GarbageShoot [he/him]

  • 0 Posts
  • 168 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 18th, 2022

help-circle






  • What do you mean fiat doesn’t work on a finite planet? Current economic models certainly don’t work on a finite planet, but fiat was here before them and will be here after they are long gone.

    what is a good way for the working class (90%+ of all humans) to save and succeed in this current environment?

    There isn’t one. A big chunk of that class can do just fine and you probably already have good normative answers in that respect, but the current economic model is one that demands poverty. Even with all of the ridiculous developments in production we have, the available infrastructure even with the qualms we might have with it, and all the other things going for us that you might want to list, the closest that the current economic model has achieved to escaping its age-old need for having a sizeable portion of the able-bodied population unemployed is by slightly expanding that same portion and then having them sell themselves by the hour and minute in the Gig Economy. If you want that whole 90% of the population to all be able to do well, you need to change the system they are operating within.


  • tl;dr I don’t have an answer for your problem, but I have some thoughts on it that hopefully might contribute to you finding an answer.

    I think it’s probably bad to think of the homeless, etc. as being drug-addled and especially as being dangerous. Usually, if they do have a drug problem (especially alcoholism) it came after becoming homeless and not before, and functions as a way to self-medicate to ease the pain of their terrible conditions. There is, of course, a strong correlation with mental illness that they are often also self-medicating, but “mentally ill” does not mean the same thing as “dangerous”. You probably don’t want to have them as a baby sitter, but that’s much more because of mental illness impairing their ability to care for others (and often themselves) rather than there being a realistic chance they would actually hurt the child directly.

    People, religions, politicians, corporations and so on speak of charity as a great thing, and it’s certainly not a bad thing, but there being a need for charity for people to survive is a symptom of a system that doesn’t care for a substantial portion of the population that lives in it, and typically brutally exploiting those people. Charity is like a bandage, it can help to tend to a wound that has been inflicted, but we must ask “Why is there a wound in the first place? What inflicted it? How can it be prevented?” Your society, like mine, is organized in part to hurt these people in order to exploit them. No amount of charity can change that fact, only a change in social organization can change it.












  • 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.