What point are you trying to make exactly because at this point your point seems to be picking nits with my posts.
Are you trying to say that the military exercises were NOT provocative?
Are you trying to say that the sunshine policy failed as evidenced by NK’s nuclear program?
Are you trying to say that NK’s abrogation of its 1994 agreement with the USA somehow proved that the sunshine policy was doomed to failure?
What is it you are trying to say?
What strawmen are you talking about? YOU brought up the 1994 agreement as if it was some sort of agreement between NK and SK and I called you on it and now you just flail around seeing strawmen in every shadow.
Your OPINION has been pointed out to me but I have yet to see a cite that says that the SP was based on the NK nuclear program. Or did you provide one that I missed?
You’re babbling again
Right because saying that we would respond similarly to russia attacking our territory is the same thing as saying we would start WWIII. Sure you keep thinking that.
[quote]
Obfuscatory nonsense. Of course we would have responded.[/qu0ote]
Thank you. I’m glad you finally understand wtf I was trying to say.
Yeah, I agree, or did you miss the part where I said that the provocation didn’t justify the response but it was provocation nonetheless. Are you under the impression that I ever condoned NK actions?
So your neighbor (who has a gun and has shot people in the head before) threatens to shoot you in the head if you smoke that joint. So you light up the joint and you are totally taken by surprise when he shoots you in the head?
Doesn’t mean your neighbor is justified but you should have been ready for some head shooting.
Lee Myung-bak - Wikipedia](South Korea dumps Sunshine Policy with North, opts to go solo)
The current SK administration abandoned the SP the day it took office. That doesn’t excuse NK actions but it wasn’t the stuff that happened between 2008 and 2010 that caused Sk to abandon the SP.
Nope, that’s just your strawman and I’ve already explained that to you in post 290, in some detail. I see you’re recycling strawmen. I can understand, it’s winter time, gotta conserve kindling.
Yeah, you’re recycling that strawman too. and it was pointed out and explained to you already.
People reading along can check post 290 to see what I’m talking about. Control F for “Which of course brought us up to another strawman” and it should bring you into the middle of a pack of links.
Brilliant factual rebuttal.
An interesting development as part of the new Wikileaks of diplomatic conversations shows that China is losing patience with North Korea and would welcome the re-unification of the Koreas and views North Korea as acting as a ‘spoiled child’.
You keep insisting that I am somehow trying to excuse NK’s behaviour, I’m not, so perhaps you are the one that is building straw men.
I’m sure you knwo what strawman is but I am not sure how you apply thenm to what I say.
My position is that the NK actions were not a surprise, that they were provoked, and they were not random acts of violence targetted at civilians.
In no way am I condoning their actions or saying they didn’t overreact before you attribute these notions to me.
I generally support the sunshine policy and thought that abandoning it in favor of saber rattling was ill conceived.
Reading WAY too much onto that off-the-cuff statement methinks.
The North are a cushie little buffer zone between a potentially fully Westernized, Capitalist Korea, were they to be unified. It would turn China into the Red pariah republic of the region. And despite their economic ascendancy of late, they don’t want that kind of attention.
NK are a spoiled child, indeed. But like with all spoiled children , you stuff something in their gob and they tend to STFU. That’s where all the rice, fertilizer and turning a blind eye to Iranian weapons imports comes in…
And weapon exports to Syria…
China really doesn’t have much of any reason to push for having a US-aligned state right up to their border. Of course it’s doubtful that unification can happen any time in the foreseeable future, in any case, as the economic devastation in the north would suck most of the life out of the south if it actually had to be fixed.
I think it’s more than obvious that the “saber rattling” is on the part of North Korea. That’s one of the main reasons the Sunshine Policy wasn’t such a hot thing.
Unfortunately for your fairy-tale take on reality, the weight of the evidence is against you. Currently, both the South and its Imperial puppet master are going out of their way to be as belligerent and provocative as humanly possible:
From the article: “South Korea is building up defences on Yeonpyeong island… A South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff officer said that Seoul and Washington were planning new military drills off South Korea’s west coast… Separately, South Korea is planning what it calls routine week-long naval live-fire exercises from 29 sites around the country… The US has said these talks cannot resume until North Korea apologises for its torpedoing of a South Korean warship in March, and stops further nuclear enrichment plants from operating.”
In other words, your beloved capitalists are responding to a tense situation with unbridled aggression and an unwillingness to engage in dialog. Yet, according to you, it’s the other side that’s guilty of “saber-rattling.” Right. Tell me another one. :rolleyes:
Fairy tale? Care to guess why the South is building up the defenses there? The only fairy tale here, as tomndebb pointed out earlier, is your absolutism regarding any facts showing how your political philosphy is a failed one.
I know that I shouldn’t waste time on this, but I can’t resist.
Ah yes, the puppet masters. Also, you are right, we’ve been as belligerent as possible, which is why we’ve already carpet bombed NK several times, just last week.
Defenses?!?
You are right, there’s nothing more aggressive than defenses.
As for those military drills, it’s almost like SK has a neighbor which has just shelled it in a completely unprovoked attack and SK wants to be at a state of readiness. Then again, as its neighbor probably shelled SK with pleasing floral bouquets, those defensive exercises are also probably a grave bout of aggression.
Also, boooo, capitalism!
(Hoooray beer!)
Your nation is not known for its restraint. If you were not already bogged down in two wars of aggression, and if the North did not have a powerful ally, and if you actually believed that you could take the North on and win, you would have attacked.
The fact that you did not attack does not make you peaceful or non-belligerent. It means only that you currently lack the capacity to threaten world peace in this manner.
Don’t get hung up on terminology. In this context, “defenses” means moving troops and military hardware to the South/North border. Yes, that’s pretty aggressive. I am confident that you would be none too happy if the PRC sent a fleet of warships and submarines to your maritime borders, and it’s not even an active enemy of yours.
As I keep pointing out (and you keep conveniently ignoring), this is nothing but your personal opinion. We do not currently have enough facts to ascertain blame. As long as you don’t mind coming off as a fanatical ignoramus, though, feel free to keep jumping to unwarranted conclusions. It is the Western way, after all.
Tone down the personal remarks, please. You can’t call someone a fanatical ignoramus unless you’re posting in The BBQ Pit.
As I haven’t had the distinct pleasure of a conversation with you, I haven’t ignored anything you’ve said to me, conveniently or otherwise. This is elementary.
Of course, you’re still wrong. It’s easy to conveniently ignore wrong things. Not only do we have all the facts necessary to assign blame, we have NK’s own version of events in which they murdered human beings because of some splashes in the water. I can see how it’d be easier to claim that this is just an opinion, but it’s somewhat hard when NK comes out and admits to deliberately killing people because of dreadful splashy-splashy.
So it’s my opinion, SK’s opinion, NK’s opinion, and pretty much everybody else’s opinion.
Facts tend to do that sorta thing.
My apologies.
You’re hedging on your stance here, friend. In your previous post, you claimed that North Korea “shelled [South Korea] in a completely unprovoked attack.” Now you’re stating that it may be possible that the South actually fired on the North’s territory first. If it did, then the response was clearly not “completely unprovoked.”
Now, if you assume that this is how it played out, then you can of course argue that the North’s response was disproportionate. You can argue that it was foolish escalation. You cannot, however, argue that it was not provoked in any sense of the word.
If you’re not getting the distinction, imagine a couple hypothetical situations:
(1) I’m walking by your house. You come out and punch me for no reason. That’s an unprovoked attack.
(2) You warn me that you will punch me if I throw pebbles at your house. I throw pebbles at your house. You come out and punch me. That attack is very much provoked, even if it is neither justified nor proportionate.
No, I never said anything of the sort.
And you’re now trying to twist NK’s own admission that they engaged in an unprovoked attack and carried out murder against SK’s citizens because of splashes in the water. Of course, it was SK’s territory in any case, and even if it wasn’t, your argument may actually be reduced to the level where murdering people is actually “provoked” by splashes in the water.
You’re reviving the Fallacy of Equivocation that Damuri unsuccessfully tried to trot out. It’s no less a fallacy when you use it.
Smoking stinky cigarettes around other people is a “provocation” in polite society. Murdering someone because of the cigarette they’re smoking would only be considered a “provocation for the murder” by someone trying to serve as an apologist for the murderer. It’s not persuasive to anybody who hasn’t already decided to ameliorate the actions of a murderer. Or in the case of NK, a pack of murderers.
Even if an action can be said to be “provocative”, the absurdity of the apologia becomes clear when you claim that stinky cigarettes, or splashes in the water, render an unprovoked murder somehow “provoked”.
There’s also quite a bit of daylight between “punching someone” and “blowing human beings into chunks of meat with high explosives and shards of hyper-velocity metal.”
You might, potentially, have something of a case if shells fell within NK and caused a clear a present danger, or hurt any NK citizens. Or, well, pretty much anything other than murder-provoking splashy splashy.
But as the facts are (facts, not opinions), that NK engaged in murder hours after the so-called provocation ceased, and that “provocation” consisted of splashes in the water.
“We had to end the lives of several human beings, because four hours earlier there were splashes in the water.” simply doesn’t debunk the fact that the NK’s attack was unprovoked.
A more apt comparison would be that you came out and shot me for walking on the road in front of your house. Because you claim the whole street belongs to you.
Strictly speaking, if we want to tighten up the analogy as much as possible it’d be something like:
You and your neighbor used to be on one plot of land but then it got divided into two parts and he doesn’t like the division. One day you decide to engage in some target practice and plink some cans in front of a small hill, and the rounds you fire off bury themselves in the dirt and never pose a risk of harm to anybody, at all. Your neighbor then waits several hours and shoots you when you’re sitting on your couch and watching TV, and claims that you provoked him and he was acting in self defense.