Objection

The US pulling out of the UN would allow them to pass all sorts of cool stuff, like recognizing and admitting Palestine and calling for a ceasefire, recognizing the universal rights of children, and condemning the far-right, all of which the US used its veto power to stop against overwhelming support on the other side.

Could do worse tbh.

For one thing, virtually every country on earth claims to be democratic, whereas only some claim to be socialist. There are many countries that claim the label of democratic that don't consider the DPRK to be a democracy, but the countries that claim the label of socialist, such as Cuba, generally recognize the DPRK as socialist. If would be strange to refer to a group of countries as socialist and then exclude a country that those countries recognize as being socialist.

It's worth noting that one of the main reasons the DPRK is not considered democratic is not because of the way the government and elections are structured, but because it doesn't allow its elections to be monitored by international observers.

I'm from the South and I always hated having to drive. I think it's also nicer/safer to drive in a place with public transit than without, because some bad drivers know they're bad drivers and will take another option if it's available, plus it just means fewer cars on the road. No public transit just sucks for everyone.

I live near Chicago, and the worst I've experienced is someone yelling or playing loud music. I'm not saying bad stuff never happens, but it's much safer than driving (admittedly a very low bar).

The means of production are mixed between public/state ownership, collective ownership, and private ownership, actually.

I take it that your metric for whether or not a state is socialist is something like, "Worker ownership of the means of production." But that metric has a lot of ambiguities that make it difficult to apply practically in an objective way. Which workers own which means of production, and in what form? Suppose we have a system where everything is state-owned and the state determines who can use what when based on a truly democratic process - but then, an organization of trained professionals in a given field go on strike to demand things be done the way they want. If all the workers should own all the means of production, then the strikers are out of line, but if the workers in a particular field should own the means of production in that field, then the state is out of line.

And should the economy be transformed, fully and immediately, to that ideal? Historically, both the USSR and PRC attempted widespread collectivization of farms, like with the Great Leap Forward, which was an abject failure. That's not to say that farming collectives cannot be successful, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect immediate and total transformation to that model or else a state isn't socialist.

People use all sorts of metrics to determine whether or not a state is socialist or not, so it's hard to find neutral terminology everyone can agree with. North Korea calls itself socialist and has a centrally-planned economy, and has been historically aligned with other countries that also call themselves socialist (such as the USSR and PRC), so it seems reasonable enough to me to call them socialist. Should I call them capitalist instead? Seems a little odd, especially since I live in the US which has a much larger proportion of the economy in the private sector.

This is what I'm talking about. The US not liking North Korea is an objective fact. But because people on the internet treat whatever you last posted as your entire identity and belief system, then you assume that's the full extent of my position on North Korea. You expect me to do the typical signals to disavow and denounce the country as part of the strategy of the Western left distancing itself from AES states. But I'm not interested in signalling anything, for the reasons I explained. The strategy of allowing and repeating all sorts of sensationalist nonsense for fear that pushing back against it will tie you to the state in question just doesn't work.

Is North Korea really "the worst dictatorship on planet Earth?" Are they worse than, for example, Saudi Arabia? Are they so much obviously worse that anyone who thinks Saudi Arabia is worse "should get their brain tested?"

It’s like talking about sexual abuse and someone saying that the person raped is now not “liking” the rapist, but a million times worse.

Ok, maybe you're right. Perhaps it's important to mention the horrible things the US and North Korea have done to each other. Like when the US invaded and killed 15% of their entire population (primarily civilians), carpet bombed the country, and deployed all sorts of chemical weapons, or when North Korea, er, sorry, what did North Korea do to America that's "a million times worse than rape?" Gonna have to refresh my memory on that one chief.

Look they first thing I’m confused about is why you started your comment with a sympathetic viewpoint to North Korea, like I would’nt open my essay about how nuclear energy is good with Chernobyl wasnt that bad. Your basically delegitimising everying else after that

That's a perfect demonstration of my point. The only thing I said about North Korea is that there are fake stories about it, which is true. I have no interest in saying or tolerating false claims just to make my position seem more appealing, or to avoid being accused of something. If speaking truth delegitimizes me somehow, if it makes people think I'm a bad person or something, then so be it, it doesn't change what's true.

And then I disagree with the false and exaggerated claims unchallenged part. What exactly do you mean. This seems like a catch all to dismiss anything that you disagree with.

I linked a video to give an example of what I was talking about. I recommend watching it, it's a little long but it's informative while being entertaining and well-produced (it has 3.6 million views with good reason). The video describes a story that was very widespread in the media with lots of mainstream sources talking about it, which claimed that everyone in North Korea had to get the same haircut as Kim Jong Un. That story was completely and totally false, it was a wholesale fabrication. The two guys in the video travel to North Korea and get a perfectly normal haircut to disprove it. It also mentions several other stories that turned out to be fake news.

You're jumping to conclusions when you say that I "use it as a catch-all to dismiss anything I disagree with." I'm not going to dismiss claims that are actually backed by evidence, but I am going to investigate whether there is actually evidence backing up a given claim.

More importantly, because the only state you’ve mentioned is North Korea I’m now prompted to assume the AES’s you’re talking about is north Korea.

That's a silly assumption, as there'd be no need for a term like that if it only applied to one country. AES states also include for example Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, China, and the USSR (prior to it's collapse).

People being terrified of cities and public transit.

One thing I personally can’t understand is their defending to the death of every socialist government. But by that I mean every government that has called itself socialist or been called socialist by the US as some sort of justification for undermining them, not if they’ve actually done anything socialist. Like do we have to simp for North Korea.

There's a couple of points I would make in response to that.

First, a problematic aspect of the internet is that your existence is defined by the last thing you posted. Which is to say, if someone says that a story about North Korea is fake, then to a reader they are a "North Korea defender," regardless of whether they hold more critical beliefs about it that they didn't happen to voice in that particular comment. And there have been plenty of sensationalist, fake news stories about North Korea, as well as about other countries the US doesn't like.

Second, most Hexbears are Marxist-Leninists, and an important thing to understand about that ideology is that it isn't about one specific set of policies that are universally applicable. When an ML defends a country, it doesn't necessarily mean that they think that country should be held up as a model for other countries to emulate.

So if they're not a model to emulate, then why defend them? First off, because the only means we in the West have of influencing their policies is through our government using military force, clandestine operations, or crippling economic sanctions. Second, because even if a socialist government is a failure, the extent to which it failed is important, because it will be held up as a criticism of socialism in general. Many Western leftists believe in simply putting as much distance as possible between themselves and AES (actually existing socialist) states, and will be some of their harshest critics to that end. But others, myself included, would argue that that's the wrong approach, because it allows false and exaggerated claims to go unchallenged, which will then still be used to criticize the left no matter how much one tries to distance themselves from it. Like, people will call Obama and Harris communists, so it doesn't seem to matter how much distance there is.

Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds is a good starting point for understanding the perspective.

Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate.

Never heard of anyone in that field doing this. If you walk into a computer repair place and say you need to recover data off a hard drive and they say they need to know how much the data's worth before they can tell you the cost, you should probably just immediately walk out and go to a different store regardless because that's probably a skeezy place.