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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10574 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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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.

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