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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10738 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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The President of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, has declared a state of martial law, accusing his opposition in parliament of colluding with North Korea and engaging in anti-state activities. Yoon’s party lost in a landslide in the last parliamentary election, and this is likely an attempt to maintain power. Troops have been placed around the parliament building to prevent parliament from convening. Opposition leaders are telling citizens to take to the streets. The parliament has voted unanimously to disband martial law. But the troops in the streets are currently refusing to disband until ordered by the President to do so. My suspicion is that Yoon either planned this with the military beforehand, or he is very incompetent and desperate.

This has significant potential to inflame the Korean peninsula, my understanding is that Yoon is an anti-communist hardliner, and I can’t imagine North Korea reacting well if he manages to seize dictatorial control over the country.

From a culture war perspective, Yoon is an anti-feminist (or at least he’s described as such), and there will likely be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Western media if succeeds at staying in control.

Edit: unconfirmed reports that opposition party leaders are being arrested.

Edit: 20:05 GMT — Yoon claims he will lift martial law on urging of members of his own party

I just want to add that being President of South Korea is a poisoned chalice. Nearly all of them got couped, assassinated or arrested after they leave office.

Maybe this very silly coup-farce is still rational? From the outside view, Yoon must've known that the end was closing in, so may as well try rolling the dice.

Edit: 20:05 GMT — Yoon claims he will lift martial law on urging of members of his own party

Yep. Like we say: Nothing Ever Happens.

Why on earth would he do this?

The time to have second thoughts about declaring martial law was before declaring martial law and trying to arrest the parliament. He’s now guaranteed a lengthy prison sentence instead of possibly winning, or at least coming close enough to demand concessions.

How legal was this? Did he have the power to do this and if so, what checks are there on this power? Now the the parliament voted to end martial law, is it over? Is that the proper mechanism for ending it? Do they have that power?

or he is very incompetent and desperate

It seems the latter. The Korean sub was for an hour panicking “the sky is falling!” and now they are making fun of him. A dictator not feared is finished:

https://old.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/1h5r8h2/%E3%85%88%E3%85%88_%EC%9E%85%EB%8B%88%EB%8B%A4/

Reddits are unrepresentative of facts on the ground. If the Korea reddit posters could vote (they can't, they are foreigners expats who can't even speak Korean), they would vote wildly to the left of native South Koreans.

Nope, looks as if it is already over. That was really weird. I think the society in South Korea needs to seriously re-think those emergency laws.

A dictator not feared is finished:

If the military stands "behind" him - the real dictator will be some general or cluster of generals. He will be a rubberstamping figurehead.

I think that we people in the west have really forgotten the meaning of Cersei's "Power is power". The reason people don't get disappeared in the streets of Paris and Berlin like in moscow, are not because the government can't, but because they don't want to.

Well, the reason the U.S. President doesn't get disappeared is also not because I can't, but because I don't want to. I expect any reasonably smart and extremely dedicated person could easily assassinate nearly anyone, but that level of dedication is very rare. Most people have split priorities.

Governments are even more this way. To the extent a government can be said to "want" anything, its desires are split between all of the people it comprises, many of whom serve only their own ends or actively disagree with the broader government agenda. I think it's a mistake to separate its capacity from its "desires" because the fundamental nature of government (almost any organization really) involves compromising its capacity by bringing people in who are not fully aligned with its desires.

Also, wow.

Is there any reasonable, by Western classical-liberalism standards, justification for this? Short of an external military crisis, it’s awfully hard for my American mind to think of a reason.

“I am declaring a state of emergency in order to protect the constitutional order based on freedom and eradicate shameful pro-North Korea anti-state groups, that are stealing freedom and happiness of our people,” Yoon said on the country’s YTN news channel. He added that this would protect the country “from the threats of North Korea’s communist forces.”

Yeah, it doesn’t sound like he bothered with an actual excuse. If there was some NK activity or scandal in recent months, it sure didn’t make American news.

More justifiable than Roosevelt's camps. In the past North Korea already managed to conquer all but a tiny sliver of South Korea and there is credible scenario where Seoul is reduced to rubble, with the repeat of the Pusan situation. When Roosevelt carted off every man, woman, and child of the wrong ethnicity into concentration camps, Japan hadn't yet managed to control all the continental US, sans Florida, and only those suffering from war hysteria thought demolition of DC by Japanese forces was within the realm of possibilities.

Yet despite Japan posing a much lesser threat to the US than North Korea does to the South one, enacting policies much more totalitarian than ones enacted by the current South Korean president wasn't enough to make US Americans consider FDR anything but a very examplar of a Western classical-liberal. This is shown by US American experts of US American history (1), holding him in very high regard. Thus not only is FDR loved by experts in the relevent field, he is also loved by the sufficently historically informed supporters of classical-liberalism.

(1) Given that the supporters of the US Democratic Party, the US party of classical-liberalism, are so greatly overrepresented, any ranking by US historians will, unless corrected for as in 1982 Murray–Blessing, inevitably be ranking by classical-liberals, with only token influence of believers in other political ideologies.

Uh…

How does a totalitarian act by an American justify an act by a Korean? They can both be unjustified.

I suppose I’d also expect suspending civilian government to lead to interment, etc., while the converse is less likely.

And “high regard” doesn’t make someone an “exemplar” of something. A lot of those classical liberals probably think Che was pretty cool, too.

Well remember, South Korea has only been a democracy for like 40 years, they had a military dictatorship until the early 1980s.

Thanks, that’s a lot better.

As it is this isn't enough for a top level post.

Some more context and your own opinion would improve the post.

Edit: the additions to the post look good.

If something is self-evidently newsworthy, I don't see why any commentary needs to be included.

Still needs to be included. We aren't trying to break news here, this is a discussion site. So start a discussion.

It’s to avoid situations exactly like this. As of the time of this writing, the happening appears to be over. It’s no longer newsworthy, or at least it’s no longer BREAKING NEWS worthy.

At least if the OP includes some original commentary/analysis instead of just headlines then the post might have more lasting value even if the original situation dissipates.

Agree with a clear breaking news exception if something is the top story on all major outlets.

This happens like once a week. And then we would have to enforce the line of what is major breaking news. The effort to write about a paragraph of text including what happened, the context of the situation, and a personal thought on it is very low. The fixes OP made are more than enough.

I think you should make an exception for important breaking news where the top post is just something like "what's your opinion on X". I like coming here to see what peoples' immediate takes on such news is.

Breaking news happens like once a week. And then we would have to enforce the line of what is major breaking news. The effort to write about a paragraph of text including what happened, the context of the situation, and a personal thought on it is very low. The fixes OP made are more than enough.

Wonder if North Korea is thinking now would be the perfect time to attack.

They really don't need to. South Korea has a TFR of 0.68. Every generation will be approximately 1/4 the prior. North Korea has a TFR of 1.81. Not quite replacement, but pretty close. They wait two more generations and South Korea will beg North Koreans to come across the border to work in their hospices wiping the asses of the last of the South Koreans.

I used to think North Korea was completely insane. And yet...

Making population projections more than 50 years into the future is foolish. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

If you lived in 1900 or 1950 and looked at the data, what would your predictions be then?

This is especially true with AI and genetic engineering around the corner.

Regardless, North Korea still sucks. So your hinting around at it being better than South Korea is pretty stupid.

We’re less than 20 years from the vast majority of labor being automated by AI and robots. A huge proportion of white collar jobs can already be automated by LLMs, SDCs are working fine in San Francisco, warehouse automation is proceeding at pace, in many cases we’re just waiting for regulatory approval, better wrappers and some minor improvements to multimodality in practice.

The problem with low tfr in the West is mass immigration, not labor shortages. If natives in Germany or Sweden stop reproducing, they’re going to end up being 30% of the population by 2100 and they and their descendants will be living in somebody else’s country, forever. Korea and China will likely still be 90%+ Korean and Chinese, there will simply be fewer of them. This is no major issue.

Depopulation itself is completely fine, the US is pretty sparsely populated but Western Europe is very dense and could easily benefit from an 80%+ drop in population over a couple hundred years (deflationary impact can be managed in various ways, including rising consumption). The issue is that if mass immigration continues, the population won’t drop, just change.

You are aware that productive labor depends on people physically doing things? Fancy computer programs cannot do this.

A fancy computer program in a fancy robot might, though.

Well, the fancy robots already exist and are already doing productive labor, the only question is how much productive labor they can do.

A more relevant question is what kind of productive labor they can do. If the price of low-skill labor gets high enough, just adding more robots will be a possibility.

A shortage of robot technicians might be a problem, but it will be less of one than ‘oh no, robots that can pick peaches without destroying them are impossible’.

We’re less than 20 years from the vast majority of labor being automated by AI and robots.

I beat this drum on occasion but we absolutely aren’t. I’m directly involved with this sort of thing and absent a paradigm-shifting in improvement and robot hardware (possible but far from guaranteed) we cannot practically automate much more than is already automated.

AI is a probabilistic inference machine. It’s not suitable for doing physical tasks with a high degree of accuracy at >99.9% success rate. At 1 part per 6 seconds, even that figure means a line failure every 1000 parts ie. about once every 2 hours.

And robot hardware isn’t up to performing constant physical work with soft bodies like cloth or complex shapes. Anything more complex than a suction gripper or pinching fingers has failed to take off in a factory setting because it’s not reliable enough or because it wears out too quickly.

Starting to see recognition of this in fiction now. Just translated something with a few lines like

"My God, why can't you just use robots?"
The researcher gave him a puzzled look.
"Humans are much cheaper, of course."

There is no guarantee of this happening. Progress in AI could stagnate. I don't agree that very many jobs can be automated with today's technology. We may be close, but progress is already slowing down. There are a number of problems limiting progress that might not be overcome. Returns to scaling are starting to plateau, we're running out of data, and Moore's Law is coming to an end. It is definitely possible that we will find solutions to these problems and I know some think they've already found them, but nothing is guaranteed.

I don't agree that very many jobs can be automated with today's technology. We may be close, but progress is already slowing down.

I think they can, not in the sense that you can automate away everything a single person does, but rather that you can automate part of what many people do, to the point that you can manage workloads with much smaller teams.

I think the reason that not that much of this automation is happening right now, is that fast progress in the technology means that you might be commiting a ton of capex into a system that might be "obsolete" in a couple of years.

It’s definitely a problem if you need lots and lots of disposable people to stand in a trench and hold rifles.

We’ve barely even entered the drone swarm age where your shielded underground factories can pump out millions of kamikaze drones to blacken the sky and scour trenches to find enemies to kill, all autonomously even if a signal with a base station or satellite is lost.

It remains to be seen whether we can actually bridge the gap between our current situation and that eventuality. It's entirely possible that our current system suffers catastrophic collapse before it achieves full automation. Given the likely outcomes of the sort of future you're describing, such a collapse might even be preferable.

Ah yes, the glorious technocratic future of South Korea where the wasteland is viciously guarded by an autonomous kill swarm. Nobody knows if a single South Korean yet lives. But trapped, deep underground, is one last 300 year old South Korean, asshole destroyed beyond all recognition by the ass wiping robot made to purpose that has desperately needed maintenance the last 78 years. Truly a bright future South Korea has in store for themselves.

The competitive pressures that cause South Koreans to not have any children may well be destroyed by a 50% drop in population or fully automated luxury capitalism.

Maybe, maybe not. What started as competitive pressures could rapidly become cultural or just generalized dysfunction. What happens when a society forgets how to have and raise the next generation of itself? Once that institutional competence is lost, can it be relearned in time? Will anyone even want to?

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Come now, if you know anything about Korean youth culture, surely you must know how enamored they are of broadcasting the most mundane of activities for all the world to see.

If you want a picture of South Korea’s future: I have no ass and I must stream.

Except the remaining 20% would consist of infertile middle-aged and old people who'd also die out in a matter of time. A collapse in fertility, unless reversed, inexorably reaches a certain point where it becomes irreversible.

Maybe, but when most people are unemployed for life I think more will have time for parenting, too.

Uh, isn't the core of SK's low fertility based on competitive pressures to get one of the few socially respected jobs before shacking up? These aren't western trailer trash who will breed on the dole.

Historically depopulation has been a pretty significant problem, and I think it's very likely to continue to be that way unless robot automation leads to such a wealth boom that the population transitioning from net producers into net consumers is alleviated. (Even if that happens, nations with solid birthrates are likely to have a comparative advantage all other things being equal.)

I'm not convinced it's impossible, but I'm not convinced it's a cinch either.

How do you mean?

All the examples that come to mind from the classical period have a ton of confounding factors. Were the Romans out of money because their tax base died of plague, or because they wasted too much on panem et circenses, or because they just had too many enemies?

By the Industrial Revolution, population is definitely less important than development, natural resources, etc. I think this probably dates back to the late medieval period, but I don’t know enough about the history to pick out key trends on graphs like these.

I guess I agree with the “all else equal” statement. It’s just rare.

they just had too many enemies?

Well I mean you are less likely to have too many enemies if you had lots of young people!

By the Industrial Revolution, population is definitely less important than development, natural resources, etc.

I think the experience of France during the World Wars would suggest otherwise (or, at a minimum, it would suggest that more people means you can better develop your natural resources!) France - which had a higher population than Germany and the UK in the middle of the 19th century - had already started suffering from a comparatively low TFR going into the First World War, where they suffered horrific casualties. Their lack of desire to run another meatgrinder the second time around is probably at least somewhat related to their population woes: note by contrast that the Germans suffered higher casualties numerically in the First World War, but were willing to bleed white in a multi-front war. (And for all the talk of GERMAN WONDERWEAPONS, Superior German Technology was more a late-war thing - I don't think it was dispositive in their struggle with the French. In fact, France's biggest mistake may have been failing to substantively attack Germany while the German army was deployed fighting in Poland - the farce of the Saar Offensive makes a lot more sense if you model the French as having a lot of unwillingness to incur casualties.)

I definitely agree that in this case (and most cases where population decline occurs) there are cofounding variables. But an older population makes pretty much all of those problems worse, and more people can be deployed to solve almost any problems (particularly now that agriculture is so efficient!)

The problem with low tfr in the West is mass immigration, not labor shortages. If natives in Germany or Sweden stop reproducing, they’re going to end up being 30% of the population by 2100 and they and their descendants will be living in somebody else’s country, forever. Korea and China will likely still be 90%+ Korean and Chinese, there will simply be fewer of them. This is no major issue.

All the technologies you listed can automate genocide too if push comes to shove

Personally speaking, I oppose genocide, so I hope that doesn’t happen.

It is a blunt, inefficient instrument. I agree.

That... is not the problem with genocide.

What is the problem with genocide?

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Not clear that North Koreans will get to move into the vacuum. Could be that South Korea imports lots of young non-Korean immigrants to take care of their elderly and these immigrants end up taking over.

Well, South Korea flooding their country with 80 IQ third worlders as opposed to allowing their co-ethnics to ease them into the dustbin of history gently as they effectively euthanize themselves as a nation does not really do much to convince me South Korea is smart or that North Korea is stupid or crazy.

The problem isn't South Korea not letting North Koreans in, it's North Korea not letting them out. North Koreans aren't allowed to travel at all. They can't even travel around their own country without a permit, which is not given without a reason (or a bribe). They certainly can't travel abroad. An amount of smuggling into and out of China is generally tolerated to keep the economy going, but that's it.

North Koreans who manage to make it to South Korea somehow are considered traitors and their family is punished in their stead, so if you're going to do that you better take your whole family at once.

Both China and Russia will deport North Korean 'illegal immigrants' back to North Korea, so basically the only way to get out is to travel the length and breadth of China and then sneak into Mongolia or one of the SEA countries from where they'll be 'deported' to South Korea instead.

South Korea already considers them citizens (SK claims the whole peninsula, so does NK.) When they arrive, they're even given some money and an acculturation course. They couldn't really be much more welcoming.

Martial law was lifted by the parliament less than half an hour ago; it seems troops have left the building. Hopefully nothing else bad happens.

The parliament wasn't allowed to meet in the first place, so any declaration by the group of people who were MPs before the declaration of martial law, is invalid.

The BBC reported that a parliamentary majority can lift martial law under Korean law. There may be some circular logic involved, but the vote involved 190 out of 300 MPs, so was a majority.

It depends if the military have appetite to run the country or not. If they decide they want to - whatever parliament does is void.

I just don't understand Asian politics.

It's kinda like those bizarre scenes in Taiwan where all the lawmakers are fighting over a pen or trying to run away with the text of the legislation to prevent it being signed.

You would expect in a place with essentially no crime people would be civil all the time, but it's really hard to predict how Western institutions play out when they are transplanted into Asia.

I mean, we have quorum busts and filibusters, ‘odd’ is in the eye of the beholder.

In the UK they had someone try to walk off with the magic mace.

A people can adopt surface-level aspects of a foreign culture, even ones with huge effects on quality of life (like Marxism-Leninism, liberalism, democracy, the sexual revolution, Christianity) quickly, but deeply held underlying population traits will remain unaffected for much longer. Eventually cultural belief does change a people (hajnal line etc), but it’s slow.

Any Seoulologists want to chime in about whether this was somehow telegraphed? Seems out of left field to this casual observer, although I am dimly aware of the parade of high level political scandals in Korea recently.

For what it's worth, reporting claims members of the President's own party were blindsided by this. Rumor mongering is afoot; I've heard in a streamer's chat that the current rumor is that the Minister of National Defense, Shin Won-shik, suggested this course of action, but take that with boulders of salt.

I guess we’ll see what happens next, so far panic appears to be limited and it’s not clear how much of the military he has on his side.

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