamentally they still fall on the same side of the fence.

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 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).

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.