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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10591 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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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.

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