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Off Topic => General Discussion => Topic started by: Obviousman on September 03, 2017, 02:48:31 AM
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I'm wondering what peoples thoughts are on the North Korean situation?
In general, I support economic sanctions and diplomatic methods. I have misgivings, though, in this case.
1. Economic sanctions - for the most part - tend to hurt the people rather than the leadership. The "Supreme Leader" won't be going without. The DPRK people, though, will face even more shortages.
2. I have heard some quarters say that "the people" will rise up against Kim Jong-un if things get too bad. I say this is complete bull. They are an oppressed people who cannot remove such an entrenched regime without external help.
3. We normally talk about stopping developments but we are now facing a situation where if some type of action is not taken in the near future, we face an "unstable" regime that has the ability to project WMD-type power at an increasing distance.
What do people think?
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It's a dangerous situation with a madman in control in North Korea and his equal in control in the US. The point on sanctions is well founded and the best that could be achieved from that would be some form of uprising. That said, the population is "so" downtrodden it is a very unlikely scenario. In all, the likely hood of some military intervention increases daily, with the most likely option some form of strategic takeout of their nuclear capability. It is probably the most destabilising situation since the Cuban missile crisis and I can see no easy resolution path. The best hope must be in dialogue with the Chinese, in the hope that they can bring some pressure to bear on the regime.
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Its a dangerous situation that we've got ourselves into.
We've got a megalomaniac fat buffoon with a bad haircut with his finger on the nuclear button. Meanwhile in North Korea they got Kim Jong Un... ;D
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Its a dangerous situation that we've got ourselves into.
We've got a megalomaniac fat buffoon with a bad haircut with his finger on the nuclear button. Meanwhile in North Korea they got Kim Jong Un... ;D
If we weren't able to laugh about it, we'd all be crying... ;D
However, I'm sure there are multiple safeguards in place to prevent the US President from unilaterally launching an attack. I'm not so sure those same protections exist in North Korea...
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However, I'm sure there are multiple safeguards in place to prevent the US President from unilaterally launching an attack.
I'm not so sure about that. From what I've heard there aren't many restrictions on a President's ability to launch nukes because there wouldn't necessarily be time to discuss it or take a vote.
I think the "checks & balances" in this case should have been the voters, who shouldn't have elected an irrational madman in the first place.
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One part of me says that the rest of the world needs to do "something" about this idiot before its too late and he really can strike anywhere in the world
Another part of me is horrified by the implications of just what that "sometihng" would need to be.
One thing I am reasonaby sure of is that the US Navy will have a number of their Ohio Class ballistic missile submarines in the area. If DPRK launches a nuke strike on Japan or Guam, the retaliation wiill be swift and decisive.
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[...] The best hope must be in dialogue with the Chinese, in the hope that they can bring some pressure to bear on the regime.
China sure is waiting until late in the day for that.
Paranoidly I think the Chinese are enviously eyeing the USA's position as a superpower and will not step up to help in a meaningful manner but rather they are hoping for the US to get mired in yet another conflict, hastening their UK and USSR-like decline into Great Power status.
<Rhetorical question goes here ---> Why has China allowed the DPRK to develop, test, and perhaps deploy nuclear weapons and ICBMs?
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There was an expert about Korea on The Daily Show last night. Worth watching, if you can.
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China sure is waiting until late in the day for that.
Paranoidly I think the Chinese are enviously eyeing the USA's position as a superpower and will not step up to help in a meaningful manner but rather they are hoping for the US to get mired in yet another conflict, hastening their UK and USSR-like decline into Great Power status.
<Rhetorical question goes here ---> Why has China allowed the DPRK to develop, test, and perhaps deploy nuclear weapons and ICBMs?
On a program here in the UK it has been stated that further sanctions (if China were to apply them as well as the west) would lead to the collapse of the regime. Apparently China would rather have a stable NK with nuclear weapons than a chaotic collapse of the current regime.
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To be honest, would you WANT an unstable regime with nukes? Another part of it might be that NK's human rights violations make the PRC look good in comparison.
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However, I'm sure there are multiple safeguards in place to prevent the US President from unilaterally launching an attack.
I'm not so sure about that. [...] I think the "checks & balances" in this case should have been the voters, who shouldn't have elected an irrational madman in the first place.
A majority of the voters voted for Mrs. Clinton. I think (hope?) this fiasco shines a very bright light on the Electoral College, which as I understand it was included in the election process precisely to stop such buffoonery - a way for a small elite to pick whomever they want to pick, ignoring the wishes of the voters. Irony at its finest.
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To be honest, would you WANT an unstable regime with nukes? Another part of it might be that NK's human rights violations make the PRC look good in comparison.
Do you really consider the present DPRK regime "stable"? I suppose there is going to be some discussion as to what we mean by "stable".
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One part of me says that the rest of the world needs to do "something" about this idiot before its too late and he really can strike anywhere in the world
Another part of me is horrified by the implications of just what that "sometihng" would need to be.
I think we have little choice but to live with it.
In terms of military action, no country in the world, and possibly all of the countries put together, are in a position to replace the US government forcibly. Maybe that will change one day, but right now, the "regime change" solution is unthinkable.
Economic sanctions? The US is a big country, and foreign trade is a relatively small part of its GDP. Sure, trade sanctions would hurt, but would it be enough? Look at how sanctioned Iran and North Korea have been, for years, and it hasn't dissuaded them from pursuing the things that are getting them embargoed. Besides, this idiot largely campaigned on a promise to put a trade embargo on the US; so how threatening would it be to him for the rest of the world to threaten to do to the US what he has promised to do to the US himself?
Diplomacy? The US isn't an advice-taking sort of country at the best of times, and even less so under its current Führer. Their attitude is, we tell the rest of the world what to do, and they do it, or face a range of sanctions up to and including military action and overthrow of their governments. I don't think politely asking the US to behave better will have much effect.
Bad as the situation is, I think we have little choice but to live with it.
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Do you really consider the present DPRK regime "stable"? I suppose there is going to be some discussion as to what we mean by "stable".
As the investment people like to say, "past performance is no guarantee of future results", but historically the regime has been remarkably stable.
The problem with more repressive regimes is, if you don't let the steam out of the boiler every once a while, they eventually blow - sometimes quite suddenly.
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Another part of it might be that NK's human rights violations make the PRC look good in comparison.
Human rights activists are pretty uniform in placing North Korea at the top of their "bad" list. The percentage of people incarcerated is comparable to the US, but their judicial system makes the US look good by comparison.
But North Korea has very little global reach. Obviously they're a huge threat to South Korea, and to a lesser extent, to Japan. Possibly they are a threat to the US now, depending on how accurately they can aim their missiles. Other than that - well, if you ask people around the world of whom they're afraid, the country they usually mention is not North Korea.
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A majority of the voters voted for Mrs. Clinton. I think (hope?) this fiasco shines a very bright light on the Electoral College, which as I understand it was included in the election process precisely to stop such buffoonery - a way for a small elite to pick whomever they want to pick, ignoring the wishes of the voters. Irony at its finest.
I think that's shining a light in the wrong place.
Hillary Clinton's vote share was the lowest popular vote share since her husband in 1992, when a third-party candidate took almost 19% of the vote. Her margin of victory in the popular vote was the smallest share since Gore's in 2000. I'd have a hard time keeping a straight face saying 46.2% is "a small elite", but 48.3% is "the wishes of the voters". The thing to shine a light on here is not the electoral college, which really only makes a difference, sometimes, in very close races; the question that should be asked is why this wasn't a blowout in the style of Reagan in 1984, Nixon in 1972, or Johnson in 1964 (the last having decisively defeated Hillary Clinton's preferred candidate, Goldwater).
Have a good hard look at the candidate the Republicans ran. Listen to him talk. The Democratic candidate was barely able to eke out a 2% popular vote victory over that. If the election were decided by popular vote share, then perhaps the Democratic candidate would have won. (We don't really know for sure, because the candidates would have campaigned differently, and the voter turnout patterns would have been different.) But if the Democrats hadn't run an embarrassingly inept campaign, this would have been an historic blowout, and it wouldn't matter how the votes were counted. If you barely manage to beat Donald Trump by 2%, and think the problem is the electoral college, I'm going to have to disagree.
A lot of people voted for Donald Trump. A minority, to be sure, but still a lot. The reason the Republicans in congress are being so cowardly about challenging a president most of them despise nearly as much as the Democrats do, is because they're afraid of that 46.2%. If his vote share were a "small elite", Donald Trump would be even more of a laughing stock than he already is - the Republicans would defy him brazenly, whenever they felt like it, without worrying about the consequences. But they're absolutely petrified of his voters, precisely because there are a lot of them. Almost as many as Clinton's voters.
I think instead of worrying about small stuff like the electoral college, the Dems ought to be thinking about why they failed so spectacularly to connect with so many voters who instead chose - again, look at him, words fail me at this point. An historical feat of incompetence - Trump took states that Republicans hadn't won for decades. In my opinion, where she failed is in connecting convincingly with voters' sense of greed. Few (including Donald Trump) can match her track record in killing foreigners, and Americans love that. She's pretty good at spouting idiotic self-serving nationalistic bluster, but probably Trump has a slight edge on that one. But, she really fails to connect with a lot of blue-collar voters' sense of greed. Many of these people are outraged - they are in the top quartile of the global income distribution and are angry and bitter that they aren't even higher, despite having no obvious skills that the other three-fourths of the world don't have. Many of them are unable to live the same lifestyles as their parents or grandparents, and feel that they should be part of an hereditary aristocracy that should have guaranteed spots close to the top of the economic pyramid - Chinese workers with identical skills are not part of this aristocracy, and should go get stuffed. Clinton's record as a somewhat inconsistent free-trader probably hurt her on this count, but probably more than that, she was just viewed as part of an establishment that hasn't done much to satisfy blue-collar greed for decades. She went up against an insurgent candidate who promised rainbows and unicorns for everyone, and who replaced the subtle, hidden sort of racism more typical of Democratic protectionists with completely open, unapologetic racism. The "deplorables" decided he was even more deplorable than she was.
Clinton must have done pretty well appealing to American voters' bloodlust and hatred of foreigners, and somewhat less well appealing to their sense of self-righteousness. But many of those whose greed and sense of entitlement has been disappointed, for decades now, did not see much merit in her. Barack Obama was a master at this - nearly all the economic gains during Mr. Hope and Change's administration went to the people at the very, very top of the US economic pyramid, but few since Bill Clinton have exuded fake "I feel your pain" empathy as well as he did. Which is apparently all you need in the US - just appeal to people's sense of greed, whether or not you are subsequently able to deliver. Hillary Clinton absolutely sucked at that. She did not "feel your pain".
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One part of me says that the rest of the world needs to do "something" about this idiot before its too late and he really can strike anywhere in the world
Another part of me is horrified by the implications of just what that "sometihng" would need to be.
I think we have little choice but to live with it.
In terms of military action, no country in the world, and possibly all of the countries put together, are in a position to replace the US government forcibly. Maybe that will change one day, but right now, the "regime change" solution is unthinkable.
Ahem, I was talking about the other idiot... Kim Jong Il
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Ahem, I was talking about the other idiot... kim jong il
Oh, I see.
Well, I think he is undoubtedly ruthless and brutal, but I am not so sure about "idiot". I think he'd be an idiot not to want nuclear weapons. Look at what happened to Qaddafi. Or Hussein. If they had nuclear weapons, they might still be alive today. What the US and the other anti-regime countries are doing in Syria - would they be doing that if Bashir Assad had nuclear weapons?
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Also, I think we're both talking about Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-il died in 2011.
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[...] shines a very bright light on the Electoral College, which as I understand it was included in the election process precisely to stop such buffoonery - a way for a small elite to pick whomever they want to pick, ignoring the wishes of the voters.
Hillary Clinton's vote share was the lowest popular vote share since her husband in 1992, when a third-party candidate took almost 19% of the vote. Her margin of victory in the popular vote was the smallest share since Gore's in 2000. I'd have a hard time keeping a straight face saying 46.2% is "a small elite", but 48.3% is "the wishes of the voters".
The thing to shine a light on here is not the electoral college, which really only makes a difference, sometimes, in very close races [....]
If you barely manage to beat Donald Trump by 2%, and think the problem is the electoral college, I'm going to have to disagree.
I don't mean that 46.2% or 48.3% is an elite, large or small, but rather that the electoral college is in itself a small elite, with the power to nominate someone to the office of POTUS, without being bound to the outcome of the popular voice. Contitutionally they are a bulwark against someone manifestly unsuitable for the position.
I agree that Clinton blew it and think you are right about why the Democrats lost and the ongoing dynamics vis a vis the hard numbers of the substantial Trump die-hard-core.
I agree with your analysis of Clinton's (and by extension the Democratic party's) failures as a candidate. I remember the sudden and stark realization of how much she was disliked by around half of the population.