this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Yeah, the US prison system is absolutely abhorrent and counterethical to all the principles it's supposed to hold.
First, the US is basically the only western country like that:tm:, second, more than one thing can be bad. "'North Korea is a great country' is a dumb position", the only (implied) assertion I made about it in my original comment, is still true, even if they got dealt a shit hand (which, so did most of the east after WW2; South Korea was in a pretty similar state (it was actually worse than NK shortly after the Korean war), yet they're doing... much better than NK at least).
Being "basically bombed to the stone age" doesn't mean a dictatorship is inevitable, nor that their government is suddenly blameless; being victimized doesn't mean you can victimize others.
Genuinely, if you take "the west" as a whole and compare it to North Korea... yeah, I do think they have a high ground. No, I'm not saying the west is perfect, far from it. No, I'm not saying communism is automatically bad, I'm totally cool with communists.
Basically my base position is "a functional democracy is the governance system that works the best". Most western states are much closer to that than North Korea (yes, I know what the Electoral College is and why it's bad), so I do think their political system is better.
All of the so called 'functional democracies' of the West are abysmal, China has 94% government satisfaction where I doubt there's one western country over 50% (and the US is at 24%)
I still wonder why you're so obsessed with North Korea. It's not like the South wasn't also a dictatorship until very recently. I wonder what the difference in economic outcomes was. Surely not the political system but instead the different material conditions between south and north i.e. embargo and isolation.
Again, I don't think that NK is the best example of AES, in fact their country is probably the worst. But I don't think the people who have produced the economic emisseration of the country and have worked to undermine its regime at every term get to scold them about their political choices.
Why should democracy be privileged when the choices of that democracy, at least internationally, are immoral. Should we praise democracy when it produces an evil outcome? Why are you so wedded to a system? After all democracy produces trans and drag bans in the south. Is that good? This isn't to say dictatorship is superior, I don't think it necessarily is, but to pretend the virtue is in the system rather than the outcome is pretty lib. If democracy produces fascism is it still good? If we throw our trans friends or homeless into the wood chipper because voters say it's good with 51% of the vote, does that legitimate it?