Trump's victory, and the further mass oppression of minorities, is closer than ever before. May god have mercy on our souls.
previous preamble
The totalitarian capitalist dystopia which was created by the United States in the aftermath of the Korean War has increasingly experienced problems as the multipolar world is being gradually birthed.
Due to the widespread exploitation of the population, long work weeks, and high housing prices, the population growth of South Korea has plummeted, with the lowest fertility rate on the planet, and the highest suicide rate in the OECD. While a capitalist "success story" before the 2008 recession in terms of profit accumulation for the richest at the expense of most others, conditions have grown more dire in the Long Depression since the crash. GDP growth per year has averaged out at 2-3%. For more concrete figures, labour productivity has stagnated, particularly in the service sector. The rate of profit hit a peak when the dictatorship ended in the late 1980s, but has since massively tumbled. These dynamics are not unique to South Korea; they are happening throughout the West.
While South Korea is stagnating, perhaps even falling, its northern neighbour is rising. With Russia already persona non grata to much of the developed world and yet still maintaining fairly good economic growth and continuously albeit gradually moving towards victory in Ukraine, Putin sees no reason to be intimidated by the West's shunning of the DPRK, and Russia is establishing ties as well as military and economic deals. This seems to portend an end to the post-Soviet period of forced isolation due to UN actions forbidding the people of the DPRK to leave the country (which many westerners believe is a policy originating from the Korean leadership due to their propagandized education).
Many in the West are still, regrettably, unable to properly analyze the geopolitical situation of Korea due to their government programming, leading to bizarre takes about imminent collapse, or desperation on the part of Russia or the DPRK, unable to recognize that the DPRK has a powerful military sector all its own, and decades of autarky has created a durable society where limited resources must be used efficiently and effectively. The position of the Korean Peninsula seems likely to be a critical part of the US-China conflict, whether this is an outright war or instead a series of proxy wars. Indeed, Korea's position may soon become very important in global trade routes if the US tries to cut off the Strait of Malacca to Chinese-bound cargo ships, with vital resources like oil and food potentially transported both over land and via the Arctic Route over Russia and through the DPRK to China. Russia's leadership clearly sees the importance of Korea in the future, hence their actions now; and, of course, South Korea siding with Ukraine has also forced Putin's hand to oppose them more openly.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The "Country" of the Week is South Korea! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
So am I giving the Dems too much credit thinking Biden WILL step down after he is
sworn inmade to serve 2 years of his next term?I think the actual strategy here is that Kamala takes over AFTER the next term reaches the halfway point, because Dems don’t even seriously believe Biden will last 4 years. The catch is that IF the Dems can just roll Biden out there for 2 years and then resign, Kamala gets to finish out his elected term through to 2028, and is then allowed a full 8 years should she get elected in 2028, giving her 10 years in office instead of only 8 years should Biden step down now.
The dems have repeatedly shown they have no strategy
I disagree. When it comes to strategy, the ONLY place the Dems have shown they are willing to implement it is like a gang of enforcers against a rouge candidate or elected official in order to see their desired INTRAparty outcome.
It happens so much that it’s actually a meme here. It’s Her Turn™. Write in campaign against primary winner. Superdelegates. Dems are brutally ruthless within the bounds of their own party but will never flex that elsewhere.
They have been absolutely dying to crown somebody like Kamala as the inheritor of figurehead position after Obama, it just so happened that Biden was the one they needed to beat Bernie. Because the Dems are ruthless intraparty, they made sure Bernie would be crushed. The Dems have wanted 8 full years of Kamala. That should be obvious to us because we know that Kamala has no organic support and this would be a disastrous move for the Dems electorally. As you said, the Dems have repeatedly shown they have no strategy, and what could possibly embody that better than setting themselves up for a massive failure like that?
But why Kamala? What does she do for them that another ghoul, maybe one with people skills, couldn't do?
Because she’s the ghoul that the Dem machine wants. They may have this reason or that for choosing to make her heir-apparent, but the reality is that they don’t really need to have any other reason other than she’s who they picked (and tbh there probably isn’t any other reason than that)
I mean in reality, do we seriously think that Biden had 100% a free choice to select her as his VP in 2020? Biden and Harris had some of the most heated exchanges of any pair in the early debates before she dropped out of the race. Relative to the generally accepted normal range of beliefs within the Democratic Party, Biden and Harris also found themselves at odds in regards to policy as well. It’s like she was picked by a neolib think tank that spent tens of millions of dollars to come up with the idea “Well, she is as left leaning as we will let ourselves go, so we should pick her for VP to help get progressive voters!”
God damn lol it’s like shes literally like a crown prince who was selected by a regency council. She simply is the heir because they want her to be, and that decision was only made with the best interests of those sitting on the regency council in mind. If we are to assume Biden DID select her on his own, it was just such an unnatural selection at the time and still is. They are nothing alike. They had zero positive interactions while campaigning against each other in the primaries. Kamala has absolutely zero charisma, which seems important to Biden as an old white man with diminishing mental acuity. She has zero political instinct to personally convince Biden to pick her. I mean, I’ve never actually seen her and Biden even doing anything together, let alone getting along or literally even chatting with each other about anything of note. She interacts very little with him at all, or at least it gets so little media coverage that it’s impossible to find. Before her selection, NOBODY cared about her. She wasn’t even competitive with support or campaign donations in her home state. But immediately preceding her selection, suddenly there were tons of obvious bots on Twitter and Reddit absolutely obsessed with her. All of that on top of the fact that Biden’s mental decline was already very obvious in 2020, there’s actually no way he just hand picked her with no (extremely) heavy outside influence.
She’s just so… everything that I described above that her selection can literally only be because the Dems wanted her next. There’s just no other fitting explanation.
I wrote way more about this than I was anticipating, but your comment really made me put into words a lot of things I never gave a second thought to because I just accepted them as well known reality lmao.
Having a good time imagining this as a biden fakeout. Yea for sure I'll step down once I'm head of the executive. You can trust me! Just get me to that office and I'll do whatever you want champ.
That’s what’s really exciting to me about this idea lmao. If Biden wins there’s just so much potential. Imagine what I outlined has been the dem plan but by the time Biden is elected his brain rots so far that he refuses to step down because he still thinks he’s capable. Will the Dems invoke 25 on him? Will they roll over and let him stay? Will there be a white house power struggle where policy is being carried out by staff at the behest of Kamala because they know Biden is unfit? There truly is no unfunny possibility here.
Why would you assume he will win in the first place?
This only makes sense if the people behind the Kamala "project" you describe are also the people thinking Biden will win which is clearly not the case right now?
Oh I didn’t say I think he will win, I just mean that is the dem plan
A VP term only counts as a full term if it's more than two years
Oh well damn that certainly makes me feel stupid lmfao but thank you for telling me. I genuinely just had a misunderstanding regarding how that worked.
But still, I think in reality you making this point just reinforced my belief even further. To be completely honest, this has only changed the math on my prediction from waiting until after the inauguration to the much, much more grim prospect that Dems are willing to send Biden out there to serve 50.000000000001% of his term, then replace him with Kamala. Then the Dems basically get 10 years of their guy in addition to basically freely ignoring any real intra-party democratic process until (very loud gulping sound) 2036.
I think Bernie in 2016 really scared the shit out of them, and they thought they placated that issue only to be very unpleasantly surprised at a much more threatening, though brief, run in 2020. The rules were rigged in 2016 to basically ignore the democratic process, and then Dems subverted it again in 2020 by the skin of their teeth.
I think that you giving me this new information brought me to a way worse realization. The Dems obviously do not want an honest competition for their party’s shot at president, we all know this. The fact that there’s a condition which allows the Dems to go from 2016-2036 without a true primary is almost certainly exactly what they’re going for now imo. Yes, Bernie is a shitlib to us, but was absolutely an existential threat to the Dems, and they want to bury any idea of what that threat was, or even the notion that it was a threat at all, for as long as possible.
I feel that this was the moment that the Democrats got scared of Bernie. I can't quite articulate it, but it showed that there was a young, vibrant base that the establishment dems could not control, so it had to be stomped out.
I think it's a mistake to think the Dems are particularly attached to Kamala. She offers nothing unique, has no institutional power in the party, and is an electoral loser. If they were handpicking anybody it'd be Gruesome Newsome.
I don’t think it’s a mistake though, because she provides them a path to essentially ignore intra-party electoral politics at the presidential level until the 2036 election cycle, plus she gets to appoint a VP of her own for that exact reason which could indeed be somebody like Gavin
I am a fan of the theory that the dems will wait until after the convention to force Genocide Joe to resign voluntarily. An open convention is too close to something resembling a democratic process for their liking. If Genocide Joe is coronated at the convention and then ousted afterwards, his succor on the throne of skulls can be chosen by the smoke-filled backroom process that Dems prefer.
Yep, that is my thought process as well. The only difference is the added piece that the Dems want to wait until the start of the next term before Biden officially resigns so Kamala is granted the ability to run again in 2028, whereas even if Biden resigns after the convention, Kamala still operating officially as president until Inauguration Day counts as a term in office.
Your reasoning is still the exact same as mine though. Dems want to avoid the democratic process at all costs for as along as possible. If they can just make it through the next few months until Inauguration Day, then they get to avoid the democratic process again for EIGHT MORE ENTIRE YEARS because in 2028 they’ll simply run Kamala again as the incumbent and hold another nominal primary.
I think you are giving Biden too much credit. If he stays in and wins, that man will clench on to power until his last gasp a la Feinstein. Even if his brain is totally fried, like Feinstein there will be plenty of people like Blinken who will prop him up because Biden is their path to power (I’m convinced Blinken is running the genocide and Biden is just rubber stamping it).
I don’t think Biden cares about the Democratic Party. He doesn’t care what happens, Après moi, le déluge.
I think the problem the Dems are facing is, there’s likely factions in the party that want their person to be the nominee. Kamala is so weak, if she was clearly the best shot to win then they would have already pushed Biden out. If Biden stays in it’s not because the Dems want him, it’s because they couldn’t rally behind one successor (IMO).
I have to make my edited comment and response to yours and others its own post I think. I’ve been given a lot of insight lol but I think much of it, including yours, makes my point even stronger
Add this to your analysis: accidents happen all the time and accidents are often fatal to frail 81 year old men like Joe Biden.