The government restricts citizens access to the Internet (among other things). I have talked to people from Russia, people from China, etc online. But I have never talked to someone from North Korea and that is a pretty big red flag for me.

And how many people from the DPRK have you actually tried to speak to? There are many in China and many in Russia, some as naturalised citizens, not to mention tens of thousands work officially in Africa.

You seem to accept that information about the DPRK is unreliable, but rather than allow this to create a position of neutrality in yourself you seem to instead default to vibes. The problem with defaulting to vibes is that those are specifically what propaganda is effective at manipulating. The vibes about the DPRK that you have are entirely a construction of western media and comment sections.

When I don’t know about something the first thing I do is take myself to the most neutral position possible - “I don’t know”. That is the starting point from which facts should be fed.

Hello @cole@lemdro.id you seem to have conveniently ignored my response?

Does every american have equally valid input on america and its politics?

When the next person says “I know someone from Britain and they said London is a no go zone” should I take them automatically seriously? Should I take their opinion on migrants and small boats seriously or should I maybe do some more serious investigation?

You dated a Korean, so what? Why should anyone take this one person’s take over serious investigation of the matter?

EVERYWHERE has its problems.

And yes, that is the DPRK too.

Sure, I don’t deny that. The issue here is what are they? You don’t know. I’ve actually visited and I could talk about some, but they’d be quite different to what you would talk about I suspect.

I’ve dated a Korean and been to Korea which has influenced me quite a lot.

Koreans in the south typically react with surprise whenever anyone on the left refers to what the US did in Korea as a genocide. Most of them have barely any knowledge of the five “republics” before the existing one, the sixth. Unless your partner was a trade unionist within the ROK I generally wouldn’t trust them to know what they’re talking about, much like I don’t trust the average liberal or magat to know what they’re talking about when it comes to the US, its history of barbarism or how it interacts with the world today. The trade unionists within ROK however do know their shit, I’ve spoken to a few of them and they’re cool comrades (but are legally not allowed to say they are)

if you can’t admit the obvious problems with the DPRK

The problems you’ve only ever absorbed through the lens of extremely dubious western media reporting whose sources for reporting come from either the CIA or NIS(formerly KCIA but renamed to make it less obvious the south is an occupied state) ?

You say “obvious” the same way the Dothraki say “It is known”. You consider this information obvious because a lot of people say it, you never consider whether a lot of people only say it because they too see a lot of other people saying it. You do not know the facts at all.

Calling anyone “insane” is always ableism.

You are using mental illness as an insult.

Just like calling anyone gay as an insult is always homophobic.

At this point nothing will stop me having a visceral negative reaction to AI being added to any product after literally every single other implementation in literally every other product has been annoying fucking dogshit. It could be the best thing ever and I’d still react negatively because I never want to hear the god damn word again.

China is super xenophobic

This is really really not true. Anyone that has actually visited China or engages regularly with Chinese people knows it’s not really true. It’s the kind of shit people who don’t question anything see in a reddit comment and then accept as fact because it confirms racist biases you already have that you’ve not had questioned or self-examined within yourself.

You should question this. You should re-examine this view. You should self-crit. You’re talking about the largest marxist country in the world, where marx is taught in schools and universities, where a marxist-leninist party leads, and where the established ideology of internationalism continues to progress. It’s just so utterly out of touch with what China actually is.

https://youtu.be/WNPKRjNEZ5E

Hexbear existed 2 years before everything else? Fucking wild. This loser’s account is literally 3 years younger than my hexbear account and 2.5 years younger than my Lemmy.ml one and he thinks we’re the late ones?

The only “ruining” I’m doing here is ruining his bullshit fuckoff attempt to associate lgbt and gender with being a corporate thing, it’s fucking nonsensical. Dude deserves to lose teeth.

Eat my ass

If you think I would read this shit after that first sentence you’re a fucking idiot

This is an absolutely garbage take. “Anonymous” defaults to male in everyone’s mind because patriarchy is the basis of our society. Claiming everyone should just be “Anonymous” is a male supremacist and exclusionary of everything else position to take.

2million people were victims of american murderers. The americans like to forget that their foreign policy and behaviour of their military is basically identical to the IDF.

The YPG are the largest armed faction of the SDF, they’ve been working with the US for a while to steal Syria’s oil but this is a new level of yikes

More anarchist concentration camps.

Stop with the “one of us europeans” bollocks.

I’m from europe and this post is 100% accurate.

“Dictatorship” doesn’t mean the same thing when Marx uses it vs what you understand the word to mean. Marx is talking about a dictatorship of CLASS. IE a large group of people within society. In liberal democracy the “ruling class” are the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the billionaires and millionaires. They are the ruling class because when they led the revolutions to overthrow feudalism they designed the new system so that they would be the ruling class. That’s how it works. A dictatorship of CLASS.

Marx calls for exactly the same thing. A revolution that overthrows the current ruling class and installs a new ruling class. When the bourgeoisie overthrew the monarchs and their aristocracy they installed themselves as the ruling class, Marx calls for overthrowing the bourgeoisie and installing the proletariat as the new ruling class.

This isn’t a downgrade to democracy it is an UPGRADE to democracy. The current system only produces the results that the bourgeoisie wants. Socialism on the other hand with the proletariat in charge produces the results that the proletariat want.

My interpretation of it is essentially Lenin and Mao’s interpretation of it, just with the benefits of historical hindsight.

No it isn’t because your description above is fucking wrong. I’m telling you what Lenin and Mao’s interpretation is literally right now. This is basic as fuck stuff.

Who controls that dictatorship has all the effective powers of a dictatorship and has the ability to make life for the people they rule hell.

You’re acting like socialist countries don’t objectively provide a better quality of life than capitalist countries when compared at an equal level of development lmao. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/

Your understanding of any of these topics is incredibly vulgar. A warped and contorted understanding that you’ve only learned through extremely passive engagement with the topic.

Yeah so you’re avoiding everything I said and injecting a completely different topic that you also don’t understand.

Marx’s critique isn’t with democracy it’s with bourgeoise-democracy. You would understand this if you understood even the basic bare minimum about marxist theory. All you are doing here is demonstrating that you do not understand the difference between what marxists refer to as a bourgeoise-democracy and what marxists refer to as a proletarian-democracy. Or if you prefer, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie vs the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx’s “opposition to democracy” that you are utilising for bullshit propaganda here is opposition to using the mechanisms of bourgeoise-democracy to achieve socialism (because they’re designed for the bourgeoisie and to produce outcomes the bourgeoisie want) and instead advocates for revolution to destroy that dictatorship-of-class and install a new democracy of the workers, a new dictatorship of class but one instead run by the working class (the vast majority) instead of the former ruling class (the bourgeoisie, the vast minority).

These are incredibly basic 101 concepts that, if you were a communist as you claim, you would already be aware of and understand. You were not a communist. You haven’t even read a pamphlet like the manifesto, let alone the Critique Gotha Programme that you’re linking to. I have though. And to anyone that actually HAS read these things that you’re pretending to have read you look like and absolute clown who is winging it.

I’m saying I don’t believe you’ve ever engaged with communism. I don’t believe you’ve read a single book. I don’t believe you’ve even read a single pamphlet. I don’t think you could give me a simplified breakdown of what historical materialism is and I don’t believe you could tell me what the 5 basic classes are that marxists define, along with a simple 1 sentence description of their scientific definition. I don’t think you were a communist and I don’t think you know anything about the “historical record of communism” beyond what you have passively consumed from the far right wing fuckwads that you’ve surrounded yourself with and allowed to rot your brain. I’m saying that the confident manner in which you bullshit about these things is a severe personal failing.

All of these are 101 things that anyone who has actually engaged with the topic of socialism for more than like 1 single week would be able to answer instantly and easily.

I’m saying that your political opinions and knowledge of history is based on vibes that you have attained from the massive quantity of propaganda you uncritically consume and not from any actual meaningful knowledge.

Clear enough?

This is what happens when everything you know is based on vibes instead of actually reading any theory or history from primary source historians instead of third.

They never engage with it because they know damn well that they have no excuse. Rather than engage in something that they are completely caught out on they resort to non-engagement.

Ironically this strategy of online rhetoric is literally in the handbook from the 77th brigade that was leaked, British military psyops. However I suspect these people just learned it naturally from many bad experiences with how that went for them. This picture from their webpage makes me laugh every time because it’s literally :

And again, all I have done is said that I support Ukraine. I also happen to be a socialist. Why is that so hard for you to wrap your head around?

Because you don’t support the people, you support the bourgeois state and your position boils down to “I am willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to protect it.”

This is not socialist ideology. This is first and foremost nationalism, which variant of it I am as yet uncertain as you’ve said nothing about what your “socialism” entails. I am unable to assess whether you’re a nazi or a plain old liberal that pretends to be a socialist by saying you like welfare while still completely and totally supporting capitalism and liberal institutional design to maintain the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. The german gothic aesthetic you choose for your username certainly doesn’t help the suspicions I have over what you really are though, literally retvrn.