Always was tbh

Get your ass on Soulseek

forcing many users to consider the unthinkable

… Death???

There are a couple different ways we could look at this.

Institutionally, there has been a general trend towards diffusion of power. Kim Il Sung was President, which like in the US, meant he was head of state, head of government, and commander in chief of the armed forces. After his death, those positions were split between multiple people.

From Wikipedia:

The functions and powers previously belonging to the president were divided between numerous officials:

The premier of North Korea;

the chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly, chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly;

and the head of the military, the chairman of the National Defence Commission (replaced by State Affairs Commission of North Korea) and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army.

These positions are currently held by Pak Thae-song, Choe Ryong-hae, and Kim Jong Un respectively.

[Reformatted for better legibility on Lemmy]

On the other hand, I would definitely consider the personality cult around the Kims to be a troublesome aspect of the DPRK’s political culture, and I don’t think there’s really any way around that.

The reason it developed historically, however, is worth exploring. Prior to the Korean war, the Fatherland Front which made up the Revolution post WW2, was incredibly vibrant, with lots of parties and social cleavages outside of the Workers party being represented. After the Korean war, however, election results show a major rallying around the Workers Party, and the sidelining of other parties and organizations in the Fatherland Front.

The Korean war never truly ended, the US bombed the Korean peninsula so much that pilots complained there were no more targets, and people took to living in caves. So it’s understandable why, despite ostensible attempts at diffusing power, that it’s managed to centralize regardless. There’s a historic desire for stability in the face of incredible adversity.

If we want to get really in the weeds about political economy, the DPRK’s economic base is made up primarily of extractive industries, like mining, because the Korean peninsula’s bread basket is in the south, and countries with primarily extractive industries tend to develop noted centralized power structures, compared to countries with more diverse productive industries.

So a Socialist country like Cuba, which has a more agricultural economy, allowed it to develop a more diverse economy, and thus it has a healthier political culture, by contrast.

All of that said, whatever qualms of critiques of the DPRK I may have, they had a Socialist Revolution, and have kept it going, which is more than I can say as a Socialist in the US.

And I think, if we care about the people of the Korean peninsula, we should want a formal end to the Korean war, a dismantling of the DMZ, an end to the US military presence and sanctions, and an internationally mediated set of talks between north and south, about what their future together might look like.

Those things would, I suspect, go a long way in helping establishing a healthier political culture in the DPRK, as well as dignified material benefits to its people, free from arbitrary restrictions

The “Recent Data” in question was largely a piece of satire which claimed that the Grindr CEO called the 2024 RNC, “Grindr’s Super Bowl” this never actually happened.

There were also claims that Grindr crashed during the 2024 RNC:

Over 1,000 users reported a Grindr outage in the Milwaukee area around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that collects online service status information.

The Grindr app also allegedly experienced problems in the Cream City on Thursday— the fourth and final day of the RNC — as well as in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. However, Grindr’s official status updates show there hasn’t been an outage since May.

According to Newsweek, those appear to be unsubstantiated.

Further, the majority of the spike in Grindr traffic during the RNC was due to journalists, curious locals, and law enforcement, all of whom got on the app with the intent to monitor the goings on.

And why would all those people want to do that? Because we’ve created this largely fake “gay on gay violence” trope wherein all of the people most opposed to queer rights are secretly queer themselves.

People believe this trope, everyone flocks to Grindr during the RNC to watch. Then the inflated Grindr numbers, of people there to see the supposed flood of secret Gay conservatives, are cited as proof that the flood of secret Gay conservatives is real.

It’s like if I claimed a Rhino was ice skating downtown. The fact that people showed up to see if there was actually an ice skating rhino, is not proof that such a thing ever existed. It’s pointing at shadows cast on the wall, and mistaking them for reality.

Ehh, I know we’re in the shitpost community, but if I can be serious for a moment, this “Homophobes are actually secretly gay” schtick always rubs me the wrong way.

It’s not actually that common of a phenomenon, and the idea absolves straight people of their own culpability in the oppression of queer people, by pinning it on an imagined “Gay on Gay violence”, as opposed to actual systemic factors

Mr. Hands, is that you?

but Abby’s definitely not flawless, to say the least

Good thing I never said that

“The DPRK is a more normal country than tabloids, in the country that bombed it to dust, suggest” is hardly what I’d call “having a boner” for it.

Lmaoo, he’s such a black hole of charisma, it’s kinda funny

Nah, they didn’t have Twitter to circle jerk on

That’s an insult to goldfish tbh

What was the nature of their physical relationship?

That…doesn’t sound like any of our business

Pretty sure

Did you do sufficient investigation to earn the right to speak about this?

Because I did some searches on her Tumblr for “Palestine” and “Gaza” and that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.

Whatever one might think about the specifics of Abigail’s public stances on Palestine (specifics muddied by the fact that the United KKKingdom essentially has no freedom of speech), I don’t think Zionists usually raise money for World Central Kitchen, or publically say “Free Palestine”.

At any rate, even across those two Tumblr posts, she’s still done infinitely more than Contrapoints and her nihilistic nonsense tweet on the subject.

proper shonen pacing

Where’s my 800 episodes of useless filler???

Enjoy!

My Immortal is an internet classic, and a bizarre time capsule of what youth subculture was like ~20 years ago.

Please learn a different ethical framework. Utilitarianism isn’t the only one

Delete this shitty fucking post. Dems put up a garbage candidate, and they lost the easiest race imaginable, for a second time.

The Democratic Party actively courted right wing voters. The left obviously didn’t want that, and the right was never going to vote for you anyway. You lost. Get over it. Start doing something actually useful instead of removed and whining.

Anyone with any institutional fealty to the Democratic Party should be so embarrased, they never show their face in public again. But instead, they just punch left, and smugly act like their own failures were someone else’s fault.

Anyway, I’m off to go do real activism in my local community, with organizations that actually give a shit about me and my neighbors.

No, they’re not at brunch.

Not to mention, that they’re out here in PSL, DSA, trade unions, environmentalist orgs, on indigenous reservations, and in immigrant communities.

They’re not on YouTube making one video a year, they’re out in the world, actually doing shit. Natalie isn’t seeing them because she’s not looking for them

“I Get To Be Daddy’s Little Princess Tank Girl” could be the title of a girls with guns anime