I was just grasping for a succinct way of describing a low-wage remote service farm outfit and “call center” was just the shortest and most generic way of phrasing it so it wouldn’t mess up the flow of the line (I started with “outsourced IT farm” and it read kind of wonky so I changed it). Although “outsourced remote IT work for US businesses” sounds a whole lot like a way of spicing up a description of call center work, especially since the accusation isn’t that they were backdooring US systems to steal from them just sending part of their wages back home.

I didn’t know of this anime before and now I have to watch the whole thing

Giving money to landlords is supporting terrorism. From tenants, anything short of Maoist revolution is collaborationism. No, I will not explain.

St. Louis has air ride sirens that go off whenever Mark Wahlberg is in town with his Shillelagh “Asia Slaya”

Edit: Seems like they taught those IT workers to use lemmy too

Is the simplest explanation really that a hostage situation that is always active and victimizing like a minimum of 10,000 people at a time, with zero public leaks, defectors, or anything else, while opening the DPRK up to revolt by creating a class of thousands of people whose families they directly threatened who also have easy access to the broader internet (Korean IT workers in China), versus . . .

These workers are supporting their families and an income tax was applied? Or just that the US is making shit up?

Is the byzantine conspiracy with an astonishing level of success really the most probably answer? What does it say about your worldview that this was what you “feel like” they are doing?

This is why despite North Koreans being dumb enough to think Kim Jong Un doesn’t poop, I love that they’re all family men down to a man; thousands and not even a few percent of them defecting regardless? They’re amazing. They could also still keep contact with the press and the CIA anonymously, but then again after the last time the press/CIA released the identity of the guy helping them which saw his family get executed they’re probably scared; I can’t recall who that person is and I can’t seem to be able to find info on him but it must have happened cause why else wouldn’t they keep in contact with the press/CIA anonymously through the internet?

Unless for their thousands of IT workers they also have thousands of handlers, and their thousands of handlers also have their own handlers. The Chinese and Russian government would also have to be collaborating with this system to be allowing North Korean handlers to be keeping watch over their charges and to be doing so secretively, but they’re the bad guys so I’m sure that’s happening.

God I love that real life is like a James Bond movie.

You have been lied to about North Korea. It is simply not the evil dictatorship it’s constantly portrayed as. This was a shock to me too when I first started trying to dig into all the things I’d been hearing most of my life about the “hermit kingdom.” But if it is something you’re remotely interested in understanding, you owe it to yourself to start questioning those lies, which includes questioning the material reasons behind why they are told. Since you posted something from a “defector” below, that’s an excellent place to start asking questions about the veracity of claims made by defectors and understanding the industry they are incentivized to participate in (often to the point of having no other options).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V4Hnl7J9H4 Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul - “A documentary on the world of defectors and South Korean Intelligence”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDXxXYFweTs What’s the Deal with Defectors? - shorter video essay that covers the basics.

If you like podcasts, I’d recommend Blowback. Any of their 4 seasons are excellent, but season 3 is about the Korean war and its consequences.

I feel like in this case you are wrong. And probably in every case involving the DPRK

Edit: Seems like they taught those IT workers to use lemmy too

If you want an actual conversation try starting with something that isn’t an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory next time

Congratulations, you are officially the dumbest motherfucker who ever lived. Your medal will arrive in the mail within 4-6 weeks.

That seems very likely. They probably have them all tied to chairs under the exhaust nozzles for the nuclear bombs the DPRK has aimed specifically at Meemaw’s beloved church, the Holy A$$emnblie of God in Cash located in the third string suburbs of Lubbock, TX.

Based on what?

Lazy NATOpedia understanding of history.

You start the story in the middle because you’ve been taught that way. Korea was occupied by the Japanese from 1910 to 1945. Kim Il Sung gained fame as an anti-Japanese guerilla fighter. Korea was sliced in half after WW2. A soviet occupied half, and a US-occupied half. Here’s how the Koreans were greeted respectively by the Americans and the Soviets, who were temporary allies in WW2.

The Americans and the Soviets naturally couldn’t agree on a trusteeship because the Americans wanted to force private enterprise and fascist Japanese collaborators onto the Koreans and the Soviets wanted Korea to be governed by the Korean working class (or, as imperialists call it, totalitarianism)

[Content warning: various atrocities]

The US instituted a US-backed military dictatorship in 1945, enabled that military dictatorship to begin executing socialists, anarchists, and Communists, placed people who had collaborated with the Japanese into positions of power, etc. The US-led South provoked the North with artillery strikes and armed incursions for 2 years leading up to the Korean war. When the “North” Koreans finally responded to this American occupation, the “Korean War” is said to have started (according to the Americans, who always start the story late), the American air force leveled every single city in the North, did not care about civilian casualties on either side, burned villages with flamethrowers, committed germ warfare, bombed schools, hospitals, dams, etc. And infantry committed sexual assault and executions on civilians. The fascist maniac General Douglas MacArthur (who Americans still worship as a “good man” in much the same fashion Americans accuse “North” Koreans of being brainwashed) wanted to nuke the entire 38th parallel but was thankfully stopped. After LOSING MISERABLY (as Americans always do in these kinds of wars, all they can do is get a high kill/death ratio by murdering civilians, they never actually achieve their strategic objectives) they continued to maintain a military occupation of the South (against the wishes of most South Koreans) LONG after the Soviets and PRC left North Korea, and they continue starving the North Koreans with sanctions for 70 years so they cannot achieve economic independence, and they blame the consequences of these sanctions on the “inferiority of socialism” while injecting billions of into the South Korean bourgeois system to keep it afloat and turn it into a giant theme park for US imperialist soldiers and sleezy businessmen to commit sexual assault on local women. Fuck off.

(you will naturally call this history “biased” because it tells the truth instead of devolving into lazy “both sides are equally bad” algorithmic assessment or the even stupider “actually the koreans themselves invaded their own country” narrative)

Burger Reich troops should GTFO of South Korea btw. They’re not wanted there. They’re fascist thieves and unwelcome occupiers and regularly get drunk and commit atrocities against locals