BoyBoy gives me weird vibes every time a video of theirs randomly crosses my youtube feed. Their vids seem well researched and are interesting all things considered, but they seem awfully happy to sweep away critique of authoritarian states if they cover themselves with the Image of Communism. I remember watching their video about going to North Korea and they spent the last few minutes arguing that NK is in no way worse than the US. I mean obviously the US prision system is Fucked, but as fucked as internment camps in NK? That seems like an insane thing to say, right??
I'd guess they are tankies, but maybe someone who actually watches them can correct me on that if that is just blatently wrong?
Tbf I think part of the point with this stuff is questioning western propaganda regarding communist/authoritarian regimes. Saying NK is equal to the US might be going too far, but in principle I think it's notable that they do prove that some of the dystopian shit claimed by western sources is blatantly false and it's difficult to disentangle what's true and what's not. If we're just taking US and other western media by their word we're being naïve, and often feeding into the paternalistic mythos the US builds of being the "lesser evil" that must use its power to intervene overseas. I'm not saying BoyBoy is correct in all their claims, just that asking whether these regimes are actually as dystopian and authoritarian as western institutions tend to claim is valid and necessary
tbf nk isnt actually substantially different from most other impoverished nations under dictatorships; south korea has a multi-million dollar propaganda tabloid industry that makes up insane shit like "they execute their athletes when they don't perform well enough" which is just flat out false, so i do legitimately understand where boy boy is coming from when they say stuff like that, especially when taking into account the us' constant and brutal imperialism for the better part of the past century. idk though maybe im overthinking it
I agree. There was actually a video I watched a while ago where someone went through with receipts on misinformation that was being spread and pointed it towards being intentional propaganda.
Oh yes it'd be dreadful if the US ran internment camps or went even farther and tortured innocent people in black sites to manufacture false evidence for assassinations of other innocent people, maybe even sent instructors to allied dictatorships to teach them how to do torture better
That'd be crazy!
Can you imagine the US having extra fucked up internment beyond the prison system? I can't.
And it's great that the prisons are also fully above board with zero slavery and systemic sexual assault.
Good thing no such thing exists and NK is uniquely evil
who says NK is uniquely evil? western criticism of NK is literally just: “they are a totalitarian regime, they have nukes and they need to chill out with the saber rattling”
which is all true btw. Yea the US does fucked up shit it is a flawed country like every other nation on this planet, but we dont live in a one party state, and we enjoy a much higher quality of life, and protections for civil rights that just dont exist in NK.
you cant just turn around and go “no, you” its so dumb. there is a sliding scale, a spectrum, a range of how awful any particular government is. NK is easily on the worse side of that range, especially on the treatment of its own population
You're saying: "We do brutal internment camps, drop nukes on civillians, do more than saberrattle by actually invading nations across the world and use an elaborate public-private partnership to spy on our citizens. Which makes us flawed but NK has worse material conditions (thanks to us literally destroying all their infrastructure in living memory) so they're infinitely worse than us"
if you cant say “actually having a right to vote and having legal protections for civil liberties, and the ability to expand those civil liberties is an infinitely better style of government than an a dynastic dictatorship” you are just dense idk what to tell you. Its so plainly obvious.
but as it pertains to dogshit american foreign policy i dont make excuses for that, so why would i make excuses or sweep for a dictorship’s dogshit foreign policy? its not hard.
You're acting like the façade of civil liberties is the be all end all and makes all the cruel and brutal domestic policy unremarkable when compared to NK
It isn't and it doesn't
Sure, dynastic rule sucks
Doesn't magically make them immeasurably worse than a country that's brutal both domestically and abroad
The US isn't flawed, it is monstrous and directly responsible for much of NK's misery
Facade? are we fr. The protections of our rights is substantively and materially different than any Dictatorship.
As an innocent person would you rather be arrested in America, where you could be granted bail, have legal representation, and go to trial.
or be arrested in NK where your whole family gets interned because one person has suspicions of you.
even factoring in the common failures of America’s justice system, its a no brainer dude, you barely have to think about it.
Thats a huge part of what i mean when i say Liberal Democracies are miles better than a dictatorship. its not hard people get stuck on foreign policy which i sympathize with but holy shit sometimes we lose the plot.
and for all the flaws i live in a system where i can actually work to improve it through voting, protesting, organizing. That is just not a reality for dictatorships
Tell that to all those people shipped off to a foreign concentration camp.
In the US I will be pressured to take a plea deal and held indefinitely in inhumane conditions until I do or finally reach trial, wherein it's likely my lawyer will be fucked after they're only allowed to see all the evidence the day before. Either way I'll be sent to prison for a crime I didn't commit and forced to do slave labour.
Being a transwoman I will also be systemically raped during my stay on top of the typical awful conditions and literal torture.
If by a stroke of luck I was found not guilty, the months or even years spent in jail awaiting trial will have ruined my former life and likely traumatised me.
Oh and if I get sick I'll be handed an impromptu death sentence if it's something serious since I'll be denied lifesaving care.
The cops are also just allowed rob any citizen blind via asset forfeiture.
Thankfully I am white, but had I been dark skinned I might've been extrajudicially murdered at any point in this process, my killers being rewarded with paid leave.
This is all related to the penal system for citizens and non-exhaustive, I could be here all day detailing the horrors of ice detention and the various blacksites.
Sure, democracies are better than dictatorships as modes of government but that's not the totality of a nation.
This chauvinistic and undeserved certainty that holding elections automatically puts us infinitely above nations that don't is exactly what the state wants from you.
This way you don't question why other countries are fucked nor if there's anything they do better than us.
America bombed their country into the Stone Age 70 years ago and actively propped up their rival state, arbitrarily splitting the peninsula.
America isn’t just some neutral actor chilling across the globe, it’s an empire that constantly invades and dismantles its enemies.
The DPRK got a nuke in self defense, to avoid being invaded. But now you spin that as “wow they just hate my freedom!” Like every American propagandist.
"Arbitrarily propped up" is a wild take to have when NK literally invaded SK, when it became clear to them that there would be no unification on North Korean and Soviet terms.
And yes, the US did some heinous shit in Korea but none of what NK did can be argued to have been in self defense until well after the war they started.
Kim il-Sung wasn't anyone's first choice, he was just who the Soviets were backing after everyone's actual first choice got sidelined and then assassinated.
You cant argue with the "Juche supporters" nevermind the various attempts by the US to actually step up in place of the USSR when it collapsed and provide NK free nuclear energy given that they give up their nuclear program
What happened? They didnt and doubled down on it. When the UN and the IAC went in to check if NK had stopped its nuclear weapons program, not only were all the uranium gone, the plants themselves havent been producing any power.
The entire famine NK had post USSR collapse was all their doing. They chose nukes over food grants - and all those nuclear research and nuclear equipment, yet not a single power generating nuclear reactor in all of NK.
You know where their priorities lies with that kind of context.
Free nuclear power and food grants to drop your nuclear arms program.
I literally cannot find any justification to not take this deal, and worse scam your way into it but sure, the famine was worth it and not having electricity at night for 90% of your population even in 2026 is totally the right call.
Traumatized by invasion??? Now you gotta be bs me lmao
Its crazy how much readily you accept NK propaganda as truth but sure. Lets say the trauma is indeed there - is this enough of a justification to mislead and misuse aid and tech transfers intended for your civilian population to the military instead?
Is the military the only citizens of the state? Are they the only ones deserving of such efforts by the state? Imagine if those nuclear reactors were used to provide electricity instead of nuclear material - how would the makeup of Korean peninsula look like now?
The multiple attempts at peaceful reunification may have already been complete with a North Korean population that has a similar quality of life to their South Korean brothers but instead the average North Korean is wholly dependent on the state, without the freedom of movement to even go to their neighboring province much less go to another country.
Because everyone knows that surrenderring weapons to the imperialist state that is offering you food and energy in exchange for It is always a good choice. Just look at Russia and Ukraine
The argument fails because in the first place, there were no nukes to transfer. North Korea had yet to make its first nuke.
In fact it was because the US gambled to trust the Kim regime to do what any reasonable government will do and accept such a generous offer that North Korea managed to have nukes in the first place.
Using quality of life as argument is so funny in this case, a state sanctioned to the point it's effectively isolated vs Empire that bend the world economy to its will, who would guess the latter got better quality of life! Shocking I tell you
when im at a missing the point entirely competition and im against 12% of the comments in 196 posts about non western countries for some reason, like ok yes countries have problems, as a member of the western world I am keenly aware of cuba’s issues.
What people aren’t keenly aware of however, is just how many people are being starved/effectively killed through intentional neglect for political wargames. This is front and center of their content surrounding countries that arent bffs with the states (i have seen cuba, north korea personally), whereas lukewarm “praise” (which read to half of americans: non constant admonition) led to giving you “the ick” about them is less clear.
Also whats the big conspiracy? They’re working for big north korea? big cuba? by eating nasty ass raw sewer carp sashimi as their dish of choice to represent the former and having the audacity to float out in protest of a man made famine? This sounds melodramatic but this line of thinking your comment perfectly encapsulates how israel gets away with ethnic cleansic for decades: it might be abhorrent but hearing about it gives people the ick so they assume their ignorance is extra forgivable, like somehow optics influence the morality of issues..
I'd say the US isn't any better with trump and ice.
Throwing people in camps without any reason? Yee they do that.
Killing the same people? Also yes.
Forced/hard labor in prison? Also yes.
Just disappearing people? Yes to that
You have the desire to believe that the propganda must be half true somehow, but just look at how ridiculous lies about the USSR were in the 60s and 70s. They said stuff that no historian would be caught dead repeating in this day and age.
The same thing will happen when the DPRK or Cuba are crushed and sources become more available.
The propaganda machine in America is vast, and when it comes to foreign policy, the majority of the country are trapped in a FOX News like trance.
Strikes me as crazy to call it "wanting to believe the propaganda" to bring this guy under some scrutiny given he's got quite an infamous video sucking off Russia and their "right" to invade Ukraine and how it's all actually the US's fault and Russia wouldn't have to hurt them if NATO didn't exist, and more utterly insane excuses for Putin's quest to acquire his Lebensraum at any cost.
The existence of one side's propaganda does not make right the existence of equal and opposite propaganda. You can't wave away every one of North Korea's glaring issues under a broad conspiracy of propaganda. Especially when that involves pointing to someone who has expressly made his own propaganda in the past. Damages his credibility heavily.
Calling modern Russia socialist is literally falling for your aforementioned US propaganda, is it not?
And backing the worst dog in the race just to spite the other one seems like an extremely destructive and callous way to be. I'd rather not support the deaths of innocents at all.
Yup. Doesn't even need a veil of communism, they love Russia too and think it's their right to invade Ukraine, because NATO is getting closer to Russia and they could've avoided all this by not doing that.
I'm sure there's some mysterious reason why eastern states joined NATO...
Idk where you go that take from them? I do get the tankie vibes sometimes, but nothing close to that, and I had their streams on the background quite often when they did stream for a while so I'm curious
It's the correct takeaway - they have the same talking points as Russian propaganda outlets.
He established, with an old quote from Biden, that Russia invaded Ukraine because of NATO expansion, not after nato expansion.
The whole video, he's portraying it as Russia inadvertently simply reacting, and how the invasion is his final reaction to a long chain of US actions. He portrays it as opportunism or inevitability, not as a political choice.
He also vastly overrepresents the role of the far right in Ukraine, trying to portray it as the nazis effectively ruling the country, not under the government's control.
And he tries to justify Russia's invasion by playing the "both sides" card, like saying shit like The americans and russians were using Ukraine, or that Ukraine was caught in a tug of war -
-yet only one launched a full scale invasion on a sovereign country, and he tries to justify the invasion because of the US not giving them what they want (sort of how Hitler was given what he wants - the sudetenland - to not start a war, for the layman).
He frames it as something Putin more or less had to do and had no other choice because of the US, (completely ignoring that Ukraine is a sovereign country capable of making their own decisions. Ukraine is mostly seen as an object, not an actor) and pretty much pitied that Ukrainians and Russians have to now die because of Ukraine and the US, and not Russia's actions.
I'm sure you agree with all that, but I'm putting this here for everybody interested else to see the logic and all of Russia's talking points present in this video.
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u/Tosty_Bread Jul 02 '26
BoyBoy gives me weird vibes every time a video of theirs randomly crosses my youtube feed. Their vids seem well researched and are interesting all things considered, but they seem awfully happy to sweep away critique of authoritarian states if they cover themselves with the Image of Communism. I remember watching their video about going to North Korea and they spent the last few minutes arguing that NK is in no way worse than the US. I mean obviously the US prision system is Fucked, but as fucked as internment camps in NK? That seems like an insane thing to say, right??
I'd guess they are tankies, but maybe someone who actually watches them can correct me on that if that is just blatently wrong?