Watch the so-called “Communist” Party leaders decry this and crush it violently. Marx is rolling so much in his grave that if they attached a generator to him they could power half of China with the electricity
I don’t think they’ll be killed. Neither North Korea nor China are that stupid. I do think that they’ll be forced to work until they drop and paid nothing or paid a pittance, even by Chinese standards, with the bulk of the value of their labour being split between the company that they work for and the Chinese and North Korean states.
dude, they decided to have a little uprising and decapitated their boss (who in systems like china gets the job because of government connections), they have done a lot worse for a lot less
You’re a literal slave? You are not paid for the work you do? You work sleep work and nothing else? You are physically and mentally mistreated at work? Does your work make you suicidal? Are you unable to switch to a different job? Do you live under a dictatorial regime? Will you be shot and killed if you try to escape?
Yeah, I doubt you can honestly say yes to even a single one of those questions. Some of today’s work environments have issues, with a lot of them caused by companies, but a lot of them also caused by the likes of you who do want the perks and the money, but who just flat out refuse to do anything at all beyond complaining and talking about murdering those that did work hard.
I’ve been a low level employee, I’ve been dirt poor, I worked myself up over the years. I’ve had loads of shitty bosses, I’ve been (technically still am) a company owner, now I’m a C level director. I work hard, work responsibly, and try to do the best for all employees in my teams. Should I be murdered too?
With people like you it’s not the company that is a problem, you are the problem. Fix your own life before you start threatening those that you don’t like
So you’ve never received a salary, then? You always worked for free? Because if so, I think there in lies the problem. Go look for a job that is paid, and you’ll no longer be a slave. Problem solved. Next!
What dogma? That we should all contribute to society, and get something in return for that?
Do you understand the mental gymnastics you’re doing here? You literally use the pinnacle of capitalism and science, a mobile phone ( I presume, if not, a computer works too) to bitch about the evils of capitalism and how you want to get rid of it and how evil it is for allowing you to do this in the first place. Because yes, without capitalism, you would not have this phone. You would not have most of the things you take for granted.
I’m presuming here that you’re young, 15-25 or so, and that you still have a lot of facts to learn about this world. I’ll assume you didn’t learn much history because if you did you’d know that capitalism has a lot of issues, that can and should be resolved, but it’s a buttload better than the alternatives
Gal, chill. Take a dipirone or something. You can criticize the system from within the system. The feudal owners of the pitchforks and guillotines during the Revolution probably noted the irony, too, when they were brought in to weigh.
I have no problem with criticizing capitalism, it’s flawed and has many issues that need resolving.
I have a problem with the types that live in this fantasy world where communism is awesome (yeah it’s not) and where we’ll all go live where we want and have a garden with vegetables in our yard and live off those and it will all be awesome and we will never need capitalism again and we can all ignore real world facts forever, yay!
How about you actually read what I wrote and then try again, instead of just seeing something you don’t like, stop reading, and try to make some half assed witty response?
I suffered nothing, you’re the ones literally acting like capitalism is only slavery
Years ago, I took a job at a call center. These jobs paid, on average at the time, about 10 dollars an hour. Which was more than minimum wage, but not by much.
Jobs other than call center work for under educated, under experienced people in my city were really hard to find. The good employers were almost never hiring, hired from within, and outsourced the entry level stuff. The vast majority of available jobs to myself and ultimately the other 300 people that ended up going through that particular call center were customer service roles.
That industry is notoriously difficult to break out of. You’d say ‘just go find a different job.’ and yeah that’s good in theory. But everyone working those jobs is always looking for another job. No one takes a call center job and isn’t thinking about getting a better job. If those jobs were readily available, call center staff simply wouldn’t exist. These are jobs of last resort. A step up from flipping burgers.
The pay is barely enough to afford rent and groceries. That was years ago, it’s probably much worse now. I had roommates. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to afford much other than going to work and back and feeding myself, nevermind driving all over town trying to find another job.
Thing is at these jobs you’re infinitely replaceable. As desperate as you were when you took it, there are ten other people behind you, just as if not more desperate for work. They will literally hire people off the street and throw them in training within a day.
So not only can you not afford to lose this job, you can’t afford to speak up at this job. You can’t unionize, because mentioning it will get you fired on the spot, you can’t speak up about abusive situations, because HR will simply fire you. You can’t even report illegal practices.
So on to this particular call center job. This was basically just filling mail order prescriptions. Theoretically people would call in, tell someone what they’d needed, we’d click a few buttons and in a week they’d have a 90 day supply.
That’s not what happened. 95% of the calls we received were problems. Most of the day was spent either being screamed at, or pleaded with, with none of the tools we needed to actually address these problems. To add to this, we were constantly watched by management. Quality, supervisors, auditors, trainers, you name it. If they weren’t taking calls they were listening to calls. My record was 3 simultaneous people listening in to a single phone call while it was happening but I heard of more. Any deviation from our very strict rules meant immediate and swift correction from everyone that heard about it, every time they heard about it. That was the only feedback.
Because we were not trained for the type of work we were doing, this negative feedback was constant.
Add to that, they gave us a really bizarre schedule. No one started at the same time every day. No one had two days off in a row. You might start at 11 am one day and 630 am next. You can imagine, bathroom breaks were also tightly monitored and yes, more than one woman was fired because they were pregnant and peed too frequently.
All of this is to just provide some context you apparently sorely need.
I found more than one suicide note at that job. Generally hidden under keyboards. I know at least one woman did commit suicide while employed there, two others that committed suicide in the years following, still working similar jobs.
It’s important to know how trapped these jobs make you feel. Not only are you rarely ever actually able to help anyone, the company you’re working for is actively making shitty business decisions and counting on you to smooth it over for them. Your managers are under pressure to keep your call times low and your answered calls high, and that shit rolls down hill. You can’t just quit, you can’t easily find a different job, you can’t afford to do anything other than work and sleep.
So no, it’s not a dictatorship. But that’s not the fucking problem.
Maybe learn a little before you start talking about things you don’t understand? You’re literally parrotting nonsense statements that sound cool but mean nothing.
Wage slavery literally is an oxymoron but yeah, I’m the one spouting rhetoric. You don’t understand even the basic of what you wantzl, not how capitalism works.
And you are quite literally making shit up and call it an argument. Wage slave? really?
You are arguing that you kust want to sit and get shit for free? Is that it? Or are you one of those delusional ones that wants to make their own food on their own garden, and somehow believe that that will magically work, even though it obviously can’t?
There is a very realistic chance that I’m taller than you, and I’m very very much not angry. I’m slightly annoyed though by people spouting rhetoric whilst apparently not able to read highschool level English.
What part is it that you don’t understand? I’ll happily elaborate
Because it’s not a joke to Phoenixz. He’s just got the boot so far down his throat there’s no alternative. Reading his comment, it sounds like one of those people who owns a job not a business, and/or one of those people who thinks he’s now in the 1%s good graces now that he makes $100k/yr.
Somebody makes a valid argument and well, since we don’t know how to respond, we’ll just call it toxic capitalism.
Capitalism has issues, some severe, that can and must be fixed. Fee people will disagree there. You, however, are the type that actually believes that Communism is great and will solve all of our problems. Writing, probably, from your phone without realizing that that same phone is in your hands because of capitalism (ands butt loads of science, also supported by capitalism), just like the pants on your butt and the food in your belly and the medicine that has or will save your life.
You want capitalism to support a strong social system that gives you all the perks like free healthcare, free education, maybe even universal income.
What do you mean? Communist podcasts I listened to consider them Communist, Internet search says the BBC says they are Communist.
Edit: you all like to downvote instead of having a conversation. Everybody hasn’t studied every subject, try sharing a little of what you know instead of discouraging discussion
You make some good points. They most definitely have currency and a lower working class with an upper government official class. I would not consider them communist at all. North Korea is just an authoritarian capitalistic hellhole, that tries to sprinkle in one or two socialist policies to maintain the illusion of pursuing communism.
I see in reading more that NK is pretty far from communist. But I think people have imagined communism to be something that it never could be. I don’t see how society could exist without money. I see that Soviets thought that eventually they wouldn’t need money but I think this is unrealistic and I don’t see that existence of money in a society could be used to determine if it’s communist or not. .
Exactly, satisfying the highest standard is not a criteria for categorisation. It’s the same as saying USA isn’t capitalistic because governament regulations are still a thing
Marx said that socialism is the gateway for communism. Bring the means of prouction to the working class, then youd be able to make the next transition to communism.
In any case, there are no societies currently that meet the primary criteria for being called socialist OR communist.
This is the problem with people promoting socialism. They tend to compare idealized version of socialism with real version of capitalism. And such comparison inevitably leads to unrealistic conclusions.
The problem is that real version of socialism is what you see in China or Cuba or former USSR. The argument with “we haven’t done socialism right” is the same as “we haven’t done capitalism right”.
I have been born in socialist country and to this day I can see negative consequences of that era. And the obvious reason why ideal socialism can’t exist - people. Same reason why capitalism sucks.
Edit: To people downvoting me: Your fake internet points have no meaning, but I love the irony of it. You can’t even keep the illusion of classlessness and equality in an internet thread, yet you are somehow convinced you could run a country like that. You’d be locking people for life in your communist paradise just for having different opinion and you know it.
Lenin himself called the system he instituted state capitalism, it was supposed to be a transitory state as Marx said (and the Bolsheviks were very big on historical materialism) that first you have capitalism, develop productivity, then communism would follow naturally as a consequence of resolving capitalism’s inherent contradictions.
The gaslighting started with Stalin, who invented the term “really existing socialism” to make it doubly clear that it was neither real, existed, or was socialism.
The closest any society ever got to communism isn’t via the Bolshevik “dictatorship of the proletariat” (aka dictatorship of the state bureaucracy), but via Anarchism. Horizontal organisation, abolish hierarchies. Very early revolutionary Russia qualifies until the Bolsheviks abolished councils in practice, Rojava qualifies, Chiapas qualifies, revolutionary Spain (until Bolsheviks teamed up with fascists to kill it off), revolutionary Ukraine (until the Bolsheviks – I think you see the pattern).
Yes, exactly it always fails, because it just does not scale. It’s an idea, that can’t exist in reality on a country level. You can point to Freetown Christiania as an example - a small anarchist commune, that already shows some major cracks in its structure. I mean, just grow family business a bit and you can already see structures and hierarchy emerging.
Plenty of worker control and ownership. If you want to get technical I’d say it’s a mixture of state socialism (only other example: Yugoslavia) and anarchism.
held together by military with child soldiers.
You mean the less than 200 16-18yolds which were demobilised like ten years ago.
The thing is that the YPG is organised horizontally, tons of independent militias and in some locales 16yold bearing arms was understood as being completely kosher, so it happened, and then the larger structure and the world got wind of it, and not doing it was added to the memorandum of understanding between all the sub militias.
There might be some technical gripes as the YPG is not officially a state actor and according to the letter of international law only states are allowed to recruit 15yolds into the military (for non-combat roles), and you can join the YPG with 16, but frankly speaking that’s not really an argument, it can be countered by saying “de facto” a lot.
You, OTOH, make it sound as if it were some African warlord with boot camps for 10yolds they raided as slaves. The situation is quite different, it was teens saying “ISIS killed my family I want a rifle to fuck them up”. And TBF there’s practically nothing more lethal than a 17yold gal with a sniper rifle and a grudge.
Thanks for detailed reply. I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It certainly wasn’t well written comment. Apologies.
What I failed to convey is that IMO this is not best example as It’s a community stuck between rock and a hard place. A lot of what it is right now seems to exist out of necessity. Which makes me wonder how well would it work if there were other realistic options that aren’t absolutely horrible.
Like if you lifted the entire land and dropped it in the middle of the EU with free market and mobility, would it still exist? I don’t think it would. For the same reasons I mentioned earlier.
Rojava could exist here, that’s for sure, if you somehow teleported it over it wouldn’t regress politically – what would be the reason for people to allow that?
Heck they probably could even join the union: You need to be a democracy, and a market economy. Democracy goes without saying, and distributing food and decommodify what they can doesn’t mean that they aren’t also a market economy. They’re just taking the “social” in “social market economy” more seriously than our socdems over here. OTOH they probably wouldn’t want to but join EFTA instead.
As to “not a good example”: It’s true that liberal democracies limit revolutionary zeal that’s why being an Anarchist in the west is kinda… erm. I don’t want to swear or jinx the nice stop-gap we have going on here. OTOH you should acknowledge that if they manage to do it between a rock and a hard place, the system itself is plenty stable enough to work under better conditions.
if they manage to do it between a rock and a hard place, the system itself is plenty stable enough to work under better conditions
That’s like saying that if fusion manages to happen in the middle of the sun, surely it can happen in my living room.
if you somehow teleported it over it wouldn’t regress politically – what would be the reason for people to allow that?
Why wouldn’t they? If my family is about to starve and most import and export is blocked, sure I will work on a farm to sustain our community, because ultimately that also feeds my family and I don’t have the option to seek better job somewhere in EU.
If there is no ISIS on the border trying to murder me, why should I accept that the farm that belonged to my family for generations was collectivized and I’m working on it for a tiny share rather than benefiting from all it can produce?
That’s like saying that if fusion manages to happen in the middle of the sun, surely it can happen in my living room.
It can. You’ll need a pressure vessel to get to the necessary combination of temperature and pressure, sure, but it’s perfectly possible.
The question is not whether an Anarchist revolution could start here, which is an open question Anarchists in liberal democracies are banging their head against, but whether it could sustain itself if it is, as it is now, suddenly teleported to let’s say the middle of the North Sea. Ignoring impacts of sudden climate change on crops and whatnot because that’d be silly. It’s a proper magical teleportation.
If my family is about to starve and most import and export is blocked, sure I will work on a farm to sustain our community, because ultimately that also feeds my family and I don’t have the option to seek better job somewhere in EU.
Working abroad, maybe studying, and then coming back to develop your country supports your family even more.
If there is no ISIS on the border trying to murder me, why should I accept that the farm that belonged to my family for generations was collectivized and I’m working on it for a tiny share rather than benefiting from all it can produce?
There was no force-collectivisation. In fact there’s no collectives, there’s cooperatives. There’s also plenty of agricultural cooperatives in the EU, some of them ludicrously large, though granted Arla is capitalist AF. Models that right-out mirror what you have in Rojava also exist. If your farm was in a EU country you’d be paying taxes on income, in Rojava you’re sending out your surplus harvest for distribution and are getting all kinds of services from the wider community. And that decommodified community solidarity is a benefit in itself.
Or do you think farmers will look at the EU, how farmers are protesting largely because they’re getting squeezed by middle-men (traders, supermarkets) and think “yeah we want that, that’s better”?
I fail to understand what surplus harvest is in this context. I have a friend farmer and he never mentioned that, because you know they generally sell stuff. The closest thing he mentioned was hay of which he might have more than he’ll need to feed the animals over winter, but even that is same product as any other and is sold to other farms. It’s not surplus, it’s par of the production.
all kinds of services from the wider community
What kind of services are we talking about? Farmers (and other citizens in EU) also get all kind of services. Also once they sell their produce, they can get all kind of services even beyond what local community provides. I don’t see any benefit outside of situation where the export/import is impractical. Hence my metaphor with fission. (even if not technically 100% accurate as metaphors are)
I fail to understand what surplus harvest is in this context.
What you don’t need for yourself, or for whole communities, what the communities don’t need. If you’re currently a subsistence farmer ways will be found to make you more productive than that, e.g. by making sure that each village has a tractor at least.
I don’t see any benefit outside of situation where the export/import is impractical.
Why are you exporting food to some place while the local restaurant is importing it? Even if it’s practical because you have roads and open borders and whatnot doesn’t mean that it’s sensible.
And, of course, there’s plenty of restaurants around in the EU which source very locally. Make that the norm, instead of the exception.
Rojava, also the Zapatista, still do plenty of commodified trade – goods against money. The base requirements that people have, though, food, shelter, education, healthcare, are decommodified. Part of the food you produce in excess goes into doctor’s stomachs, the rest onto the market so that things like medical supplies can be bought, stuff Rojava doesn’t produce itself.
What gets distributed, what gets sold and what gets bought is all council decisions.
That honestly sounds like taxation with extra steps.
Why are you exporting food to some place while the local restaurant is importing it?
The obvious answer is that they both do what is most reasonable for them. If it’s cheaper to source locally the restaurant can (and if they care will) source locally. But why limit yourself to local only?
In practice the “let’s do all local” is very naive. My friend is a farmer. He told me about hay to give you some example. He’s able to sell and deliver truckload of bales for a good price. It’s extra money for him. But the thing is you need to buy truck load. Some local horse owner wanted just one bale. And he explained that if he paid the driver to go over to his farm, load it, unload it, paid the fuel, etc… he’d be actually losing money. So you might be wondering why is that horse owner buying more expensive hay when there’s farm with literal tons of hay not that far away. Well that’s why - it’s actually cheaper for everyone involved.
There’s another company that has cars and equipment to do small deliveries. They buy bulk hay, make smaller packages and sell it, but it’s obviously not local anymore, they need to be able reach across the country as they wouldn’t even cover equipment cost if they only served few local horse owners. It sounds ineffective, but it really isn’t.
I’m not saying that it’s always absolute 100℅ effective system, but everyone involved has motivation to be as effective as possible.
To stretch this into extremes, why aren’t you using locally built computer? It is technically possible to build one in your city. But the investment would be astronomical. And once you produce said computers, producing just enough for local community would never be economical. And if you produced quantities that are economically viable and sold them globally, it would be cheaper to buy them from the local global market than to build logistics for local delivery.
That honestly sounds like taxation with extra steps.
No it sounds like organisation of a society without all the extra steps.
Some local horse owner wanted just one bale. And he explained that if he paid the driver to go over to his farm, load it, unload it, paid the fuel, etc… he’d be actually losing money. So you might be wondering why is that horse owner buying more expensive hay when there’s farm with literal tons of hay not that far away. Well that’s why - it’s actually cheaper for everyone involved.
BS. At least one of the two has a pickup truck (if you’re talking good ole small bales) or a tractor with a forklift attachment (if we’re talking the big ones).
The reason it ends up being more expensive is because you insist on employing middle men, “pay the driver”.
I’m not saying that it’s always absolute 100℅ effective system, but everyone involved has motivation to be as effective as possible.
The free market ensures the perfect allocation of resources given that all actors are perfectly rational and act on perfect information, the maths make perfect sense. The trouble is that that’s not what’s happening in the real world, neither of the two conditions are even close to met. If our farmer and horse owner OTOH sit in the same council, are deeply connected into their local community, everyone can exchange information and we end up with a better result based on that exchange of information. They can also talk sense into each other, making things more rational. “Market” doesn’t mean “money exchanges hands”. And neither does “economy”.
To stretch this into extremes, why aren’t you using locally built computer? It is technically possible to build one in your city.
No, it isn’t. We literally don’t have enough inhabitants to run a silicon fab and everything connected to it.
We also don’t grow coffee – if nothing else we don’t have the right climate. I get mine from the Zapatistas. Yes, they do trade on the international market. It’s very good coffee, in fact, forget finding it anywhere but at specialist retailers. Noone here is arguing for “you cannot have Szechuan pepper if your neighbour doesn’t grow it” or “you cannot have a computer if you aren’t Taiwanese”. Communities – at whatever scale – do already have and will continue to have their specialities. How much of that is commodified or not will be a question to answer in the future, but already now we’re seeing both, We’re certainly not sending Ukraine bills for the weapon and money we send them, and that’s how it’s supposed to be: They need it, we have it, they get it.
Interesting tidbit I picked up on an Andrewisim video recently: organizations from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist branch of the left are particularly vulnerable to falling into cult behavior. It’s a reason to consider the whole branch to be bad and cut it right off. If not that far, then at least view organizations from that branch with a lot of criticism.
I was born in country where intellectuals were in jail and uneducated workers were put to management positions, because they should own the means of production or some bullshit like that. You can imagine the end result of that.
And again, this is the same “that wasn’t true socialism” argument. Obviously it wasn’t. The socialism as per your definition can’t exist on a country level. You can see it being implemented on a small company level (think family owned businesses) but the bigger it gets the more the cracks show and it just does not scale.
You don’t need money going to shareholders in order to scale. You need management structure. Even anarchists would say they’re against unnecessary hierarchy, and at least a little structure is generally necessary. Top management does not need to be paid 300-to-1 over the average worker. Nor do they need to specifically represent shareholders, which is what a CEO is.
Right but as soon as you have hierarchy, you have classes. You can have hierarchy in family owned business and it can work with everyone doing their best for the good of the business/family. But these social structures fall apart as the hierarchy grows bigger. And very soon what’s good for your family is not necessary good for the business - including non-monetary stuff like how much time you spend working or how hard your job is. Notice how there’s not a single CEO or shareholder in the picture and the system is already falling apart.
There is this famous saying from communist times: “If you’re not stealing, you’re stealing from your family” That pretty much sums it up.
You can’t have working socialism with humans, because the system is inhuman by its very nature. (and I don’t mean it in bad way even if the consequences end up being really nasty for many human beings)
No we’d say we’re against hierarchy because hierarchy is evil and organisation doesn’t imply it. It’s an important corner stone to look out for as hierarchical realism (the notion that organisation just doesn’t work between equals) is the fundamental opponent. On the contrary, if you look at systems, complexity and chaos theory it becomes clear that it’s hierarchical systems which are fundamentally flawed, can, by their very structure, not process information nearly as well. SNAFU.
It’s okay to be downvoted. That just means you’re the proxy for which people question what should be questioned (even if the informed answers are already very clear), that you’ve touched on impactful and deep subject matter. Don’t be sad about a meaningless red number.
There seems to be a bit of a difference, even though both involve asking questions. To quote wiktionary:
sealioning (uncountable)
A type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter, in order to wear down an opponent and incite angry responses that will discredit them.
JAQ off (third-person singular simple present JAQs off, present participle JAQing off, simple past and past participle JAQed off) (slang, derogatory) To ask loaded questions inviting someone to justify their views or behaviours, in an attempt to make tangential claims of little verisimilitude appear acceptable.
So the way I understand it, “JAQing off” is when you’re trying to guide your audience towards a certain conclusion without stating it outright (e.g. “Are the official numbers of holocaust victims really as solid as people claim? Are there alternative historical interpretations? I’m just asking questions here, not implying anything folks.” when you think just saying “The holocaust didn’t happen!” might make it too obvious you’re a Nazi), while sealioning is more about annoying the other party and trying to make them look bad/unreasonable and yourself polite and reasonable in comparison (e.g. “I’m just curious, is there any actual evidence that fascists are inherently bad people, as you claim? As a person with no opinion on the matter, I would just like to have an honest and open debate on this subject.” so when people reply with something like “Fuck off, fascist!” you can say “Wow, so much for the tolerant left.”). Both tactics are frequently applied by online trolls, especially of the far right, but they have somewhat different goals.
And this is a place where we have the authority to call people out on their bullshit and make everybody more informed in the process. Deep Canvasing is more effective than Sealioning.
I’ve probably only met a handful of communist who admit to the crimes of communist regimes and acknowledged that communism in practice never lived up to the ideals. But they’re only far and few and majority of communists engages in bad faith behaviour, especially when you list all the bad things communists states have done and they go “no true communists fallacy” or “what gulag?”. Or, even if they acknowledge the arbitrary arrests and purge, they say “those people deserved it”.
But yeah, keep feigning acting in good faith. I’ve seen this many times.
It’s because they haven’t winnowed the State as Marx described. The problem is that once certain members of the Proletariat get their hands upon the levers of power, they find they rather like it and don’t want to let go.
It’s rather anti communist to be ruled by a dictator, and certainly a hereditary one. That’s as close as you get to monarchy, which is the antithesis of communism.
The irony is that the people are good that they live in an communist utopia, and while everyone shares the same circumstances that can hold. It’s only when living abroad when they see they are being exploited, like the rioters in this case.
😂 good point. I’m just thinking that since it’s NK, the “manager” probably didn’t have much more freedom or authority than the employees did. I’d be very surprised if he benefited from the embezzlement. I’d expect the higher ups to take it all.
North Korean workers in China. The Mexicans of China if you will. The plant manager wasn’t likely going to buy mega yachts. But finding someone with so little regard for their fellow humans carries a pay bump there. Just as it does in the western world.
They can also just refuse to do the job because it hurts the laborers that work for them. They got laborers doing this because they didn’t treat them like people. I don’t think they should expect to be treated well when they treat others poorly.
I agree with you, but I also understand the French people taking King Louis and Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Just saying, the situation there might be so intense and oppressive, that the killing could at least be understood even if not just. We just don’t know enough :/
I agree the situation is oppressive and untenable, but the plant manager isn't the same as a King. We don't know if the plant manager had the actual power to fix anything, given the corruption and embezzling going on behind the scenes. A King is the top of the pyramid, this guy wasn't necessarily, so I don't condone his murder based on pure speculation. The French people didn't have to speculate that the King and Queen were directly responsible for the peoples' misery and oppression.
We just don't know enough.
I would say that's a good reason not to condone mob violence, not a reason to support it.
Doesn’t China regularly execute managers anyway? I’m completely against the death penalty, but I remember the melamine milk thing resulted in multiple executions (and a bunch of other sentences for other people).
Might depend on the Plant manager. If they were just a regular person trying to do their job, then yeah, that’s a pretty shitty thing to do. Like, I understand when my manager needs us to do certain things or pushes on some aspect, they’re under the gun as much as us workers to get results. I actually get along well with my managers and I like all of them, I even actually enjoy my job a bit. Not sure how I’d react though if I wasn’t getting paid, that’s kind of pushing people into desperation.
If the person was the cause of many of their misgivings and was just a general prick to everybody, then… I don’t know, maybe they had it coming? Article only mentioned a “representative” though, so not sure why that person in was singled out, maybe it was an NK internal security person who reported people to their government?
it is a cushioned mat that is supposed to make your feet or legs not hurt from standing in one spot. I’m not sure how well they actually work but I’ve got one infront of the sink for when I’m doing dishes.
They make a ton of difference if you’re standing on a hard floor for more than an hour or two. Still worse than something to sit on but stools are a luxury beyond the reach of American workers.
I couldn’t find an image but there’s an old Far Side cartoon that shows a building that’s something like “Jake’s Croissants and Fill Dirt”. Reminds me of that.
USA is reserve currency for a huge chunk of the world, they have to all fail with their local currency first, you need a common ground for international trade - the US is still a reserve currency because oil mostly.
So you think the civil collapse of two governments with over 2.8 billion citizens collectively would be a good thing because it would make improve the logistics of trade? /gen
India has some social issues comparable to the rest of the industrialized world, for sure, but on a completely different scale because of their long arduous history of marginalization and castes. China is an expansionist dictatorship which is a whole other animal.
China took over Hong Kong by means of corruption and military force, attempted but failed to do the same thing with Taiwan. They’ve been raiding Tibet and tearing down temples, rounding monks up like cattle. They’ve even been having constant border disputes with India. That’s all in the last decade. Imagine taking over multiple other nations in a 4 year period and not thinking that is overly aggressive for modern international relationships. Hell, they’ve even been having border disputes with the damn oceans: China landfilled the sea between Hong Kong and Borneo for military use and to gain territory in a contested region. They’ve recently been accused of overfishing with Cyanide in the Philippines, as well.