I have little reason to weigh in on the DPRK specifically because it makes no difference to my positions in practice. Even if retired US army lieutenant-colonel Roger Cavazos’ allegations are true, my stance is the same: just leave them alone.

The US government has a very long record of orchestrating regime change in countries across the globe, but I’m not familiar with any case where the result was actually an improvement for the people who live there. It’s also incredibly inconsistent and hypocritical for the US to take such an aggressive stance against the DPRK while buddying up to countries like Saudi Arabia which make absolutely zero pretence of being a democracy. If I were going to entertain the notion that US policy is in any way driven by benevolence and promoting democracy, then obviously step 1 would be to not actively give weapons and military support and even perform military attacks on behalf of a literal monarchy.

Why is it that the DPRK and Saudi Arabia are treated so differently? Because the Saudis provide the US with access to their country’s natural resources, while the DPRK doesn’t. This is a far more consistent through-line that explains US foreign policy much better than any concern with “human rights” or “promoting democracy.” When they do talk about promoting democracy, it’s opportunistic, it’s just because someone who is standing in the way of the expansion of the empire can plausibly be labeled as undemocratic.

Even in cases like Afghanistan, which is controlled by Al Qaida and clearly undemocratic, I see no reason to support sanctions or other forms of aggression towards them, because I have no interest in supporting imperialistic expansionism. If a country is just trying to be left alone, why would I support going there and fucking with it?

When the US refuses to invite Chinese election observers to oversee it’s elections, is that “suppression of information?” That’s nonsense.

The reason that a country wouldn’t invite observers isn’t that they’re trying to suppress information, it’s that they don’t want to give another country the authority to delegitimize them.

What’s actually far more authoritarian is this idea that every country in the world needs to bend the knee and allow the West to come into their country and declare whether they are a legitimate democracy or not.

Suppose there’s a country that’s a legitimate democracy, but they have such valuable and plentiful natural resources that any major power they invited in would seek to delegitimize them in order to seize control of said resources. Because you assume that they’re “authoritarian” for not inviting in a major power to oversee their elections, you are ruling out the possibility that such a state could exist.

What this means in practice is that you’re giving the West a justification for aggression towards any country on the planet. If they refuse to invite observers, they must be authoritarian and illegitimate, but if they do invite observers, then those observers can simply declare the government illegitimate anyway.

What that works out to in practice is nothing short of chauvanism, imperialism, and world domination. It isn’t a real, objective metric, because it’s only obfuscating the real metric which is just how well a country gets along with the West. A country being on bad terms with the West does not definitionally make it undemocratic, but by your standards it would be.

Virtually every country in the world has some form of elections, outside of a handful of literal monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. What’s more debatable is how legitimate they are and which metrics we use to evaluate that.

Often a country is considered undemocratic if it doesn’t allow international observers, but of course that requires a degree of trust, as it gives those observers the power to delegitimize the elections. Furthermore, the idea that observers from country A would be legitimate and that country B should be expected to let them in already carries a whole bunch of presumptions about which countries are and are not democratic, which winds up being circular. The US, for example, is never expected to invite international observers to legitimize it’s elections.

If you really stop and think critically about how to evaluate elections from the outside, without just assuming the answer based on vibes and presumptions, it’s a very challenging and complicated question. An American may take it as a given that China isn’t democratic while their system is, but a Chinese person could easily feel the opposite. Without establishing clear metrics, it would be impossible to evaluate who is correct from a neutral and objective standpoint. Even if a metric is agreed on, people might have different assessments based on looking at different information.

Personally, when possible I prefer to avoid arguing over it when possible because without establishing a metric it’s impossible to discuss productively, and if you try to establish a clear metric, people will just immediately call you a tankie or red fascist because of course everyone knows bad country is bad, and how dare you try to examine things from a neutral point of view instead of agreeing with what “everyone” already “knows.” I’ve also found that it’s better not to talk shit about random countries I’ve never been to and which don’t really affect my life in any meaningful way.

Having said that, if you’re actually interested in learning more about the subject in good faith, you might be interested in this Luna Oi video where she discusses how the government of Vietnam actually functions and collects feedback from regular people, or the one where she describes how elections work.

That’s not how anyone uses it at all.

I mean yes, people love to scream about “authoritarianism” whenever a government they dislike does stuff, but there is absolutely a moral component to that accusation.

Virtually every leftist project anywhere in the world has made literacy an incredibly high priority. Cuba’s literacy rate went from around 70% under capitalism to 99.8% under socialism. Here’s a fucking NYT article from 1976 titled, “North Vietnam Puts the Emphasis on Literacy,” which says, “Since 1958 the North Vietnamese have been stressing complementary education, a fundamental expansion of the literacy campaign. . . Complementary education remains an integral part of North Vietnam’s educational system.” Vietnam went from sub 20% literacy under capitalism to 96% under socialism. For reference, US literacy is at 79%.

Trying to pass off leftist projects as unconcerned with literacy of all thing is one of the wildest and most bizzarely delusional claims I’ve ever seen anyone make on here, which is a high bar considering how many people just spew out whatever BS sounds good knowing they can dismiss anyone who fact checks them as a “tankie.”

If anything, the fact that so-called “authoritarian” leftist projects were so concerned with massive education campaigns, even while dirt poor and even in the midst of fighting for survival should at least give y’all pause regarding the typical, “red fascist” bullshit. It won’t, because you can just choose to ignore that pesky reality in favor of your ideological preconceptions, but who knows, maybe the NYT and Miami University are just communist propaganda.

Hi, welcome to the conversation, you should probably read the things I already explained.

The liberal understanding of democracy (that you’re operating on) is constraining the power of the state, while ignoring class conflict. The Marxist understanding is a state where the people have succeeded in class conflict to the point that they are able to wield the state against the bourgeoisie, while keeping them out of power. The fact that the communist party has secured power is not somehow a strike against Vietnam, from the Marxist view.

It’s always funny to hear this scaremongering over “one party states.” I live in the US, where I have a choice between one party that represents the interests of billionaires and another party that represents the interests of billionaires but also hates gay people. When I vote for a third party that’s actually in line with my interests, everyone hates me for it. And you know what they say? “The primary is where you’re supposed to choose who you like, but then you have to get behind them, to stop the Republicans!” Well, even single-party states still have primary processes, and in a case like Vietnam, you don’t even have to worry about the threat of an entity like the Republican party coming to power, thanks to the structure of the government suppressing the political power of the right.

If a one-party state is so horrible, it implies that the Republican party (and similar parties in other countries) existing is somehow a good thing, somehow fulfilling a necessary condition for a country to be a “democracy.” Even though it’s controlled by a tiny fraction of society and uses every ounce of political power it has to subvert and oppose popular policies!

With that being said, you don’t even have to be a member of the communist party of Vietnam to run and hold office in the country. You don’t have to be a part of any party, you can run as an independent, and people do.

And yes, ditto for Cuba, I am “seriously” calling it a democracy.

Vietnam and Cuba would probably be some of the best examples I think.

In the West we’ve been getting 50/50 splits on voting

Close elections are a fairly meaningless metric, especially when all candidates agree on certain key issues.

whereas out east

“Out east?” Where? There’s tons of different countries with all kinds of different governments in what’s classically considered the East. There isn’t even a Comintern to generalize about, but it doesn’t seem to slow you down at all.

Have you actually studied the government structure of, say, Laos? I doubt it. So, where did you get this information you’re confidently repeating about it? Mind-boggling how liberals will just say shit. Lazy stereotyping at best.

The Marxist view is that capitalist countries are anti-democratic because the bourgeois class has the power to both sway elections and exert influence over people’s lives outside of the political sphere. True democracy means a state that actually represents the people’s interests, which in turn requires suppressing the political influence wielded by the rich.

The liberal view is that the state’s capacity for repression is uniquely dangerous, and so freedom just means being able to act without interference from the state (not from private entities), and what determines whether a state is free or not is whether it adheres to certain principles. In that view, a Marxist state that represses the bourgeoisie is violating the principle against political repression, and is therefore not democratic.

On the other hand, Marxists point to things like capitalist states repressing strikes to show that in those countries, the state is also willing to act on behalf of the people who control it, and that that this whole idea of a state being constrained by “principles” or “norms” and somehow being independent of class conflict is nonsense and just not how politics works. This is because Marxists view ideas as being the products of material conditions and material interests, and so any such “norms” or “principles” are only as strong as whatever class interests are invested in upholding them.

For the vast majority of people, no they didn’t.

Did you know? You can change your gender at any time by going to the OPTIONS MENU. Normally it’s a lot of work!

The three words?

• Git reckt bozzo

Curiously, written in English.

The other person was being sarcastic.

“If you were a doorknob, I’d start drinking heavily… so that way we can get turnt together.”

Religion, famous for encouraging you to critically examine your beliefs.

I’ve fallen off a bit on it, but Go. The amount of complexity that emerges from simple rules, the aesthetic forms that emerge, as if both players are collaborating on a work of art. To an experienced player, each stone has a meaning, in it’s own language, and you can almost hear them speaking. There are so many ways to approach the game, a player’s personality reveals itself on the Go board, and any flaw in one’s way of thinking, anything you need to work on, comes out on the board like looking into a mental mirror.

I’m actually heading out to a tournament now, and I’m super rusty but I think I’m starting to rediscover my interest in it.

And once again, this is an argument against factory farming and inhumane practices, not farming and domestication in general.

Yes, because that’s what 99% of the decisions of 99% of people involve. Just because it’s theoretically possible to imagine a situation where these things are done ethically doesn’t mean that’s actually an option that is practically available.

I am not particularly interested in criticizing small farms with relatively ethical practices. My position, from my original comment, is, “But surely in the present state of affairs where that treatment is not the norm, veganism is the only ethical approach, no?”

Is there a hypothetical situation where it’s ethical to kill an innocent person?Suppose some space aliens say they’ll destroy the world with a giant laser if you don’t. That hypothetical does not change the fact that not killing innocent people is still a good general rule in the vast majority of situations you’ll actually encounter in life. To throw out all reservations against murder just because of that hypothetical would be making a rule from the exception.

Likewise, I’m sure you can imagine a hypothetical situation where it’s ethical to consume animal products, but unless that situation is an actual, real thing in your life, that you’ve looked into to verify is the case (which the example of eggs in Germany makes me skeptical of), then what you’re doing is throwing out a generally good rule based on an unrealistic hypothetical, just because following the rule would be inconvenient.

What about wool, honey, milk, eggs.

Again, it’s a matter of whether you’re looking at things in the abstract, or in terms of how things actually work.

Take eggs for example. Eggs aren’t just a byproduct of having chickens around, there are specific breeds that are dedicated to egg-laying. Because only a small number of males are needed for reproduction, most male chicks are put on a conveyor and ground to death. While I can’t claim to be an expert in German laws, I did find that German courts have allowed this practice.

It’s a similar story with milk. Because dairy cows are a different breed, male calves are typically slaughtered at birth. Dairy cows are kept in a constant state of pregnancy, suffer the stress of being separated from their young, and are killed as soon as the milk slows down, typically a quarter of their natural lifespans. Dairy is also similarly bad for the environment as beef, and there are widely available plant-based substitutes like oat milk that taste just as good, if not better.

No matter what animal product we’re talking about, maximization of profits is almost always going to involve cruelty, environmental harm, and selective breeding to the point that any expectations about natural by-products aren’t true. Even with regulations (which can be difficult to enact effectively), there are tradeoffs: limiting cruelty can increase environmental impact (as well as the price). If animal products were appropriately priced based on offsetting the harm they cause, they would be unable to compete against plant-based alternatives.

The way I see it, the tiny fraction of meat that’s produced ethically should go to the tiny fraction of people with dietary restrictions that require meat.

The vast majority of people are not going out to investigate small farms to see if their practices are ethical. They are buying meat from a grocery store, and if they consider it at all, they might pick one with a label slapped on like “organic,” completely meaningless thanks to lobbying.

Practically speaking, it is almost always a choice between torture products and nothing.

Labels like “organic” are essentially meaningless.