North Korea - much ado about nothing?

[just maybe]

Answer the question - 'how would life in 'south' korea be now?'

There's an in-between period in that question that is important.

Course, wouldn't expect you to know about that.

 

[camsmith]

Even Peter Costello does a better job than you at answering questions JM.

Thinking about a career in politics?

 

[just maybe]

Even Peter Costello does a better job than you at answering questions JM.

Thinking about a career in politics?

Well, cam, if you're basing your questions on bad assumptions drawn from ignorance, we need to expose and deal with that first.

 

[MSR273]

There's an in-between period in that question that is important.

Course, wouldn't expect you to know about that.

Answer the question - 'how would life in 'south' korea be NOW?'

 

[just maybe]

Answer the question - 'how would life in 'south' korea be NOW?'

Hard to say. Would the military dictatorship have fallen without US support? Maybe democracy would have come earlier.

Too many variables. Stupid question.

 

[camsmith]

You leave Peter for dead.

 

[just maybe]

You leave Peter for dead.

You're an idiot. Expecting someone to give a definitive answer about an alternate history is a shining example of how poor your ability to contest a point is.

You couldn't actually address what the South Korean wrote, so instead you tried to make it seem like it was an important point for me to answer you what would have happened if the US weren't involved in SK.

Well here's how it goes, peabrain: I say one thing, you say 'oh no, this would have happened' if you don't like it, and we get nowhere.

Your question was stupid, irrelevant and unanswerable. To expect someone to explain to you what would have happened over the last 50 years if the US had withdrawn support shows how little sense of reason you possess.

Now, have you read what the Korean wrote and provided, and are ready to answer it, or are you still pig ignorant about the Korean peninsula and going to resort to stereotypical bitching again? I suspect the latter.

 

[Rear Admiral]

Is this hubbub and outrage over North Korea's missile testing really worth all the fuss?

To be honest, Kim seems to be the kind of insular, idiotic dictator who will want to maintain power. Now he may be a fruitloop, but he is no fool, and there is no way he would ever consider attacking the US or other allies - he would be crushed in moments. His greatest instinct to survive, and even the dumbest dictator knows attacking a megalith is not going to achieve anything.

They have claimed self-defense - and I actually believe them. A dictator like Kim would have a serious paranoia complex, and being labelled part of an axis of evil and constantly threatened by the US would not be helping that complex - if you were an isolated dictator with extreme paranoia, wouldn't you be building weapons too, so you have some retaliatory capacity? It fits the profile of your average dictator perfectly.

Hell, the missiles he's produced don't even work properly, and to be honest I don't really see the fuss about them, plenty of countries have long-range missiles and it's more that no one likes North Korea than they're doing anything different to plenty of other countries. I don't see NK using them in any aggressive capacity, and if we're realistic the chance of Kim doing so is minutely small.

Of course, any excuse the oil companies can get to jack up petrol prices will be taken, but seriously, does anyone else actually see NK as a threat? I don't.

Horrible place, for sure, but they're not exactly in a position to threaten anyone.

A good thread .

In all their Sabre Rattling, Pyongyang knows crystal clear that if they were to initiate their own pre-emptive strike on the US (or one of it's alies in the region), the retaliation from the US would result in the length and breadth of North Korea being reduced to incinerated ash and rubble from which the rats and cockroaches would struggle to emerge. And that's not involving Nuclear Weapons. And no matter how deep the bunkers might be in Pyongyang, eventually they'd run out of food, water, and (filtered) air. As mentioned here.....

To be honest, Kim seems to be the kind of insular, idiotic dictator who will want to maintain power. Now he may be a fruitloop, but he is no fool

....I honestly think that Pyongyang is just trying to provoke and bait the US into a pre-emptive strike, where China would then step in.

When taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture with North Korea, the problem with all of this is China. Or more specifically - the West's economic relationship with China, where these issues cannot be separated.

With North Korea, their whole means of existence is China. Almost all the trade North Korea has (what little of it there is), is done via China - both licit and illicit trade. And in particular, North Korea's access to crude oil. Simply put, China is North Korea's lifeline. If China wanted North Korea to do any one particular thing or another, it would be as easy as turning a tap on or off, plain and simple. And in addition, they're North Korea's main ally in all this Sabre Rattling that we're seeing between Pyongyang and Trump. So if The West has serious issues with North Korea, then China is fairly and squarely in the mix. Russia is involved to some degree, either directly or indirectly, but China is the main player in this situation. So if the US wants to sort out this mess with North Korea, it's going to have to be done via China, in some form or another.

The fact of the matter is, The West is in a sort of semi-defacto state of War with North Korea, and has been for decades. But it's only in more recent years that the heat has been cranked right up. But the problem (as mentioned above) is the West's economic relationship with China. The vast majority of the world's manufacturing is now done in China, and for two reasons:

- Absurdly low wages. But everyone knows that.
- But also the economy of scale. And this is the White Elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Forgetting about slave wages, China's scale of production means that it cranks out such enormous volumes of products, their cost-per-unit of production is microscopic, compared to just about anywhere else in the world. And that's irrespective of labour costs.

So there is no hope of competing with China, where we shouldn't even contemplate doing so.

If you take a look back, not all that long ago most Western Nations did the vast majority of their work and production locally. We all did this from day dot. But towards the end of the 20th century, a group of absolutely f*cktard free-marketeers came up with this hair-brained scheme of new wave Globalisation. There were a whole lot of great buzz words they used, but if you boil it right down, what Globalisation is about is simply the exploitation of semi-slave labour combined with the abolition of Tariffs/Trade protection. And that's pretty much it. Sure, there are lots of so-called "benefits" to Globalisation, but they basically only benefit the large corporations....not the rank and file citizens. If you dispute that Globalisation has been a "net negative" for most citizens of developed nations, I suggest you read here, whereby you can continue to dig a bigger and bigger hole for yourselves.

In fact Globalisation has been so foul and toxic, it's now come back to bite many of those in the ars3 that were initially big spruikers of the (so called) wonders and benefits of Globalisation and Free Trade (some of our banana growers and pork producers are just two examples that spring to mind). Globalisation has been a means by which large companies and corporations can radically boost profits by bypassing their local populations (who have worked for generations to establish labour laws) and only employ workers in developing nations which they can exploit with impunity. A sort of semi-new-wave-slavery, of sorts. And they're gone even further with the use of technology and automation. But this rort has now come back to bite the big players in the West (mainly the US) in the ars3....not just their own population they have essentially thrown on the scrap heap, but in the West's dealings with China. Cutting through the bullsh*t, China and the West are not good friends. In fact they're in a sort of semi-defacto state of undeclared War, where China is the ally of one of the West's biggest enemies - North Korea (as mentioned above). But the problem is, most large US/Western companies and corporations are hooked on cheap Chinese labour worse than the most hardcore drug addicts are hooked on their substance of choice. No matter what happens, these large US/Western companies and corporations just cannot give up this addiction. In fact not only do they not want to give it up, they will fight tooth and nail to protect this addiction of theirs. And increase it. But to be clear, it's not that they can't make a change....they just don't want to. Because to do so would mean that they'd have to locate their businesses/factories elsewhere (ideally in the countries where their company are based) and be required to pay fair, livable wages. But this would cut into their profits, and they'd rather eat broken glass and drink warm, stale beer before they even considered doing that. And China is only too well aware of this addiction, and this is what's allowed China to grow and become more powerful than ever before in recorded history. Now Washington and The Pentagon are stuck trying to sort out this God-almighty mess that's been decades in the making.

So when dealing with North Korea, you can't even think about bringing about real change in Pyongyang until the US is prepared to apply the blowtorch to China, in terms of economics and trade. Now the US is in debt up to it's back teeth to China, and it can't flip a magic switch and make this all go away overnight. But what it can do is make a start by slapping an enormous Tariff onto goods made in China, and getting the big two out of China and back onto US soil:

Apple and Nike

Now there are kazillions of other corporations that have their operations/production based in China, but Apple and Nike are the big two. The flagships, so to speak. And they need to be taken away from China, with an iron clad guarantee they will not be going back onto Chinese territory, where no additional Western companies will utilise any further Chinese labour in their companies and corporations. Making this sort of change would be profound, but it is entirely do-able. And from then on, the West needs to begin a slow but unrelenting "de-Globalising" of all it's corporations' outsourcing of work and production back onto their own soil with the employment of their own citizens. e.g. If it's an American company/corporation - whatever goods or services they produce must get produced in the US. If the US planted a flag in the ground with this, it would send shock waves like a Tsunami throughout the global political and economic world, where it would send a loud message to China that "the jig is up". Yes, the US does need to pay off it's debt to China, as do many other countries, but it needs to be done over generations....not overnight. And we in Australia need to damn well follow suit. So if the West (particularly the US and Australia) wants to get serious about sorting out this mess with North Korea, then what's discussed above is what needs to be done. And if I'll say it once, I'll say it a million times - it's not a matter of whether we can/can't do this (we have before, and we can again)....but our political leaders just don't want to. Why? Because they're in the back pocket of the large businesses/companies/corporations, as discussed here.

In Australia, it's our primary exporters (e.g. mining and large scale agriculture) that are dictating terms, and that sh*t needs to come to a screeching f*cking halt.....yesterday, if not sooner. The problem is, the large business/corporation owners would sooner rape/pillage/murder before they give up their bribery and ownership of the political system, along with their addiction to cheap, foreign labour. Yes, they are that bad. What does give me hope is the fact that most (if not all) the Right-Wing Conservative Governments around the world (Australia included) are digging bigger and bigger holes for themselves, as they're sticking to the absolute bedrock foundation of everything they live and breathe - Lunacy101.

But over the last couple decades, this ideology of their's has proven to be Fool's Gold, and the broader electorate is absolutely enraged with anyone that's selling out to Wall Street (read: Trump's victory in the US Federal Election.) Much of the (so called) advances the developed world has made in recent decades aren't advances, in the true sense of the word. They've just been an endless string of efforts to replace workers and their wages - either by outsourcing to nations with slave wages, or by technological unemployment. If people can recall, Trump was spruiking the reintroduction of massive Tariffs on Chinese-made goods, where even Bernie Sanders agrees with this general policy push, but as soon as Trump got into office, all his rhetoric naturally proved to be pure and utter bullsh*t. But at the next Federal Elections in the US and Australia, it's likely that The Right-Wing parties will lose in the-Mother-of-all landslides, where those in opposition are likely to implement serious and comprehensive changes to how our economies operate, from top to bottom. And making these sorts of changes are what's going to sort out China and North Korea. But until then, we're just treading water.

 

[ABSOLUTE MADMAN]

Not as good as the 2000 Clarkson thread bump.

 

[cannot]

SK rooted if trumpster brings his fire and fury

 

[Pie eyed]

It is not unusual for children who play with matches to burn their own houses down.....