North Korea would likely not be a worse place than China or the US if their economy wasn’t shit. And a lot of that is literally just The Great US Empire (and its vassals) restricting global trade by gunboat politics since the war. Cuba has the same problem: Immense evolutionary pressure to harden their government against US-caused regime change followed by total exploitation combined with reduced trade options.
We really need to make like the French and band together to stop the wealthy from screwing us.
Floating paint chips?
EDIT: Reflecting pool “crime”
We live in a fascist country now.
“But there’s no mass graves.”
Not yet. And it doesn’t matter. There isn’t just one flavor of fascism. There isn’t just extreme fascism or no fascism.
This is a facist nation because it is behaving like a fascist nation. And it’s not going to get better unless voters start being more responsible. And it might even be too late for that.
“There are no mass graves”
Ask the hundreds of people who entered ICE internment camps and never left. Alligator Alcatraz. 2/3rds of the 1,800 people “disappeared”
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/09/25/men-lost-from-alligator-alcatraz/
The article does not support your statement. Even if people have gone missing, the author doesn’t allude to a mass killing. I’m all for exposing ICE, but I’m also against creating misinformation or fueling rumors.
…so they just disappeared into the system and we have no idea if they’re alive or dead? You know that’s only marginally better right?
Not marginally, but quite the difference. There’s no need to be reductive just because you disagree and want to speculate.
It’s probably not that quantity today, but read about that statement “Wir haben es nicht gewusst”. There were “rumors”, but most people just thought about their own lot instead of worrying about those rumors.
Sticking to the known facts does not mean I stop worrying.
Every fascist regime was established in democratic elections. No fascist regime was overthrown in democratic elections.
Fascism is proof that capitalism is incompatible with democracy.
Every fascist regime was established in democratic elections
This feels questionable at best— there’s a lonnnnnggg history of rulers in countries prior to democracy
I want to add (without prison sentences… for now) all the push of Europe to do the internet surveillance China style, after we have criticized it so much.
Is so sad how “autocratic government surveillance” suddenly becomes “protecting the children”…
Fuck politicians, hope they all die a terrible death. They deserve all the hate in the world and then a bit more.
It hasn’t “suddenly” become that- every single internet censorship bill ever proposed is named some flavor of “save children”
I’m all for burning Epsteins list at the stake at Super Bowl halftime; but the right to privacy is sacred and should be revered
Is so sad how “autocratic government surveillance” suddenly becomes “protecting the children”…
The saddest part about it is how well it works. People are still falling for this shit. We never learn anything.
Someone got 50 YEARS for protesting ICE
A life sentence for protesting.
This is America.
Our Constitution is effectively over and a frightening percentage of Americans aren’t even aware, or don’t even care.
Personally, I’m crossing my fingers for Balkanization. Staying chained to this sinking ship is not wise.
Two people who weren’t even there, who never discussed the illegal acts, who were only in a group chat where people discussed attending a legal protest, were sentenced to 50 years.
But they were trans women in Texas. So the jury had no problem sending them to a men’s prison without any crimes being committed.
Where they will be almost certainly subjected to v coding
They will be raped until they give up either caring or life
Also 50, 70, and 100 year sentences for people who were protesting against ICE in Texas
Wow this completely flew under my radar wtaf
What are the chances that these people will get pardoned, etc, when(if) normality returns?
Also what’s the chances that the judge who handed down these long and unfair sentences will get any repercussions for being so obviously corrupt?
Unlikely. The US executes people when there’s so much new evidence after sentencing pointing toward them not being guilty that the original prosecutors plead for them to not execute. The Dem establishment’s complaints against ICE are mostly just procedural; they just argue for things like more transparency for these detention centers, not their abolishment.
The last time that a Democratic president was in office for a federal execution was Lyndon Johnson.
A full pardon? Maybe for some of them, especially the zine guy, but the guy who actually shot the cop, unlikely. No democrat would want the optics of that.
Cop shot first. The guy who shot him did so in community defense.
In fact that cop may have given the shooter’s attorneys an argument to revisit Harlow v Fitzgerald, and hand the SCOTUS the full text of §1983. They were given, unknowingly, an illegally edited text in 1982 when Harlow v Fitzgerald established Qualified Immunity, which is illegal according to the full statute as recorded in the 1871 Congressional Record.
I mean to give full context, that protest did end with a cop getting shot.
But the sentences are still wildly excessive including 30 years to someone for carrying a box of magazines.
First off, the shooter claims that the cop was about to murder an unarmed protestor.
But more importantly, it was just one person who shot. Collective punishment is literally against the Geneva Convention.
Imagine getting a 50 year prison sentence because you were peacefully protesting at a place where someone else shot a cop. By the same logic, every cop that was present when Alex Pretti was executed should have 50+ year prison sentences.
I know reading comprehension is not great on this site, but I’m in no way shape or form making an argument the protestors were in the wrong. Literally just providing context.
It’s cool that you were able to get that snarky remark in, but I was not necessarily disagreeing or arguing with you.
However, reading your comment again, it still comes across as cop apologetics. It’s the “the protest did end with a cop being shot”. It’s a justification. Maybe you didn’t intend that, but that’s the implication.
Did I comprehend ok?
It’s not in any way a justification. In fact the language is deliberately neutral as not to imply the protestors did anything wrong (which they didn’t) a protest happened and a cop was shot. Just stating objective fact, because that is a crucial detail the the other commentary left out, which makes their comment sound like they arrested and sentenced these people purely for protesting. (Which they kind of did, and the cop being shot was just their justification, but that’s besides the point)
How many years were did shooters of Pretti and Goode receive?
Those floating paint chips are worth thousands of dollars! Or rather, that’s what the administration paid for them.
We’ve had plenty of examples of what happens when you let autocrats take power. It’s not like Trump didn’t tell us who he was. For that matter, it’s not like the Republican Party hasn’t been obvious about who they are since Reagan.
And yet we keep electing them.
Maybe we do so because it’s macho, and voting for anyone else is effeminate. Or we do so to punish the Democrats when they’re wishy-washy. Or we do so to own the libs (and in 2026, to return non-whites and women to non-citizen status.)
It’s a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, and I’m unsure we can’t get ourselves out without a whole lot of people suffering and dying.
People are gling to suffer and die no matter what at this point, so we’d might as well go down swinging.
I’m gonna see what happens in November, but history tells us that violent dictatorships are rarely brought down by peaceful means.
Oh, there are peaceful movements that work. But then the autocrats can sometimes be eager to fire the first shots. Take January 6th, 2021 for example.
As Nelson Mandela put it, A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.
*never
We can all hope for a toilet aneurysm.
This is a good take. America owns all of this shitshow.
Didn’t they beat the guy so badly he had brain damage and died?
No, but we’ve given Antifa protestors fifty years plus for conspiring to shoot ICE. Give us time.
*without any evidence. That’s an important part.
a kid got years in North Korean prison for stealing a poster
The full story of this kid was far crazier than the post implies. (https://archive.is/kyR8h)
Firstly, he wasn’t in jail for years. He was in jail for 17 months, largely due to the chill relations between the Obama government and North Korea during that time. It is common for US expats to receive special release with a bit of glad handing and brown nosing from a US diplomat, and the fact that Bill Richardson wasn’t able to secure Otto’s release was the exception rather than the rule.
But secondly, and much more curiously, the story spun up after his release looked more and more like a fabrication the deeper journalists probed.
The previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was “repeatedly beaten,” as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing, when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and “April,” as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto’s body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.
It is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto’s death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct. Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. “I don’t believe Otto was physically tortured,” Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. “The campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea’s cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.”
Many experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be “both brutal and smart,” as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip, especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts’ doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten. However, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, “In general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God’s sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick, and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.” The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.
So you had a US expat detained for an extended period, only to be released into US custody as an attempt by the NK government to curry favor with Trump. But in the process of being released, Otto falls into a vegetative state with no evidence of physical violence perpetrated against him. The poor state of his health is conveyed to the Trump administration and immediately poisons relations with the new administration.
And over the next several months, Trump begins to ratchet tensions with North Korea as a potential prelude to war.
How did this happen? Who did it benefit?
Regardless of whether any beatings occurred, when someone is imprisoned in your country, they are under your care, and you are responsible for them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s malnutrition, beatings, or if he just smacked his head against the wall on his own accord really hard: it is the responsibility of the custodian to ensure the good and proper health of those in their custody. That is the position of international human rights law. It doesn’t even matter if a prisoner decides to kill themselves, a death in custody is always the responsibility of the custodian and in that case it’d still be the custodian’s fault for allowing the creation of circumstances that allows prisoners to kill themselves.
It is not usual for a person to suddenly become comatose while in custody. And even if that did happen, it was North Korea’s positive responsibility to notify consular officials and the family of that, and deliver proper medical care to them.
Also worth mentioning is that he “allegedly” stole that poster in the first place, so he probably didn’t even do any crimes, he was just picked as a political tool
he probably didn’t even do any crimes
Pretty sure even his friends admitted he pulled the poster off the wall.
So a guy got imprisoned by the most brutal government in the world. And then he fell into vegetative state. But said government has nothing to do with the vegetative state?
Do people just do that? Do people just go “eh, I’ve had enough, maybe I’ll just turn my brain off for a while”.
Here in Australia our racist nutbag pollie is pretending a poster that was dropped behind her could have been a bomb… and now wants police protection
And people keep listening to her as if she’s a champion for the working class. Fuck off Pauline you vapid cunt, people with more than 2 brain cells can see through your facade.
You haven’t heard? She’s absolutely interested in uniting the nation into one.
Which is why she openly hates woke people, greenies, lefties, first nation ceremonies (and therefore traditional first nations), people who don’t speak english (also some of our first nations), trans people and migrants. She definitely tries to unite suspected war criminals too.
In her defence, she does spend 1 day a year trying to unite everyone… Australia day. Everyone MUST unite on that day, including first nations who were invaded that day at one time.
And, she at least waited until the day after Australia day to release her “anti-woke” video and song which started openly attacking Aussies she deems are “unacceptable”
One might easily prefer Kim Jong Un over Trump too.
You do you, but Kim actually got people executed by cannon so…
Even assuming that is real (which it seems like not) Trump is not far behind, he is a dictator at the top of a chain of command that ends with hiring racist hooligans to ICE and effectively allowing immigrant executions to scare people off. And to top it he is a also child rapist and a global menace so really hard to beat.
Who is facing years for touching floating paint chips? Link to article?
