North Korea

That is if it doesn't end up with increased repression to make harder for those people to get anywhere near North Korea through the DMZ.

Inter arma enim silent leges

So at best these guys do nothing except looking stupid - and at worst they cause even more oppression?

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

I believe Stiman's intention is to get back in the news. From my understanding she has been irrelevant to the general public since the 1970's. Also the comments on the time article make me want to throw up. My respect for the feminist movement has taken a nosedive.

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.

There isn't really a "feminist movement", you know. They don't all meet up in some shadowy lecture theatre in Berkeley to coordinate their actions.

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Yup.

It's all on Twitter now.

They do have medals for almost, and they're called silver!

True, but Stiman is one of the most influential feminists in recent history. Ether way I still support the feminist cause, I am just loosing respect for the organized groups,if that makes any sense.

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.

That's just what the Femilluminati want you to think!

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Not influential enough for you to spell her name correctly, it seems.

I don't think Steinem really is all that influential these days. She's very second-wave, and we're into the third/fourth wave now. Feminists seem to suffer from academic matriophagy, in the sense that the present wave likes to denounce the previous wave in quite strong terms whilst simultaneously being inspired by it. Hardly unusual, but the classification of feminism into "waves" makes it seem acute.

edited 24th May '15 4:28:14 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

And with the fall of the USSR, a lot of the "useful idiots" and "fellow travelers" had nothing to do.

Gloria Steinem is now, at best, a gadfly. This Christine Ahn lady is one of the worst form of "useful idiot": she's blind supporter of Best Korea.

During the Cold War, there were many Soviet apologists who insisted that the whole thing was the west's fault. If only the USSR was allowed to roll over Europe live peacefully etc. There would be peace. Ditto the cry for a "nuclear freeze": many peace groups had some ties to Moscow.

I thought that time had healed that wound, most of these groups moved on or distanced themsevles from the Kremlin. But it seems that the "peace" movement still has some suckers. Read this article and weep for poor Christine Ahn.

Alright, I went to a Catholic school and was educated by real nuns and I had several pacifist freinds in high school and college (I lived in a college town). So I don't hate peace activsts on principle.

There are the genuinely clueless: Jodi Williams campaigning to ban landmines in South Korea for instance. Only a few peace activists met with her, the rest knew that the mines keep the Norks on their side of the DMZ. There was a blogger who claimed that "Nork" was somehow racist...somehow, I dunno... even though the term is just a contraction of "NORth Korea"...

I DO LOATHE the usefull idiots who are tools for dictators. They do much more harm than good. Plus, if things turn sour, USFK will have to rescue their dumb asses from the Norks.

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

Because these days everything is either racist, misogynist, triggering or a combination of any of the three.

Also, why am I not surprised that pro-North Korea feminists exist?

edited 24th May '15 5:06:35 PM by DrunkenNordmann

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

Because the world is big enough that you can pretty much find pro-anything anythings?

And Nork could be racist, if it's used deceptively I'd say it's not but if it's used as a derogatory term it might well be.

edited 24th May '15 5:10:34 PM by Silasw

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

"Jap" is just an abbreviation of "Japanese", yet it can be derogatory and is generally considered racist. "Nork" is exactly the same thing, in principle.

The only difference is that "Nork" does not have a recorded history of having been used as a derogatory term (instead of a neutral shorthand) so it's not automatically associated with a racist connotation. It can be racist, though.

Plenty of terms that refer to ethnic groups could be PC if they hadn't been ruined by people who used them derogatorily.

"Yid" comes from "Yiddish", which was a language spoken by a large fraction of Jews in Europe until the Holocaust (and is still spoken by a significant number of European Jews). Perhaps it might've been a bit rude to use it to refer to a Jew who didn't speak Yiddish, but I imagine that would be a very minor faux pas if not for the derogatory use that this word has had throughout its history.

I can think of an example in Finnish, as well. Skip the next paragraph if you don't want to learn something completely useless.

Useless trivia: The Finnish word "ryssä" refers to Russian people - it's derived from the Swedish name for Russia, which is Ryssland. "Ryssä" was a completely normal and acceptable term for "Russian" (the correct term, BTW, is "venäläinen" - derived from "Venäjä", which is Finnish for "Russia") until it started to get a negative connotation during the period of Finnish nationalism (late 1800s), when Russia tightened its grip on Finland. The word was used as an insult to refer to people who supported the Socialist Red faction in the Civil War of 1917 (the Reds were Finnish but they were assumed to be supported by Russia) so if it wasn't an insult before that it became an insult then, and has been used as a derogatory term for Russians ever since. It was probably used most frequently during and immediately after the Second World War, during which the USSR invaded Finland twice. /useless trivia

Anyway, the point of that example was to illustrate how a word can come from a perfectly reasonable origin and have a neutral meaning, yet become derogatory through its use. If people are using "Nork" to refer derogatorily to North Korean it's not a politically correct term.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Is it really racist if its referring to a political entity rather than a race though?

Thats like calling someone racist for using the word commies.

"War without fire is like sausages without mustard." - Jean Juvénal des Ursins

If it's clear that you are genuinely opposed to North Korea and not just making fun of things, it might be tolerable once or twice, but it does get annoying when you're trying to have a serious discussion and the term keeps being used in a snarky way.

Also I was not aware yesterday that the DMZ walkers were pro-North. Now it really does feel like Dennis Rodman's misguided attempt to foster a cultural relationship with the leader.

Unfortunately this is taken quite seriously in many circles.

On another note, I'm a bit dubious about how the term "pro North Korean feminist" is being applied in the context of this discussion ^note  kind of like how people keep insisting that the Nazis were socialists because they had "socialist" in their formal name , but it's neither here nor there. I do believe that China and North Korea's skin trade is going to come to a head sooner rather than later as global awareness of the issue continues to grow, which was basically my previous point.

Global awareness of major civil rights violations is becoming a major feature of movement ideology, so there's naturally going to be a bit of a cultural disagreement about points and particulars of similar movements with broadly similar goals.

edited 24th May '15 9:25:41 PM by Aprilla

Yeah, there's one of the best examples of You Keep Using That Word. One can only be racists towards races.

Especially if you're pro-South Korea. Then it REALLY isn't racist.

edited 24th May '15 11:11:49 PM by Protagonist506

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

What would you call bigotry towards members of one nationality but not others if the people taken as representative are of the same ethnicity?

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Fishing for controversy. No worse then being called yank, brit, fin, aussie, etc.

Who watches the watchmen?

The women have crossed the DMZ

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.

So they didn't actually cross into North Korea, just traveled to Pyongyang, say some empty words and useless rhetoric without any risk and without doing anything useful.

For all the talk about bringing better rights for North Korean women, they managed to do jack shit besides scoring a PR victory for no one but themselves? What bunch of selfish broads, using the plight of others to make themselves look better and still claim they are helping.

I just went through the slides, as far as I can see all they did was give some speeches, meet the people the Party and Kim approved them to meet and never set foot outside the DMZ bases and Pyongyang, just it.

No wonder the Norks didn't make a huge mess out of it, it was a PR stunt for North Korea.

edited 25th May '15 6:02:53 AM by AngelusNox

Inter arma enim silent leges

With all due respect, are you really that surprised they didn't go farther?

I'm a bit disappointed, really. I expected a bigger controversy or clusterfuck rather than empty rhetoric and some pretty staged pictures.

Inter arma enim silent leges

Well they did manage to score PR points for the Norks as well

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.

I don't really see what else the peace activists could have done.

If they suddenly started criticising NK while in the country, they'd have not been saying anything anyone else doesn't already know, and wouldn't make any progress towards improving human rights in the country. They'd probably just get arrested, accused (rightfully) of being terrible and ungracious guests, booted and banned.

Their intention was to complete a crossing from North to South with more people than has ever been done before, no doubt because they intended more and more crossings like that to take place, hopefully increasing the links between the two nations. And for the first part they were successful. Acting up would have just made the whole enterprise a failure.

The crossing should not be the end goal, completing a crossing means nothing unless it actually has a desirable effect.

They could have stayed in South Korea and focused their campaign on what actual people from North Korea want/suggest. They could have not acted like the South Korea goverment is as much at fault as the North Korea one.

If their goal is going to be scuppered by pissing of the North Korea goverment than they have the wrong goal, because if the North Korea government isn't getting pissed off you're almost certainly not have a positive effect when it comes to helping people.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran