EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

No but your wife is a biologist who by your own admission doesn't know about anything else apparently so why would she be a good judge of governments?

maybe she wouldnt but somehow people can dislike dictatorships without being racist

aerdil posted:

how does she know the dprk is a dictatorship? where does she get her information about that?

유대인

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

aerdil posted:

how does she know the dprk is a dictatorship? where does she get her information about that?

유대인

does this mean most americans are a good source as to whether the troops are Good and Just. i mean they speak the language and grew up there so i'd imagine they are.

Instead of a lesson on sources, which was not possible there, I asked that they read a simple essay from 1997 that quoted President Bill Clinton on how important it was to make all schools wired. The counterparts had approved it because it related to our current textbook theme of college education. I hoped that they would grasp the significance of the Internet and how behind they were. I also gave them four recent articles—from the Princeton Review, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Harvard Magazine—that mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and Twitter. None of the pieces evoked a response. Not even the sentence about Zuckerberg earning $100 billion from something he dreamed up in his college dorm seemed to interest them. It was possible that they viewed the reading as lies. Or perhaps the capitalist angle repelled them.

...

Their collective decision to switch their essay topics to condemn America seemed to have been compelled by the articles about Zuckerberg. What I had intended as inspirational, they must have viewed as boasting and felt slighted. The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world.

Edited by aerdil (May 25, 2016 06:29:46)

Ufuk_Surekli posted:

i'm not just trying to be antagonistic i would genuinely like to know, what leap of thought has to occur for us to look at a system with an obviously elected legislature and full compliment of elected officials and go "yep, definite dictatorship"

but then come to the opposite conclusion about similarly constructed systems elsewhere. i want to believe it's more sophisticated than "well I don't like this one, so it's a dictatorship you see", but i have yet to have it explained to me in a way that gives that mode of analysis content beyond pick-and-choose

because i'm not the kind of Class-1 imbecile who takes north korea's word for its elections and/or elected officials being anything other than show ponies for the Kims. fortunately there aren't many of you and you are a source of vaugely distasteful comedy to the limited extent that you are noticed at all, even on the left

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

because i'm not the kind of Class-1 imbecile who takes north korea's word

otoh you seem pretty credulous of the western state media apparatus's ability to portray its perceived enemies honestly. "chutzpah" is the most generous word that comes to mind, there

aerdil posted:

this reminds me of that somethingsenstive thread from the racist goon who wrote about teaching at a predominantly black highschool

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/what_it_was_like_to_teach_essay_writing_to_north_korean_graduate_students.html

this seemed too stupid to be possible if it didn't come from a Protestant missionary, "I was shocked when kids in a Communist country didn't have their minds blown by Web site man with $100 billion," but yeah,

about 30 teachers, all Christian evangelicals besides me,

something tells me the order of events there has been nudged into a Slate-friendly formation to sell Daily Show watchers on the writer's book. Out now from Crown Publishers.

Ufuk_Surekli posted:

also, if the big conspiratorial acting game is *so obvious* to your average NATO-dwelling non-imbecile, what is the point in putting on the show in the first place, in your view? is your claim here that the citizens of the DPRK are "Class-1 imbeciles"

Ya that's the whole idea behind it isn't it?

aerdil posted:

lol damn.

Guyovich posted:

if the dprk were really a dictatorship, there are other systems we could look to in order to determine this. those systems don't even bother having sham parties, they don't have multicameral forms of governance, methods of recall, checks and balances, because who gives a shit? they're kingdoms. so if the kims' power were absolute, what purpose does this extra pageantry serve?

sometimes the "pageantry" performs specific local ideological functions, or did historically, and isn't connected just to convincing foreign liberals or something like that. like in china one of the legislative bodies is like 30% Revolutionary Guomindang and not CCP, which has nothing to do with the reality of that bloc party, no one considers it a real independent party. The reason is because it performs an ideological function as a link between the old republic and New China, suggesting that the patriotic sections of the Nationalist Party joined the revolution and that the Taiwanese government is filled with renegades. In recent times the Chinese government has tried to build links with the Taiwanese KMT through channels like this. There are several other "democratic" parties which are tiny and exist as links to the pre-1949 democratic movements in China, such as the overseas leagues that were influential in the early 20th Century, all of which are officially consultative and accept the hegemony of the CCP.

Korea keeps some democratic parties like this as part of a national front for similar reasons. DDR was like this, with parties in the National Front performing some function, such as a party that was primarily to cater to the rights of ex-Nazis.

Anyway it's not true that "authoritarian" countries generally don't have potemkin parties, it's almost the rule outside a handful of Islamic emirates/etc. Virtually all post-colonial African countries had single-party states which then assembled coalitions around themselves when they transitioned to official parliamentary democracy. Or Arab socialist parties where they tended to purge from above other socialist parties in national fronts as part of a strategy to integrate them into their blocs (which often worked). That's why, for example, the Iraqi Communist Party initially was seen as supporting the occupation of Iraq, because it was eager to participate in the new electoral bodies and build a base there, in a way that many other groups considered them collaborators, a position they took primarily because Hussein murdered large numbers of Communists.

tpaine posted:

getfiscal posted:

if a majority of americans supported the invasion of iraq then we shouldn't be like oh well them's the breaks.

agreed, we should exterminate the country

*acdc's back in black blares as tpaine and bippy wear body armor and open fire into crowds at the damn gooncon*