RWDT XX: The System Is Kapp Putsch

[United Muscovite Nations]

"haha i is so smart comic strip political theorist is so dum, nevr mine that he 4med the basis of modurn political thot"

I mean doesn't Juche propaganda claim an element of divine right? Hana mentioned something about traditional Korean mountain deities, right?

Yes. It doesn't have anything to do with the validity of their social contract. The North Korean people accept the sovereignty of the sovereign. This agreement is legally in perpetuity.

[Cekoviu]

So I have begun to study the ideology of Juche/Songun and I must say it does has quite some merits of its own...

no, it really doesn't

[Questarian New Yorkshire]

Also irony. You claimed the pledge of allegiance a bad thing yet somehow the cult of Juche and Kimism is good? It is like the pledge dialed up to a billion and forced.
North Korea is not an “organic” concept, it is a carefully created construct forced top down that relies on people lacking adequate access to outside information.

Let's be careful, I'm not defending North Korea's internal politics. It's not how I would organise a state.

I think UMN thinks the same way too.

I am:

• Protesting this threads ignorance of North Korea,
• Protesting the beliefs of certain people that the US can just invade countries and "liberate them",
• Supporting peace between countries and the right of self determination.

[United Muscovite Nations]

Also irony. You claimed the pledge of allegiance a bad thing yet somehow the cult of Juche and Kimism is good? It is like the pledge dialed up to a billion and forced.
North Korea is not an “organic” concept, it is a carefully created construct forced top down that relies on people lacking adequate access to outside information.

Let's be careful, I'm not defending North Korea's internal politics. It's not how I would organise a state.

I think UMN thinks the same way too.

I am:

• Protesting this threads ignorance of North Korea,
• Protesting the beliefs of certain people that the US can just invade countries and "liberate them",
• Supporting peace between countries and the right of self determination.

Yes. Their social contract is valid, that doesn't mean I love it.

[Questarian New Yorkshire]

So I have begun to study the ideology of Juche/Songun and I must say it does has quite some merits of its own...

no, it really doesn't

Whether you like Juche or not (it's not my thing, honestly) the Juche regime is the legitimate and sovereign government of North Korea, one of two legitimate and sovereign governments of the whole Korean peninsula, and the vehicle by which North Koreans engage the world and other countries.

That should happen on their terms. If they want to live in another form of government, they should be able to. If their government asks for our help and we can provide it, we should provide it. If they overthrow their government and replace it with a new one, we should work with them. This is not about the government of North Korea or its political-philosophical appeal, the government of North Korea was not constituted for the satisfaction of Americans — the Government of North Korea was constituted for the people of Korea! This is not about you or me, this is about the Korean people and their right to self-determination.

[Imperium Romanum Sanctis]

How? What is the point of the social contract if not do benefit the people? And what do the people there get in return for allowing a tiny elite to rule over them in basically feudal system?

How did they ever agree to it?

They get enforcement of law. They agreed to it in perpetuity by accepting the rule of the Kims.

They get to eat grass during famines and are sent to gulags along with their families when they complain about the government.

North Korea is a mirror image of what China would be like if the Cultural Revolution never ended. It's a psychotic dictatorship where the state is highly dysfunctional, and the rule of law is totally dependent upon the whims of the absolute monarch.

There's no such thing as a social contract in North Korea. You can't have one in such a chaotic nightmare of a system.

[Questarian New Yorkshire]

North Korean government imprisons its own citizens, US government goes to other countries and imprisons their citizens, who is the bigger criminal?

[United Muscovite Nations]

They get enforcement of law. They agreed to it in perpetuity by accepting the rule of the Kims.

They get to eat grass during famines and are sent to gulags along with their families when they complain about the government.

North Korea is a mirror image of what China would be like if the Cultural Revolution never ended. It's a psychotic dictatorship where the state is highly dysfunctional, and the rule of law is totally dependent upon the whims of the absolute monarch.

There's no such thing as a social contract in North Korea. You can't have one in such a chaotic nightmare of a system.

Again, consent =/= democracy. Social contracts can be absolutist and authoritarian.

Fourthly, because every Subject is by this Institution Author of all the Actions, and Judgements of the Soveraigne Instituted; it followes, that whatsoever he doth, it can be no injury to any of his Subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused of Injustice. For he that doth any thing by authority from another, doth therein no injury to him by whose authority he acteth: But by this Institution of a Common-wealth, every particular man is Author of all the Soveraigne doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his Soveraigne, complaineth of that whereof he himselfe is Author; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himselfe; no nor himselfe of injury; because to do injury to ones selfe, is impossible. It is true that they that have Soveraigne power, may commit Iniquity; but not Injustice, or Injury in the proper signification.

Fiftly, and consequently to that which was sayd last, no man that hath Soveraigne power can justly be put to death, or otherwise in any manner by his Subjects punished. For seeing every Subject is author of the actions of his Soveraigne; he punisheth another, for the actions committed by himselfe.

[Fahran]

Civic ritual is either a cause or a symptom.

When I was at school Great Britain was the only country in Europe to have mandatory religion in its state education system. Really. So when I was in junior school we marched every Easter and Christmas to the Anglican church and sat inside and listened to the vicar talk about religion. Not like I ever paid attention.

So, is that a cause of social cohesion, or a symptom of social cohesion?

That's a symptom. We did those things because we were a socially coherent society (in rural Yorkshire those things still existed in the 1990s.)

But imagine forcing everyone to go to Church because you want them to socially cohere. It may not work. It may take a long time to work. It's not a click-fingers +social cohesion thing. Take mandatory military service.

In all European countries military service has been mandatory since the early middle period, because peasants would be conscripted without consent. In some countries like England they actually had to regularly train as well. One wonders whether this is a cause or a symptom but I think it was neither, since these people didn't have "agency" as citizens. Being told what to do by a higher power without having a say often causes cohesion, but acceptance of it can also be a symptom too.

Military service works in Switzerland still because it's seen as a duty for all men and an automatic thing that all men just have to do in Swiss society, like wear a belt when you go outside, get a job, and not beat people up etc etc. It's a symptom of a highly cohesive society and not the cause of one. Now just try institute mandatory military service in the US and see what will happen.

As I have alluded to in my other posts, the best way to get social cohesion is simply to put a load of very similar people together. They'll cohere naturally. This is a verboten opinion, so I need to be careful how I phrase it.

I'm not certain we can draw a clear distinction between cause and symptom here. As Novus mentioned in a large number of his previous posts, large-scale military conscription in World War II created a high level of social cohesion in the United States in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, which was sustained in part by organizations that brought veterans and their families together. Government policy can and has served instructive purposes, even when this occurred quite by accident, and I think that's inevitable when we acknowledge government and the state as the realization of man's political nature.

With North Korea's state, we're looking at an eclectic blend of ideas, some of them originally quite foreign to Korea itself, that were imposed top-down on the population and that have gained strength due to the traumas of the Korean War, painted as a patriotic struggle in spite of the fact that it was initiated as a war of aggression. It's not exactly the textbook model of organic social cohesion in the absence of government policy even if we suppose, with decent evidence, that a high level of social cohesion was present even before the inception of the Juche state. Because the values that mattered in pre-Kim society have been shaped and molded by the prerogatives of the ruling party, which has changed its interests as time has passed.

Even if we examine the role of Anglican rituals to public life in Yorkshire, there's no clear distinction between symptom and cause. If those rituals were mandatory or even granted state sanction, they served to reinforce feelings and realities of social cohesion. They were both a cause and a symptom.

[Taihei Tengoku]

China would be like if the Cultural Revolution never ended

Americans don't get to say this phrase

[Imperium Romanum Sanctis]

They get to eat grass during famines and are sent to gulags along with their families when they complain about the government.

North Korea is a mirror image of what China would be like if the Cultural Revolution never ended. It's a psychotic dictatorship where the state is highly dysfunctional, and the rule of law is totally dependent upon the whims of the absolute monarch.

There's no such thing as a social contract in North Korea. You can't have one in such a chaotic nightmare of a system.

Again, consent =/= democracy. Social contracts can be absolutist and authoritarian.

How can you have consent in a country where you're literally not allowed to leave?

[Imperium Romanum Sanctis]

China would be like if the Cultural Revolution never ended

Americans don't get to say this phrase

I'm not American.

[Taihei Tengoku]

Americans don't get to say this phrase

I'm not American.

Think again, gweilo

[Fahran]

North Korean government imprisons its own citizens, US government goes to other countries and imprisons their citizens, who is the bigger criminal?

Our enemies must always be perceived as greater criminals in instances when our own morality has not been indicted by ourselves. That remains true even when we find particular policies disagreeable on moral or practical grounds.

[United Muscovite Nations]

Again, consent =/= democracy. Social contracts can be absolutist and authoritarian.

How can you have consent in a country where you're literally not allowed to leave?

Please do not edit the reasoning out of the quote. You got your answer in my post, you edited it out, and then ask me how it can be justified:

First, because they Covenant, it is to be understood, they are not obliged by former Covenant to any thing repugnant hereunto. And Consequently they that have already Instituted a Common-wealth, being thereby bound by Covenant, to own the Actions, and Judgements of one, cannot lawfully make a new Covenant, amongst themselves, to be obedient to any other, in any thing whatsoever, without his permission. And therefore, they that are subjects to a Monarch, cannot without his leave cast off Monarchy, and return to the confusion of a disunited Multitude; nor transferre their Person from him that beareth it, to another Man, or other Assembly of men: for they are bound, every man to every man, to Own, and be reputed Author of all, that he that already is their Soveraigne, shall do, and judge fit to be done: so that any one man dissenting, all the rest should break their Covenant made to that man, which is injustice: and they have also every man given the Soveraignty to him that beareth their Person; and therefore if they depose him, they take from him that which is his own, and so again it is injustice. Besides, if he that attempteth to depose his Soveraign, be killed, or punished by him for such attempt, he is author of his own punishment, as being by the Institution, Author of all his Soveraign shall do: And because it is injustice for a man to do any thing, for which he may be punished by his own authority, he is also upon that title, unjust. And whereas some men have pretended for their disobedience to their Soveraign, a new Covenant, made, not with men, but with God; this also is unjust: for there is no Covenant with God, but by mediation of some body that representeth Gods Person; which none doth but Gods Lieutenant, who hath the Soveraignty under God. But this pretence of Covenant with God, is so evident a lye, even in the pretenders own consciences, that it is not onely an act of an unjust, but also of a vile, and unmanly disposition.

[Fahran]

How can you have consent in a country where you're literally not allowed to leave?

Under such circumstances, consent is predicated on the absence of rebellions sufficient to topple the regime, in much the same way as an enlightened absolutist would gauge consent by the absence of French-inspired bourgeoisies storming the palace and the support of key interest groups and king-makers.

[United Muscovite Nations]

Do you guys think Kim goes around shooting and rounding up political prisoners? Do you think he alone is the DPRK? Are not the soldiers and police, who exist in the millions (and if we count those who have served, it is the greater part of the North Korean population) part of the DPRK? When Kim hands them a rifle, pistol, or nightstick, and asks them to commit violence in his name, in what way is their committing of violence in his name not an agreement that Kim is their sovereign?

[Novus America]

Really? The elite are above the law. And when did they willingly accept the rule of the Kims? Why should the Kims rule?

Again I am not calling for us to “liberate” them or whatever but do not BS. You know as well as I the Kims seized power by force, and live for their own benefit alone, and they people just resources to be exploited and disposed of when no longer useful.

They willingly accepted the Kims' rules when they served in their armies, when they learned in their schools, utilized their roads, etc.

Read Hobbes. Consent =/= voting and the social contract is not democratic.

I have. Read Locke and Rousseau. Hobbes is not the only or final word on the matter.

And by definition a contract requires consent. Legally you cannot have a contract without consent.
Lack of consent is an absolute defense against being bound to a contract.

Even Hobbes argues there is consent even without democracy.
But North Korea has issues under Hobbes, because although Hobbes argues against democracy he argues the purpose of the social contract is to benefit the people agains the “state of nature”. Including things like hunger.

Ultimately Hobbes argues the social contract exists to benefit the people, ergo being able to demonstrate those benefits undermines the ideas. Which is an inherent problem with Hobbes anyways because he assumes the people will benefit, he does not offer what happens when the people do not. He was more interested in defending the existing order in the UK of his time over building a universal model anyways. It cannot be really applied to a non Christian country either as Hobbes argues a biblical and Christian justification.

Hence why subsequent thinkers had to build on it.

[United Muscovite Nations]

They willingly accepted the Kims' rules when they served in their armies, when they learned in their schools, utilized their roads, etc.

Read Hobbes. Consent =/= voting and the social contract is not democratic.

I have. Read Locke and Rousseau. Hobbes is not the only or final word on the matter.

And by definition a contract requires consent. Legally you cannot have a contract without consent.
Lack of consent is an absolute defense against being bound to a contract.

Even Hobbes argues there is consent even without democracy.
But North Korea has issues under Hobbes, because although Hobbes argues against democracy he argues the purpose of the social contract is to benefit the people agains the “state of nature”. Including things like hunger.

Ultimately Hobbes argues the social contract exists to benefit the people, ergo being able to demonstrate those benefits undermines the ideas. Which is an inherent problem with Hobbes anyways because he assumes the people will benefit, he does not offer what happens when the people do not. He was more interested in defending the existing order in the UK of his time over building a universal model anyways.

Hence why subsequent thinkers had to build on it.

Yes, and the social contract does benefit the people. They get (most of the time) food, they get education, they get roads, they get law enforcement, and they get hospitals.

[Imperium Romanum Sanctis]

How can you have consent in a country where you're literally not allowed to leave?

Please do not edit the reasoning out of the quote. You got your answer in my post, you edited it out, and then ask me how it can be justified:

First, because they Covenant, it is to be understood, they are not obliged by former Covenant to any thing repugnant hereunto. And Consequently they that have already Instituted a Common-wealth, being thereby bound by Covenant, to own the Actions, and Judgements of one, cannot lawfully make a new Covenant, amongst themselves, to be obedient to any other, in any thing whatsoever, without his permission. And therefore, they that are subjects to a Monarch, cannot without his leave cast off Monarchy, and return to the confusion of a disunited Multitude; nor transferre their Person from him that beareth it, to another Man, or other Assembly of men: for they are bound, every man to every man, to Own, and be reputed Author of all, that he that already is their Soveraigne, shall do, and judge fit to be done: so that any one man dissenting, all the rest should break their Covenant made to that man, which is injustice: and they have also every man given the Soveraignty to him that beareth their Person; and therefore if they depose him, they take from him that which is his own, and so again it is injustice. Besides, if he that attempteth to depose his Soveraign, be killed, or punished by him for such attempt, he is author of his own punishment, as being by the Institution, Author of all his Soveraign shall do: And because it is injustice for a man to do any thing, for which he may be punished by his own authority, he is also upon that title, unjust. And whereas some men have pretended for their disobedience to their Soveraign, a new Covenant, made, not with men, but with God; this also is unjust: for there is no Covenant with God, but by mediation of some body that representeth Gods Person; which none doth but Gods Lieutenant, who hath the Soveraignty under God. But this pretence of Covenant with God, is so evident a lye, even in the pretenders own consciences, that it is not onely an act of an unjust, but also of a vile, and unmanly disposition.

I deleted the Hobbes quote to save space, but that's neither here nor there.

A social contract is completely invalid when the government fails to meet even the most basic needs of its citizens. In regards to North Korea, that would be the abject poverty and recurring famines endured by its citizens. It's not something that's permanently set in stone.

[Fahran]

So I have begun to study the ideology of Juche/Songun and I must say it does has quite some merits of its own...

Its good qualities align with the good qualities of Fascism to a significant degree. I find both Fascism and Juche repugnant but I can concede that much at least.

[United Muscovite Nations]

Please do not edit the reasoning out of the quote. You got your answer in my post, you edited it out, and then ask me how it can be justified:

I deleted the Hobbes quote to save space, but that's neither here nor there.

A social contract is completely invalid when the government fails to meet even the most basic needs of its citizens. In regards to North Korea, that would be the abject poverty and recurring famines endured by its citizens. It's not something that's permanently set in stone.

It does meet their basic needs, as evidenced by that they are alive. Was no government legitimate prior to like 150 years ago?

[Novus America]

Civic ritual is either a cause or a symptom.

When I was at school Great Britain was the only country in Europe to have mandatory religion in its state education system. Really. So when I was in junior school we marched every Easter and Christmas to the Anglican church and sat inside and listened to the vicar talk about religion. Not like I ever paid attention.

So, is that a cause of social cohesion, or a symptom of social cohesion?

That's a symptom. We did those things because we were a socially coherent society (in rural Yorkshire those things still existed in the 1990s.)

But imagine forcing everyone to go to Church because you want them to socially cohere. It may not work. It may take a long time to work. It's not a click-fingers +social cohesion thing. Take mandatory military service.

In all European countries military service has been mandatory since the early middle period, because peasants would be conscripted without consent. In some countries like England they actually had to regularly train as well. One wonders whether this is a cause or a symptom but I think it was neither, since these people didn't have "agency" as citizens. Being told what to do by a higher power without having a say often causes cohesion, but acceptance of it can also be a symptom too.

Military service works in Switzerland still because it's seen as a duty for all men and an automatic thing that all men just have to do in Swiss society, like wear a belt when you go outside, get a job, and not beat people up etc etc. It's a symptom of a highly cohesive society and not the cause of one. Now just try institute mandatory military service in the US and see what will happen.

As I have alluded to in my other posts, the best way to get social cohesion is simply to put a load of very similar people together. They'll cohere naturally. This is a verboten opinion, so I need to be careful how I phrase it.

I'm not certain we can draw a clear distinction between cause and symptom here. As Novus mentioned in a large number of his previous posts, large-scale military conscription in World War II created a high level of social cohesion in the United States in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, which was sustained in part by organizations that brought veterans and their families together. Government policy can and has served instructive purposes, even when this occurred quite by accident, and I think that's inevitable when we acknowledge government and the state as the realization of man's political nature.

With North Korea's state, we're looking at an eclectic blend of ideas, some of them originally quite foreign to Korea itself, that were imposed top-down on the population and that have gained strength due to the traumas of the Korean War, painted as a patriotic struggle in spite of the fact that it was initiated as a war of aggression. It's not exactly the textbook model of organic social cohesion in the absence of government policy even if we suppose, with decent evidence, that a high level of social cohesion was present even before the inception of the Juche state. Because the values that mattered in pre-Kim society have been shaped and molded by the prerogatives of the ruling party, which has changed its interests as time has passed.

Even if we examine the role of Anglican rituals to public life in Yorkshire, there's no clear distinction between symptom and cause. If those rituals were mandatory or even granted state sanction, they served to reinforce feelings and realities of social cohesion. They were both a cause and a symptom.

Exactly, in these cases there is not a dichotomy as it is a cycle, a feed back loop, at least in cases with a somewhat representative government, people influence the government and the government the people.

[Fahran]

Do you guys think Kim goes around shooting and rounding up political prisoners? Do you think he alone is the DPRK? Are not the soldiers and police, who exist in the millions (and if we count those who have served, it is the greater part of the North Korean population) part of the DPRK? When Kim hands them a rifle, pistol, or nightstick, and asks them to commit violence in his name, in what way is their committing of violence in his name not an agreement that Kim is their sovereign?

I once read an excerpt from a survivor of Saddam Hussein's tortures and executions who mentioned that the deepest and darkest evil of dictatorship is how it makes every citizen complicit. It was in reference to how family members were often made to betray and/or torture one another in order to simply survive. That's why an absolute state of that nature is aberrant and repugnant, because it constitutes a usurpation of the natural order. It puts the state and the regime before family, before one's own instinctual morality, before the community in some cases, and it does so forcefully and violently.

That said, the illegitimacy, brutality, and evil of such a regime does not in and of itself justify the evil of war between otherwise disinterested political communities, especially not a war that would replace torture, usurpation, temporary starvation, and incarceration with death, rape, pestilence, and enduring starvation.

[Nakena]

Do you guys think Kim goes around shooting and rounding up political prisoners? Do you think he alone is the DPRK? Are not the soldiers and police, who exist in the millions (and if we count those who have served, it is the greater part of the North Korean population) part of the DPRK? When Kim hands them a rifle, pistol, or nightstick, and asks them to commit violence in his name, in what way is their committing of violence in his name not an agreement that Kim is their sovereign?

I once read an excerpt from a survivor of Saddam Hussein's tortures and executions who mentioned that the deepest and darkest evil of dictatorship is how it makes every citizen complicit. It was in reference to how family members were often made to betray and/or torture one another in order to simply survive. That's why an absolute state of that nature is aberrant and repugnant, because it constitutes a usurpation of the natural order. It puts the state and the regime before family, before one's own instinctual morality, before the community in some cases, and it does so forcefully and violently.

That said, the illegitimacy, brutality, and evil of such a regime does not in and of itself justify the evil of war between otherwise disinterested political communities, especially not a war that would replace torture, usurpation, temporary starvation, and incarceration with death, rape, pestilence, and enduring starvation.

Was it the book written by the doppelganger of Saddam Hussein's evil son Uday "I was Saddams Son"?

I read that one in the build up to the Iraq Invasion in 2003. I read it in one night. I needed a shower after that. Good stuff.

So I have begun to study the ideology of Juche/Songun and I must say it does has quite some merits of its own...

no, it really doesn't

Well I just started reading about it. But this I can already say:

It's clearly superior to marxism leninism. And thus already superior to "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics".

It puts man in the center of it's thought and rejects the false diamat teaching of marxism/communism.

It's humanist. And as you know, I am a humanist.

Perhaps the last one. ;^)