look at this postsecret submission for this week lmao

I understand being a little disturbed by an event that big but like come on guys

It’s less that all your questions and responses are pissing me off, it’s more that all of these things can be addressed if you did what I did which is to let go of all the political assumptions you once had and crack a book or two. It’s not reasonable to expect randos on an ML matrix instance to do your homework for you. You invite at least a tiny bit of ridicule whenever you charge into a public space making bold claims, especially with something as politically charged as North Korea. Sometimes a little shame is useful to teach us to not repeat mistakes.

“It is important that we have the same definitions of words if we are going to use those words to try and communicate with one another. I’m not sure how you misinterpreted that but I’m sorry if I didn’t make it clear enough.”

You made yourself clear, your point is just nonsense. The definitions for these terms weren’t pulled out of thin air, they were created with science and observation. What you’re doing is akin to going into a medical community and trying to voice an opinion about miasmatism. Nobody is going to care very much because it’s an obsolete idea without any clear definitions (because it’s obsolete). But no, WE’RE the trolls for not entertaining your corny “theory” about how North Korea is kinda Problematic.

“Again who gives a shit about that right now?”

Idk man probably all the people whose lives are ruined or otherwise made worse by the United States. Everything that has been happening geopolitically for the past 5 years is basically people outside of the US realizing that the US doesn’t care whether they live or die and choosing to move on to a different world order. And that’s exactly why the US and US capitalism is so stressed out right now. They know that their empire is kaput and that we all see them for who they really are. Do you ever actually stop and think about the millions, tens of millions of lives that have been ruined by the US? Does it actually compute for you? Does it ever occur to you that there might be people on this very server whose lives have been directly affected by the US? Is it all just collateral damage to you? But no, I’M the bad guy for giving you some harsh truths about needing to do some reading and investigation for yourself before starting a long, exhaustive conversation with those who already have.

“I don’t care if the US were to blow up the moon, that has no bearing on whether or not the DRPK is militarized or why it is or isn’t a justified trait.”

Weird thing to say. I would probably care quite a lot if the US destroyed the moon because we need it to live. Sort of like how the US military destroys the environment which we also need to live. At least 2 people here have already given you a perfectly fine reason why they’re so “miltaristic” as you put it: their whole country has been a battlefront against the US before either of us were even born.

I really cannot stress this enough, your inability to talk about the state of the US empire and it’s effects on the world is really not our problem. Imagine trying to talk about ancient Mediterranean politics and being like “well I don’t WANT to talk about Rome, just cut them out of the picture and we can go from there.” It doesn’t matter what you want. The reality of empire is that it imposes itself on the rest of the world.

Trying to extricate the United States from what they did to North Korea IS hostile to many people here even if you don’t care that it is. Learn about dialetical materialism and then come back here and tell me how effective it is to talk about the imperial periphery and somehow not talk about the imperial core. My top recommendation for learning the full context of North Korea warts and all is the podcast Blowback’s season on the Korean war. This will give you a full sense of what the war actually was outside of wholesome MASH episodes, and how the US government has zero problem with genocide as long as they benefit. Then you will begin to understand why it’s silly to try and evaluate NK without understanding what the US did to it first. And then when you’re done that read State and Revolution. I don’t really have much left to say to you because I can tell you’re far more likely to just keep bickering here than actually taking in new information (they always do).

Prove me wrong though!

I’ve been in that position and it’s really difficult because obviously there are still plenty of decent users on the site, but once I got rid of it I felt a lot lighter. It’s a site that’s explicitly being marketed towards fascists or libs at best so it’s not like things are going to get any better. Plus you always have spaces like this so it’s not like you don’t have anything.

None of us are deliberately being antagonistic or trolls. The others who have already tried to help you were far nicer than I’m willing to be.

You said earlier in your comments that you weren’t as careful with your words as you’d like to be. I think you have a long road to recovery ahead of you in that sense. If you’re going to deliberately enter a space populated by marxist leninists than it would probably be a good idea to do a little bit of homework and make sure that the actual terms and language you’re using are based in reality with clear definitions ie. marxist leninist.

Second point: you claim to want to somehow totally disentangle the United States of America from this conversation…about North Korea. Do you understand why it’s a little strange to only want to talk about one without the other? Other commenters have already pointed out to you that it was they who destroyed their country, infrastructure, and way of life. It’s really just silly (and honestly a little bit suspicious) that you want to “analyze” NK “fascism” without talking about the American fascism that resulted in their state existing at all. That isn’t analysis. It’s just a weird thought experiment where you rank a nation in isolation based on stats like it’s a fighting game character or something.

Also why aren’t you interested in what you call “American corruption”? What you’re describing is American imperialism which is responsible for the vast array of crises that afflict all of us right now in the modern day. It is the biggest contradiction of our times. If you’re not interested in it that’s fine but you can go splash in the political kiddy pool on .world or reddit or something.

You THINK that having clear definitions for these things is somehow salami-slicing but it is incredibly important. I understand that in your worldview (probably lib) Opinions are the most important thing in politics and it’s all of our responsibility to tiptoe around each others individual definitions, but that’s just not reality.

I’m really not interested in continuing to bicker about whatever it is you think militarism is but every description you’ve given of it applies to the US at at least some phase of it’s history. Trying to ascribe some kind of rank to how “militaristic” a society is useless. Why not also rank nations based on how “attractive” they are while we’re at it? It’s the same type of immaterial mumbo jumbo based on colonial thinking.

https://en.prolewiki.org

I’m not even joking, libs vision of “miltarism” is purely based on how visible the military is. Watch any trash “news” segment on NK and they ALWAYS cut to footage of tanks driving around and military parades. It was the same with Russia in the cold war. And the kicker is that the US flies jets over stadiums and has cop parades and shit and is culturally obsessed with it’s military so it makes even less sense.

I feel like OP is running on deeply flawed, fluffy, neoliberal definitions of terms like Nationalism and Dictatorship. Pretty sure State & Revolution alone clarifies that ALL states are dictatorships because they need to be in order to continue existing, so I guess I’ll point them there first. Also, the nationalism practiced by the US is pretty different than the nationalism practiced by colonized nations who are trying to expel occupiers and build a state that they actually control.

Btw OP how exactly is Hyper Militarism different than regular ol’ militarism? What is the cutoff point? Is it % of GDP spent on the military? Or is it just when you drive scary tanks around in public? The US empire via it’s shell organization NATO is forcing it’s member states to spend billions more on “defense” as we speak to prop up the MIC and drive the motor of global imperialism. Given that, wtf does “militarism” even mean?

The US and it’s citizens, have no leg at all to stand on complaining about other countries military conduct. The US lets it’s allies maim kill and rape civilians when they’re not doing it themselves. What makes you think that brutality against innocents would be a political dealbreaker for them? They’re always fine with it as long as it’s just the cost of doing business.

True, very true. I suppose that lately I’ve decided to focus on studying theory more now that I have the time, but also because I think I’ve hit the wall when it comes to getting liberals to understand that revolution isn’t something we have to totally make up from scratch. Plus I haven’t completed some key texts. I just don’t think that I could ever successfully play a role evangelizing libs to be leftists, since that is apparently what we’re talking about here.

Indeed. I fr think that the past 25 years of seeing chaotic imagery in the middle east on CNN has desensitized the vast majority of North Americans to violence that is outsourced. As someone whose childhood perfectly overlapped with that period, it applied for me as much as it disgusts me now to admit it. Not an original thought of mine, but the US learned a very valuable lesson after Vietnam which is that as long as conscription is off the table and that type of interventionism happens via an abstraction layer of Proxies, the American public has a vastly higher tolerance for imperialism.

The Kamla stans demonstrate this by accepting(!) that some kind of genocide is going to happen and that Trump Is Worse in the reality where he wins. The version that Kamahalah practices is then implicitly more “under control” and better but it’s still a genocide. They are aware of this. They patently accept the reality that genocide must happen for their government and status quo to operate. If they didn’t do this math before endorsing the program then in their own words, caveat emptor.

Exactly. I never actually say “I heard all of this shit back when Kamala as POTUS was a laughable notion and Biden was considered our saviour from fascism” but I should probably start doing so. These lib cheerleaders have inherited their master’s desire to only acknowledge history if it somehow benefits their short-term goals. Maybe Trump getting elected will prompt them to think about fascism beyond Death Camps and being mean to minorities for fun. Probably not though.

Yes, I’ve had to reevaluate my own models of why American “leftists” do what they do this past year and engage in some self-crit.

Even after all this time I was still operating on the admittedly liberal logic that they just didn’t have all the facts and were propagandized and that our duty was to provide that information. I failed to understand that they’re only human and won’t turn on the ideology that’s provided them with what they materially want and need. It’s not that it’s impossible to convert them. I just think it’s likely that lib idealism eases their contradictions more effectively than ML ideology does.

The worst part about it is that I was also roughly on their level only 2-3 years ago. I know exactly what they think. They think that there will be some magic combination of elected representatives to defeat the SCOTUS and the parliamentarian and all the other obstacles and booby traps their system throws up to protect itself.

I guess the bottom line here is that history tells us that cooperation with libs holds very little promise of us getting what we want because they are not living in reality and as such will not behave realistically. I’m willing to be wrong if any comrade can explain why but I see no way to make them understand.

Agreed. I just don’t have any sympathy left. Seeing the fake leftists immediately get with the program as soon as the dems shed their skin and crowned Kamala really made me realize that USAmericans like them fundamentally don’t understand or care about the nature of their empire. The most galling thing I think is the Buying Time assertion, wherein voting for the dems will give leftists the space they need to work against fascism. Just don’t ask them what that actually entails, or what they’ve been doing since 2020 and 2016 when that talking point was also deployed. Nor should you ask how that can be true when the dems have been actively quashing free speech since last October, going so far as to legally codify dissent as anti-semitic “hatred”. It’s extremely self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing thinking that conveniently lets them defer any serious political action until after they know they’ve gotten what they wanted. I’ll remind you once again that that was what these same libs said in 2020 and I think we all know that they’ve pissed away all that time buying into poli-tainment as usual instead of “preparing” as they put it. I’m going to just start asking “buying time for what?” because I genuinely have no idea what they mean.

Ok. I don’t know who that is.

Duly noted.

I really have no idea

Yeah, it sucks but we’re not therapists or priests. We’re leftists. We can’t give them absolution for the despair they feel about the fact that their way of life is threatened, or the guilt they feel about choosing to live in denial. Which is what I honestly think they’re looking for when they do the “well what DO we do except vote?!?1” thing. I had to hit rock bottom a couple times before deciding to change the way I think and dispose of old ideology so I guess that’s what it’s going to have to take before they maybe open their minds.

The contradictions are sharp enough now that simply acknowledging the terrible things the dems do/have done the past 4 years can provoke a full-blown chimp out. Trump Would Do Worse makes up the vast amount majority of everything I hear from them whenever they pester those like us who can no longer stomach the rat race. I think the reason they’re so aggro this cycle is because deep down they know that they don’t really have a leg to stand on beyond bluanon crap. They can’t accept that the fact that you simply can’t claim to be anti-cop and anti-genocide and then not only vote for them, not only stump for them, but also piss and moan when we refuse to. It stresses them out to address that contradiction and call it out for what it is, self-interested fascist apologia. This is what happens when your only perception of what fascism is comes from Spielberg movies and other holocaust oppression porn.

If I were you I would probably either ignore them or corner them if you’re already stuck in a conversation and ask point blank if non-American lives are worth sacrificing to them to get what they want: Trump crying on election day so they can gloat and over-post about it for the next 4 years and go back to being blind, deaf, and dumb to geopolitics (whilst pissing and moaning ineffectually about SCOTUS and congress every day).

I have GOT to stop engaging with Kamala stans online. It just leaves me irritable and distracted and demoralized for the rest of the day.

I got into it today with one and even after sending them that long ass github post + others detailing all the cop shit she’s done, they still stick to their doomsday fantasy of Trump opening Le Fascist Death Camps when he wins, just like what was supposed to happen during his first term and didn’t. Their definition is fascism is just pop history shit. It doesn’t matter if you remind them that the minorities they love to hug and kiss and pretend to give a shit about have been saying America is fascist for a LONG time. They’ve just been lucky enough to have been exempt from it so it wasn’t “real” fascism. They had the NERVE to state that the dems will be more hospitable to “spreading class consciousness”. Sounds like the blind leading the blind to me. How convenient that “Trump would do worse” is essentially impossible to disprove (we can’t predict the future and you know if we could they’d deny that too) and applies basically as long as he still draws breath.

They will look you dead in the eye and tell you “you need to vote for the cop to prevent a police state.” You couldn’t write a more hamfisted example of American exceptionalism. Nobody can radicalize you further than a radlib. They make me sick.

Yeah, a lot of people think they’re dumb but I think they’re totally, fully aware of how full of shit they are. Why else would they spend so much time obsessing over losing their half of the duopoly? The DNC knows they have the easiest, cushiest job in the world and spoilers threaten that job security. Being a politician in a lib democracy is like being chased by a bear; you don’t have to be the fastest, you just have to not be the slowest.

it looks like one of those amalgamation pictures of every man in scandinavia made into an average