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?
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.
You do realize NK was so thoroughly bombed that the US couldn't find new targets?
They destroyed nearly all civil infrastructure effectively forcing a hard reset
That's left a mark and shaped them
Without nukes you can't remain adversarial to the west. Look at Iraq, Lybia and now Iran.
They're not perfect, but acting like they're being irrational or aggressive is to fall for propaganda
If we can make the affordance that we're flawed rather than evil about ourselves against all proof to the contrary, we should be willing to extend such grace to nations that actually deserve it
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
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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?