I think we’re spending more on debt than that right now. Just read how that’s a major marker of a nation in decline, historically, spending more on debt than military updates.
The British Empire wracked up a ton of war debts and tried to levy taxes on its colonies and that kicked off the Revolutionary War. France spent so much money assisting the colonists to own the Brits that they wound up with their own debt crisis which is what kicked off the French Revolution.
Debt is a big problem but generally the way countries acquire debt is getting involved in a bunch of military entanglements. The US dumped a truly absurd amount of money into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nobody really acknowledges that aspect of them. We are well and truly spent, massively overextended, and we desperately need to stay out of military entanglements. We simply don't have the capacity for them. There's tons of domestic crises which have just been festering while to government goes galavanting around the world looking for glory and plunder.
There are two paths forward for the US: one where we make massive military cuts, refocus on addressing domestic problems and addressing the material conditions that have given rise to the far-right, and we start trying to play nice and win countries over through diplomacy and investment the way China does, gracefully managing the decline of the empire and leaving the door open to revitalization and possibly even becoming a positive influence on the world. The second is that we keep pouring more and more money into ensuring we have the most lethal military in the world, we continue trying to dominate the Middle East and elsewhere through military force, we ignore rising costs of living and other domestic problems, we keep becoming more and more of a global pariah, and as extremism gets worse and worse we won't have anything going for us but the military and as our only tool we'll apply it to more and more situations, losing more and more ground until we probably wind up nuking the world rather than accepting that we're no longer "number one."
It is virtually certain that we will follow the second path and avoiding that is really the only worthwhile political goal there is.
I see this talking point all the time and I have no idea why anyone would think it matters at all.
Country A has a population of 200 million people and each one has X tax dollars going to the military. Country B, which is directly threatened by Country A, only has a 20 million people and each spends 2X dollars on the military. That means Country B's spending per capita is twice that of Country A's, but Country A's military spending is five times that of Country B. Obviously, Country A is more deserving of criticism for building up a five times larger military with no legitimate threat, while Country B's spending is more reasonable, and might even need to be higher, despite the fact that it's already twice as high per capita. Per capita is almost entirely irrelevant in the discussion.
Yeah. I don't understand how anyone in the poor or working class can be a patriot. This country will let you die in the street if you can't pay a bill some rich asshole demands of you.
I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.
Oh for sure, just off of sheer spending in Hollywood, corporate media, social network algorithms, and marketing, America is by far the most propagandized country on Earth.
We're also #1 in per capita health care spending, and it's #1 by a lot -- literally twice as much as any other country. This goes fantastically well with that "worst in the developed world in healthcare outcomes" bit.
Wanting decent healthcare, education, life expectancy and a free press is "communism" according to Trump. But he is all in favour of giving pardons to some very unpleasant people - so I guess they're happier!
Kids cant read anymore either. We pay our teachers less than babysitter pay rates, cut school funding and put cops in schools who run away and cower in the parking lots at the first sign of trouble.
One of the many problems is that it's also #1 on GDP. Therefore GDP must be the One True Metric of a country's success. Therefore it makes sense to shun any policy that might lower GDP.
GDP was meant to make the US look better than it actually does from day 1. Economists warned about GDP's many issues and inaccuracies immediately, but it was still pushed through. The official reason is that no other metrics were available, but it's not entirely true, because the concept of GDP PPP was created a decade or two before GDP nominal.
I mean no where else does gun deaths quite as silly. I mean where else is there a non zero number of people a year get shot due to storing loaded firearms in an oven?
Remember during the pandemic when people were accidentally killing their sour dough starters because they accidentally left them to warm in the oven and another member of the household decided to make pizza. It happened A LOT.
"I and my camera crew arrived in Mexico, we're being told the border to America is protected around the clock by armed machineguns, and trained attack dogs 24/7. They're known to imprison journalists and torture dissenters, and I've signed up to live here for a week... we may not make it out alive."
I picked a clearly anti-communist and anti-DPRK source to prove a point but there are many more from research papers to articles.
Defector testimony is not self-validating. There is serious reporting and academic work on the South Korean defector industry and the incentives surrounding it: selection bias, monetary incentives, media sensationalism, translation problems, trauma-related memory issues, political pressure, cases of embellishment and recantation, and demand for defector-activists who reproduce the narratives Western and South Korean audiences expect. For many defectors, this can also become an income stream in a society where they are otherwise economically marginalised.
English language reporting on the DPRK is largely farcical. Anyone can look it up, but sorting through the bullshit is incredibly difficult. Think about this for a moment: do you blame Cuba for its poverty, or the US Empire's embargo? Do you believe everything mainstream news sources say about Cuba, or do you place a heavy deal of skepticism? The DPRK and Cuba are both quite similar situationally, with the former opting for heavy millitarization as deterrence and the latter opting for sending doctors as international aid. Both are socialist, both are under heavy embargoes, both have achieved quite a lot considering their circumatances. Both have strong ties with each other, and support liberation movements in Africa, Palestine, and more.
A lot of what you think you know about the DPRK is just wrong. The problem with reporting on the DPRK is that information is extremely limited on what is actually going on there, at least in the English language (much can be read in Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and even Spanish). Most reports come from defectors, and said defectors are notoriously dubious in their accounts, something the WikiPedia page on Media Coverage of North Korea spells out quite clearly. These defectors are also held in confined cells for around 6 months before being released to the public in the ROK, in... unkind conditions, and pressured into divulging information. Additionally, defectors are paid for giving testemonials, and these testimonials are paid more the more severe they are. From the Wiki page:
Felix Abt, a Swiss businessman who lived in the DPRK, argues that defectors are inherently biased. He says that 70 percent of defectors in South Korea are unemployed, and selling sensationalist stories is a way for them to make a living.
Side note: there is a great documentary on the treatment of DPRK defectors titled Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, which interviews DPRK defectors and laywers legally defending them, if you're curious. I also recommend My Brothers and Sisters in the North, a documentary made by a journalist from the Republic of Korea that was stripped of her citizenship for making this documentary humanizing the people in the DPRK.
In fact, the report is a propaganda piece likely geared at shoring up the rule of Kim Jong Eun, North Korea's young and relatively new leader, said Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Most likely, North Koreans don't take the report literally, Lee told LiveScience.
"It's more symbolic," Lee said, adding, "My take is North Koreans don't believe all of that, but they bring certain symbolic value to celebrating your own identify, maybe even notions of cultural exceptionalism and superiority. It boosts morale."
Sadly, some people end up using outlandish media stories as an "acceptable outlet" for racism. By accepting uncritically narratives about "barbaric Koreans" pushing trains, eating rats, etc, it serves as a "get out of jail free" card for racists to freely agree with narratives devoid of real evidence.
It's important to recognize that a large part of why the DPRK appears to be insular is because of UN-imposed sanctions, helmed by the US Empire. It is difficult to get accurate information on the DPRK, but not impossible; Russia, China, and Cuba all have frequent interactions and student exchanges, trade such as in the Rason special economic zone, etc, and there are videos released onto the broader internet from this.
Finally, it's more unlikely than ever that the DPRK will collapse. The economy was estimated by the Bank of Korea (an ROK bank) to have grown by 3.7% in 2024, thanks to increased trade with Russia. The harshest period for the DPRK, the Arduous March, was in the 90s, and the government did not collapse then. That was the era of mass statvation thanks to the dissolution of the USSR and horrible weather disaster that made the already difficult agricultural climate of northern Korea even worse. Nowadays food is far more stable and the economy is growing, collapse is highly unlikely.
What I think is more likely is that these trends will continue. As the US Empire's influence wanes, the DPRK will increase trade and interaction with the world, increasing accurate information and helping grow their economy, perhaps even enabling some form of reunification with the ROK. The US Empire leaving the peninsula is the number 1 most important task for reunification, so this is increasingly likely as the US Empire becomes untenable.
Well... I just joined the site after 3 months of unwarranted permaban on Reddit, and this is my first time seeing it. But I'll keep this post in mind next time.
70 replies
Don't forget military spending, we're definitely #1 in that.
I think we’re spending more on debt than that right now. Just read how that’s a major marker of a nation in decline, historically, spending more on debt than military updates.
The British Empire wracked up a ton of war debts and tried to levy taxes on its colonies and that kicked off the Revolutionary War. France spent so much money assisting the colonists to own the Brits that they wound up with their own debt crisis which is what kicked off the French Revolution.
Debt is a big problem but generally the way countries acquire debt is getting involved in a bunch of military entanglements. The US dumped a truly absurd amount of money into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nobody really acknowledges that aspect of them. We are well and truly spent, massively overextended, and we desperately need to stay out of military entanglements. We simply don't have the capacity for them. There's tons of domestic crises which have just been festering while to government goes galavanting around the world looking for glory and plunder.
There are two paths forward for the US: one where we make massive military cuts, refocus on addressing domestic problems and addressing the material conditions that have given rise to the far-right, and we start trying to play nice and win countries over through diplomacy and investment the way China does, gracefully managing the decline of the empire and leaving the door open to revitalization and possibly even becoming a positive influence on the world. The second is that we keep pouring more and more money into ensuring we have the most lethal military in the world, we continue trying to dominate the Middle East and elsewhere through military force, we ignore rising costs of living and other domestic problems, we keep becoming more and more of a global pariah, and as extremism gets worse and worse we won't have anything going for us but the military and as our only tool we'll apply it to more and more situations, losing more and more ground until we probably wind up nuking the world rather than accepting that we're no longer "number one."
It is virtually certain that we will follow the second path and avoiding that is really the only worthwhile political goal there is.
Whichever is the dumbest choice we will proudly choose that one, no matter which party holds the presidency.
The second option would likely lead to domestic collapse and revolution before “nuking the world.”
Domestic collapse and nuking the world are not mutually exclusive.
The US will never cut back on the military
That spending isn't for the people, it's for the "donors"
It's a house of cards, but the American public are utterly beaten into submission, so even if they know it, they do nothing
Until they do
I doubt I'll see those days, but it's be amazing to watch from a safe distance
I don't trust them not to take exactly the same path afterwards though
It seems engrained in what passes for a culture over there
Another W. Number 1 in debt interest spending.
Not per capita
I see this talking point all the time and I have no idea why anyone would think it matters at all.
Country A has a population of 200 million people and each one has X tax dollars going to the military. Country B, which is directly threatened by Country A, only has a 20 million people and each spends 2X dollars on the military. That means Country B's spending per capita is twice that of Country A's, but Country A's military spending is five times that of Country B. Obviously, Country A is more deserving of criticism for building up a five times larger military with no legitimate threat, while Country B's spending is more reasonable, and might even need to be higher, despite the fact that it's already twice as high per capita. Per capita is almost entirely irrelevant in the discussion.
Don’t forget “believing in angels!”
Yeah. I don't understand how anyone in the poor or working class can be a patriot. This country will let you die in the street if you can't pay a bill some rich asshole demands of you.
I hate this stupid holiday.
Lots of maga folks blame everyone else. And they believe if those people are gone, suddenly everything will be fixed.
You know why gas is so expensive? Immigrants.
You know why food is so expensive? Biden.
You know why movies suck? Wokeness.
You know why my children don't talk to me? Obama.
I can't wrap my head around patriotism in general. Seems like social engineering to make people more obedient.
I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.
How do I vote for this guy?
"Our country is good, so its problems most be the fault of evil Foreigners!"
“Russiagate” was a psyop.
Previously.
How bout dem apples.
Gotta be up there for propaganda. Americans appear to hate the idea of taxing billionaires, socialised healthcare, etc
Hey! We're not all that stupid. Just most of us.
Oh for sure, just off of sheer spending in Hollywood, corporate media, social network algorithms, and marketing, America is by far the most propagandized country on Earth.
sums up that shithole pretty good :)
We're also #1 in per capita health care spending, and it's #1 by a lot -- literally twice as much as any other country. This goes fantastically well with that "worst in the developed world in healthcare outcomes" bit.
Capitalism is such a scam.
Where's police abuse?
Wanting decent healthcare, education, life expectancy and a free press is "communism" according to Trump. But he is all in favour of giving pardons to some very unpleasant people - so I guess they're happier!
Yeah, we’re #1 at gifting our oligarch overlords those amenities because they live here? It’s a shame they’re thankless garbage.
Oh I think vacation days should be added as well
The Great US Empire is exactly that. It is #1 in projecting power and using gunboat diplomacy. And since WW2, that was all it needed.
A nation that can't adapt to the changing world
Thank god MAGA can’t read
Kids cant read anymore either. We pay our teachers less than babysitter pay rates, cut school funding and put cops in schools who run away and cower in the parking lots at the first sign of trouble.
One of the many problems is that it's also #1 on GDP. Therefore GDP must be the One True Metric of a country's success. Therefore it makes sense to shun any policy that might lower GDP.
GDP was meant to make the US look better than it actually does from day 1. Economists warned about GDP's many issues and inaccuracies immediately, but it was still pushed through. The official reason is that no other metrics were available, but it's not entirely true, because the concept of GDP PPP was created a decade or two before GDP nominal.
and none of that will change with the current administration or any offshoot thereof
I mean no where else does gun deaths quite as silly. I mean where else is there a non zero number of people a year get shot due to storing loaded firearms in an oven?
How else are you supposed to dry them?
I assuming... wait... Are they storing them?
Loaded as well.
Remember during the pandemic when people were accidentally killing their sour dough starters because they accidentally left them to warm in the oven and another member of the household decided to make pizza. It happened A LOT.
People being stupid with an oven, an every place sort of stupid and mostly not harmful (other then the odd sour dough/house fire).
People being stupid with an armed oven, only in america.
Save us from American Exceptionalism.
Quite frankly, I am OVER IT.
More guns than people. Checkmate, libs
but but the dow jones!!
imo, it's often last in citizens who believe ranked statistics.
Wow! We're number one at so many things! We're number one, we're number one!
I remember when republicans used dictatorshios to defend their ideology
Great analogy, including the typical throwing around of seemingly random acronyms assuming everyone follows their sports and knows what they mean
"It's all a HOAX!" - MAGA
"Yosemite?"
You are right. The US has the most Yosemite sites in the world.
https://youtu.be/wTjMqda19wk
Excuse me, we're a number 2 at everything. What's this 24th?
Why do they say the Western world - is North Korea more unequal?
Everything western citizens know about NK is US propaganda
Tonight on VICE
"I and my camera crew arrived in Mexico, we're being told the border to America is protected around the clock by armed machineguns, and trained attack dogs 24/7. They're known to imprison journalists and torture dissenters, and I've signed up to live here for a week... we may not make it out alive."
Except, you know... independent journalists interviewing North Korean deserters.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart
I picked a clearly anti-communist and anti-DPRK source to prove a point but there are many more from research papers to articles.
Defector testimony is not self-validating. There is serious reporting and academic work on the South Korean defector industry and the incentives surrounding it: selection bias, monetary incentives, media sensationalism, translation problems, trauma-related memory issues, political pressure, cases of embellishment and recantation, and demand for defector-activists who reproduce the narratives Western and South Korean audiences expect. For many defectors, this can also become an income stream in a society where they are otherwise economically marginalised.
"Independent"
English language reporting on the DPRK is largely farcical. Anyone can look it up, but sorting through the bullshit is incredibly difficult. Think about this for a moment: do you blame Cuba for its poverty, or the US Empire's embargo? Do you believe everything mainstream news sources say about Cuba, or do you place a heavy deal of skepticism? The DPRK and Cuba are both quite similar situationally, with the former opting for heavy millitarization as deterrence and the latter opting for sending doctors as international aid. Both are socialist, both are under heavy embargoes, both have achieved quite a lot considering their circumatances. Both have strong ties with each other, and support liberation movements in Africa, Palestine, and more.
A lot of what you think you know about the DPRK is just wrong. The problem with reporting on the DPRK is that information is extremely limited on what is actually going on there, at least in the English language (much can be read in Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and even Spanish). Most reports come from defectors, and said defectors are notoriously dubious in their accounts, something the WikiPedia page on Media Coverage of North Korea spells out quite clearly. These defectors are also held in confined cells for around 6 months before being released to the public in the ROK, in... unkind conditions, and pressured into divulging information. Additionally, defectors are paid for giving testemonials, and these testimonials are paid more the more severe they are. From the Wiki page:
Side note: there is a great documentary on the treatment of DPRK defectors titled Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, which interviews DPRK defectors and laywers legally defending them, if you're curious. I also recommend My Brothers and Sisters in the North, a documentary made by a journalist from the Republic of Korea that was stripped of her citizenship for making this documentary humanizing the people in the DPRK.
Because of these issues, there is a long history of what we consider legitimate news sources of reporting and then walking back stories. Even the famous "120 dogs" execution ended up to have been a fabrication originating in a Chinese satirical column, reported entirely seriously and later walked back by some news outlets. The famous "unicorn lair" story ended up being a misunderstanding:
These aren't tabloids, these are mainstream news sources. NBC News reported the 120 dogs story. Same with USA Today. The frequently reported concept of "state-mandated haircut styles", as an example, also ended up being bogus sensationalism. People have made entire videos going over this long-running sensationalist misinformation, why it exists, and debunking some of the more absurd articles. As for Radio Free Asia, it is US-government founded and funded. There is good reason to be skeptical of reports sourced entirely from RFA about geopolitical enemies of the US Empire.
Sadly, some people end up using outlandish media stories as an "acceptable outlet" for racism. By accepting uncritically narratives about "barbaric Koreans" pushing trains, eating rats, etc, it serves as a "get out of jail free" card for racists to freely agree with narratives devoid of real evidence.
It's important to recognize that a large part of why the DPRK appears to be insular is because of UN-imposed sanctions, helmed by the US Empire. It is difficult to get accurate information on the DPRK, but not impossible; Russia, China, and Cuba all have frequent interactions and student exchanges, trade such as in the Rason special economic zone, etc, and there are videos released onto the broader internet from this.
In fact, many citizens who flee the DPRK actually seek to return, and are denied by the ROK. Even BBC is reporting on a high-profile case where a 95 year old veteran wishes to be buried in his homeland, sparking protests by pro-reunification activists in the ROK to help him go home in his final years.
Finally, it's more unlikely than ever that the DPRK will collapse. The economy was estimated by the Bank of Korea (an ROK bank) to have grown by 3.7% in 2024, thanks to increased trade with Russia. The harshest period for the DPRK, the Arduous March, was in the 90s, and the government did not collapse then. That was the era of mass statvation thanks to the dissolution of the USSR and horrible weather disaster that made the already difficult agricultural climate of northern Korea even worse. Nowadays food is far more stable and the economy is growing, collapse is highly unlikely.
What I think is more likely is that these trends will continue. As the US Empire's influence wanes, the DPRK will increase trade and interaction with the world, increasing accurate information and helping grow their economy, perhaps even enabling some form of reunification with the ROK. The US Empire leaving the peninsula is the number 1 most important task for reunification, so this is increasingly likely as the US Empire becomes untenable.
Nodutdol, an anti-imperialist group of Korean expats, released a toolkit on better understanding the situation in Korea. This is more like homework, though. I also recommend Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance for learning about the DPRK's democratic structure (although it has changed in the lady 2 years, multi-candidate elections are now being rolled out and the Democratic Front previously used to select candidates has been abolished).
Western reporting all affirms the fact that food security has been improving in the DPRK.
Even the satellite photos?
Someone does make a decision on which photos may be revealed to the public.
With cherrypicking, it'd not be hard to make some propaganda based on real photos that makes US look like a third world country as well.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Asia_at_night_seen_from_space#/media/File:East_Asia_at_night_by_VIIRS.jpg
You can get photos of anywhere on the planet every day, it's hard to fake that.
See, they want you to think it shares a border with South Korea.
But communist gulags though.
Take this endlessly re-posted shit back to reddit.
You came into our space, not vice-versa
Well... I just joined the site after 3 months of unwarranted permaban on Reddit, and this is my first time seeing it. But I'll keep this post in mind next time.