For someone who’s been around so long, I’m a little surprised you require explanation of a deviation of the dinosaur response.
Spoiler: Gman’s at fault because he had already shit up the thread over the past couple days or weeks or millennia. It gets hard to tell the time scale.
Ask yourself why Gman is here? He’s supposedly a new account. He basically only posts on P&R, on a gaming forum. And two thirds of those posts after whining about the way he’s being treated.
Think about that for a minute. Actually, since we had to explain the rabbit pictures, you may want to take the rest of the day to contemplate what’s going on here.
I didn’t do that in the original post or the reply. Which you still don’t seem to get. Keep trying to get it though. We’re family here and we won’t kick you out or anything, just keep shaking our heads and saying ‘well bless his heart’
So you’re going all in on the Six Year Old Defence? Triggercut had no choice, was not in control of his actions. The only way to view his posts in that thread is that gman made him post them?
Right, you think he’s a troll. There’ve been many accusations of trolling, or posting in bad faith aimed at gman in the last couple of weeks. My problem is that these complaints seem so… selective.
There are plenty of trolls on the home team here. None of them seem to cause this level of distress. Armando’s entire body of work in this subforum is a years long series of shitposts. But hey, he’s “one of us”, so that’s not a problem. Dave Perkins trolling in this thread doesn’t seem to bother you; is he a different kind of troll, maybe the good kind?
Frankly I don’t trust the trolling accusation in the first place. It’s the laziest way to dismiss dissenting opinion. But even if I stipulate that that’s all he’s doing, my point of view is there a bunch of people here who are being much bigger jerks then he is, and somehow they get a free pass on their behaviour. Everything is apparently, somehow, gman’s fault.
I’m going to bow out of the conversation, but just wanted to publicly apologize. This issue has just really irritated me and gotten under my skin, hence my antagonistic tone. You didn’t deserve a snide or irritable response.
It is strange Mark Weston’s posts are derided as “weird” because he hasn’t posted often on this forum recently, as if there’s something creepy about not devoting massive amounts of time to an online forum. My posts are similarly sinister because I’m new, and I have shown an interest in politics over games in my initial posts. I don’t go around checking others’ post history, because I find that a bit creepy in itself, but if I did, I assume I’d find that most people here have been here a long time, know each other, and generally share the same political tilt. I could make all kinds of personal assumptions about their motivations for posting here maybe: they simply want affirmation of their beliefs (like the typical Fox News viewer, or my friends at Stormfront), for example. But who does that kind of speculation help, in a thread about North Korea?!
We got on this most recent tangent because someone assumed I wasn’t being sincere when I thanked them for actually contributing to the discussion, despite all this noise. Again, more assumptions about my motivations – AS IF! someone can’t be appreciative of an informative post about a poll showing that most South Koreans approve of what Trump did at the summit, by an overwhelming margin.
I will tell you that the poll showing South Korea’s approval of the summit dovetails with this New Yorker piece, written one day after the meeting, in which the author points out that it’s the “chemistry” between Trump and Kim Jong Un that seems to have resonated with South Koreans locally. That’s something they obviously haven’t seen between a Western leader and a North Korean, and it’s their apparent reason for supporting the summit, and thinking it could be different from previous efforts to connect there:
South Korean people have been living under continuous threat of war, real war where their civilian population dies in huge numbers, for decades. The younger generation doesn’t really even remember why they were at war.
So yes, they have a desperate sort of hope that things will work out.
I’m mostly just being sad that Mark missed my three serious posts over the last 5 years in P&R; I was so proud of them there, sprinkled amidst the shitposting :(
I do. I think its net a good thing. For those of us who want to see North Korea disarm and one day dream of seeing the walls come down like in Germany any step towards the liberation of North Koreans from a scumbag communist regime is a very very good thing.
I am just annoyed that trump seems incapable of doing anything good without staining it with some gaff or political & personal attack immediately after or during it.
I have a friend who is optimistic about it. Maybe since she’s following it through Korean media, she knows something that we don’t? I usually don’t second-guess people about what’s going on in their own country, but I think this is one issue where it helps to have some distance from it. How they deal with North Korea is tied into their domestic politics, what generation they’re from, and so on, so they can’t help but be biased.
Also, she sees Trump as a complete idiot who will potentially wreck the progress that the Koreans are making on their own, not as some great peacemaker bringing them together.
The vast majority of those 300 posts were either gman or replies to gman, so yes the cause of those 300 posts is gman and the people who are responding to his posts. The vast majority of which have nothing to do with the actual news about NK, and are instead whataboutism, moving goalposts, reporting personal feelings of woe cause poeple are being mean, etc. Not the nukes falling. Does my post now make sense? Does the fact that gman repeatedly has done exactly this in multiple other threads recently make a difference?
You either don’t get it, or are being deliberately obtuse for whatever reason. Seems like the latter at this point.
I use the PR threads in part to keep up with what’s happening in the world. Most things of importance make their way to this forum. When it gets all shitted up with the drivel that gman has been posting relentlessly, it becomes harder to get the actual news since there is no way to stop his posts from appearing on my screen. Perhaps that is his entire point in being here and he’s thrilled that it’s working. I don’t know, but it’s really effing annoying.
I imagine South Koreans are optimistic about the summit for the same reasons some people were optimistic about Trump “fixing” the country and #MAGA. They don’t know any better and are hoping for some magical cure for what ails them. For South Korea, I’d guess that they hope to finally see a day where the threat of invasion isn’t a legitimate concern. Or maybe some of them want to see their family members again, if they’re trapped up north. So they’re optimistic, even though that optimism is probably severely misplaced. Trump is a selfish self-absorbed con man. That’s all he is and all he’ll ever be. If he somehow ends up being a catalyst to peace between NK/SK then it’ll either be an accident or he’ll make out like a bandit money-wise.
It’s obviously a good thing that the South Koreans approve of the summit. Especially given how cavalierly Trump has been about frightening them with his childish taunts of North Korea. But the people of South Korea are in a very specific psychological place on this issue, where they’re considering something that poses an immediate, local, and existential threat. I remember the fear of living under the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War, and I would have been perfectly happy with a dovish leader appeasing the Soviet Union. Anything to alleviate that fear would of course be welcome. So of course South Koreans are happy to hear Kim Jung Un and Donald Trump smoothing over their dumb spat about who’s got the bigger button.
That doesn’t change the fact that we just got Charlie Browned by letting North Korea hold the football again. We further legitimized one of the most evil and morally repugnant leaders currently in power. Is it worth approval in a South Korean man-on-the-street poll when we undermine our standing in the world, both morally and in terms of our political strength going forward? Or is this just another “Gorsuch” situation where Trump supporters immediately grab onto whatever silver lining they can dream up to justify another political fumble?
Global politics is not a popularity contest, and it’s certainly not about making people feel good. Nor is it about abandoning the values that define you as a country. Just as Trump and his supporters are betraying centuries of democratic norms, this North Korean nonsense is doing the same thing to diplomatic norms, and Trump supporters are too short-sighted to understand what has actually happened.
The main difference is that Obama actually secured a verifiable dismantling of the Iranian nuclear program, and continued verification of their nuclear facilities for a decade.
We haven’t actually gotten anything from North Korea.
Also, North Korea is by virtually any measure, an objectively worse regime, that is less compatible with a movement toward liberalism.
