- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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Those floating paint chips are worth thousands of dollars! Or rather, that’s what the administration paid for them.
He touched floating point chips? Like an old 80387?
In the defense of the North Korea outrage, they lobotomised the kid and sent the dying body back to US.
IIRC some experts said that most likely his state was causes by reaction to medicine or something. North Korea prefers to exchange American prisoners for something rather than simply kill them.
Give the Americans some time.
only difference here is that the body will already be on us soil
It’s bizarre to see somebody believe that not only will a former Olympic athlete be sentenced for touching paint but to honestly believe he could be beaten into brain damage and die from it.
Chances are the guy walks away scot free and then sues the US Government.
Yeah because he’s white.
Wait until you find out what the current regime and its supporters thinks about being able to sue for violating the constitution.
Frankly, I don’t care what the buffoon thinks.
We took his name off the Kennedy building, we’re suing comanies for AI racial bias, we blocked his DOJ from collecting trans medical records, and we just told his ICE to fuck off from immigration hearing locations.
The courts aren’t completely corrupted yet and they are still in charge.
The courts aren’t completely corrupted yet and they are still in charge.
You sure about that? I’d lto have faith in the rule of law, but the trump admin is increasingly ignoring court orders, despite the public wins you mentioned.
I really feel like we’re going to see the admin trot out the apocryphal Andrew jackson quote of ‘the courts have made their decision, let them enforce it’ in the next year or so.
And yet his name is off the Kennedy building and his ballroom is not open.
And yet US citizens are still being abducted, killed, disappeared, and sent off to random countries. But sure, let’s all cheer about them removing his name from the Kennedy building lmao. What a joke.
(All in the name of immigration control! If only those us citizens had just sued the government I’m sure they’d still be alive!)
We’re saying we are seeing the end of that soon. We are being more oppressed over time
I think he has a lot less support and authority now than at the start of his term.
Sure it’s bizarre to see somebody believe that, but it’s because it is so easy to believe with all the shit going on, not because it’s something difficult to believe.
Given the post, these comments, and that comment score I think it isn’t unrealistic to believe it’s just a bunch of fucking Tankies trying to normalize North Korea.
Like yeah, the Trump admin is shit, and would have spiraled out of control if there were no resistance, but it ain’t fuckin North Korea. It isn’t even as bad as China.
More things that you wouldn’t have thought possible in polite society have been happening in recent years.
Since US was a colony.
No no, see, these folks don’t count the genocide of millions and the people who suffered under street executions, illegal detention, and the destruction of families, for centuries because those people deserved it for being born wrong. Now it’s happening to white people! Can you believe that? My stars! Never before! Unprecedented!
I bow to the lotus feet of the guru.
😂😭🫂
How is this fake news getting suct high upvote ratio
He wasn’t literally surgically lobotomized no - but he did have extremely severe neurological damage from an unknown source which put him in a vegetative state that he never regained consciousness from. If it was done by DPRK intentionally or not isn’t known, but he did suffer those injuries during his time imprisoned under their supervision, and generally it’s held that harm to a prisoner is the fault of the captor.
Yes, that’s not “North Korea lobotomising him”. Hence fake news. A lobotomy cuts off the front of the brain
It would be the first time North Korea has harmed an American in this context and it’s pretty likely to be unintentional if they wanted to trade prisoners
What a tedious semantic argument. An inaccurate use of a term in an informal setting that nonetheless quite accurately describes the symptoms he experienced, is not fake news - it’s not even news, it’s an internet comment. It’s been corrected now.
it’s pretty likely to be unintentional
It’s generally unintentional to beat someone and have them wind up in a vegetative state.
See the other comment from someone else, they were not beaten at all and the one anonymous report that he was appears to be fabricated
The beating the previous comment or is referring to isn’t a real beating, it’s figurative to make a point. Intentional or not, it happened and NK is responsible for the outcome. Just like the US is responsible for what happens to the foreign nationals we imprisoned.
Not what the other comment says.
“Didn’t they beat the guy so badly he had brain damage and died?”
Is that not what this person is saying?
You seem to have experience with lobotomy.
Appreciate your kind words
Actually shut the fuck up. Please.
Pretty sure there were missing teeth.
Edit: not Otto. Might have been another prisoner. Or I’m confusing it with World War Z and how North Korea solved the zombie crisis by pulling everyone’s teeth.
Edit edit: ok, he’s the one I read about but these details aren’t in wikipedia and may be suspect.
They said Otto was deaf, blind, jerking uncontrollably and making “inhuman” sounds when they met him on a plane.
His teeth also looked like they had been rearranged with pliers, his father said.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/he-totally-deformed-otto-warmbiers-11242029
That’s demonstrably false.
Which part?
Edit: apparently the lobotomized part.
Getting hit with the biggest “um, actually” energy from the tankie battalion 🙄
If you’re traveling to NK you deserve to be lobotomized.
What kind of lunatic go there for vacation?Also, just for some context, he was part of Hillel. Which is kind of like a jewish hitler youth. It, like aipac, are part of a large well funded effort to sanitize Israel activities.
Which in many ways raises my suspicions about what was really going on with that whole episode.
I don’t know anything about Hillel, I’m just here to say that having been a member of the Hitler Youth tells you nothing about a person other than they were a youth in the 3rd Reich.
At my university Hillel was the biggest opposition to the pro-Palestine protests that weren’t in some position of power (aside from trolls on Reddit that don’t go there), they’re a shitty organization
Didn’t the people arrested for the paint chips turn out to be fake?
WH claims six people have been arrested, last I checked we only have evidence of two being arrested (both misdemeanors)
This is in extremely poor taste considering what happened to the kid in the picture. That’s what is terrifying, not a vandalism arrest.
We should oppose fascism without belittling its victims, regardless of which state they’re under.
I don’t think this is belittling the kid at all. Just pointing out that we’re now doing approximately the same thing at home.
The kid returned home with brain damage, IIRC. Has that happened to anyone accused of vandalizing the pool?
not the pool specifically, but yeah a ton of people have been hurt protesting
https://projects.propublica.org/protest-police-videos/
or just look at what ICE does to people
Wow, talk about moving the goal posts. Do you really think anyone on Lemmy is pro-ICE?
we’re now doing approximately the same thing at home
this is the ““goalpost”” I was responding to. You’re caught up on the comparison of the poster to the reflecting pond. We’re comparing the US government to the DPRK (North Korean government)
The only actual evidence was a blurry video which probably wasn’t even him. He was just a convenient political tool. I remember reading a very detailed breakdown of how the suspect in the video was the wrong height and walked differently.
a kid got years in North Korean prison for stealing a poster
The full story of this kid was far crazier than the post implies. (https://archive.is/kyR8h)
Firstly, he wasn’t in jail for years. He was in jail for 17 months, largely due to the chill relations between the Obama government and North Korea during that time. It is common for US expats to receive special release with a bit of glad handing and brown nosing from a US diplomat, and the fact that Bill Richardson wasn’t able to secure Otto’s release was the exception rather than the rule.
But secondly, and much more curiously, the story spun up after his release looked more and more like a fabrication the deeper journalists probed.
The previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was “repeatedly beaten,” as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing, when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and “April,” as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto’s body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.
It is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto’s death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct. Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. “I don’t believe Otto was physically tortured,” Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. “The campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea’s cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.”
Many experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be “both brutal and smart,” as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip, especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts’ doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten. However, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, “In general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God’s sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick, and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.” The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.
So you had a US expat detained for an extended period, only to be released into US custody as an attempt by the NK government to curry favor with Trump. But in the process of being released, Otto falls into a vegetative state with no evidence of physical violence perpetrated against him. The poor state of his health is conveyed to the Trump administration and immediately poisons relations with the new administration.
And over the next several months, Trump begins to ratchet tensions with North Korea as a potential prelude to war.
How did this happen? Who did it benefit?
Also worth mentioning is that he “allegedly” stole that poster in the first place, so he probably didn’t even do any crimes, he was just picked as a political tool
he probably didn’t even do any crimes
Pretty sure even his friends admitted he pulled the poster off the wall.
I have a friend who work at the time for a company that offer tour in weird places, the story running between this type of travel agencies at the time was that the guy refused to listen security instructions, got way more drunk and tried to go, multiple times, in place clearly mark « don’t go there ». After the will the hotel staff had to call the police
the story running between this type of travel agencies at the time was that the guy refused to listen security instructions, got way more drunk and tried to go, multiple times, in place clearly mark « don’t go there ».
Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. Not unusual for someone to come into the country on a tourist visa and commit a nasty taboo.
It helps to remember that this is a country we are still functionally at war with. Imagine a Ukrainian taking a vacation in Moscow. Or a Palestinian touring Tel Aviv. That’s what these Americans are undertaking.
As a safety measure the agency of my friends now refuse American when going in North Korea
Or a Palestinian touring Tel Aviv.
21% of the population of Israel is Palestinian. There’s tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the Jaffa neighbourhood of Tel Aviv.
- Death to israel. 2. Aren’t you tired of poisoning all fkn conversations with your Israeli disgusting propaganda? Can you fuck off? nobody likes zionists.
Good ol apartheid.
21% of the population of Israel is Palestinian.
Not for long
Regardless of whether any beatings occurred, when someone is imprisoned in your country, they are under your care, and you are responsible for them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s malnutrition, beatings, or if he just smacked his head against the wall on his own accord really hard: it is the responsibility of the custodian to ensure the good and proper health of those in their custody. That is the position of international human rights law. It doesn’t even matter if a prisoner decides to kill themselves, a death in custody is always the responsibility of the custodian and in that case it’d still be the custodian’s fault for allowing the creation of circumstances that allows prisoners to kill themselves.
It is not usual for a person to suddenly become comatose while in custody. And even if that did happen, it was North Korea’s positive responsibility to notify consular officials and the family of that, and deliver proper medical care to them.
So a guy got imprisoned by the most brutal government in the world. And then he fell into vegetative state. But said government has nothing to do with the vegetative state?
Do people just do that? Do people just go “eh, I’ve had enough, maybe I’ll just turn my brain off for a while”.
No, because the most brutal government in the world is the United States’.
The United States is pretty bad, especially for being a supposedly rich country. But no, it’s not the most brutal.
Even though I would not travel to the USA under any condition, if I have to choose between USA, north Korea, Iran, or some other random authoritarian country such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, sudan or somalia, I’m going to USA. Even though I’m a non-gay male.
Go tell that to the black people living there that have been brutalized for generations. Or maybe to people living in countries that was destabilized by it. This pales in comparison to the contries you named, combined.
Hell, go see what they did in North Korea during the war.
Edit: And how could I forget. Go tell that to the indigenous
Yeah. Go tell that to the people/slaves of the countries I mentioned.
As I said, USA is no good, but it’s not the worst.
You don’t seem to understand the meaning of “worst”.
“Bad” is absolute and can be judged with just the USA.
“Worst” is relative and you have to consider the other ones.
And when you compared the atrocities comited, it doesn’t even scale close to everything the US has done and is currently doing.
Also tell me who’s the one that profits from the slavery in Saudi-Arabia and supports it fully?
You seriously think I just considered what the US did without comparing it to the other countries you mentioned?
You don’t seem to understand the meaning of “worst”.
The “Worst Country” is the country that the US Media tells us is the worst, as measured by US Think Tanks and US Epsionage Agencies and US Propaganda Mills.
FYI, the person you’re arguing with is from .ml, so good luck getting them to admit that the us is better than any other country, despite any and all available evidence to the contrary.
You people are seriously disgusting. No wonder minorities don’t feel safe in the Fediverse.
‘They used dogs’: New Al Jazeera film exposes Israel’s use of rape in jails
Former detainees detail systematic torture and sexual violence, including rape, while in Israeli custody.
The United States used black children as alligator bait, allowed and encouraged dogs to rip humans’ flesh from their bones and eat it, until they died, made black mothers nurse their infants so whites could play “Hit the N****r Baby” with baseballs that were aimed either at the head, or stomach so they would vomit. This was before portable cameras, microphones and video recording devices were widely available. I’ll posit USA probably did it first.
North Korea would likely not be a worse place than China or the US if their economy wasn’t shit. And a lot of that is literally just The Great US Empire (and its vassals) restricting global trade by gunboat politics since the war. Cuba has the same problem: Immense evolutionary pressure to harden their government against US-caused regime change followed by total exploitation combined with reduced trade options.
Wasn’t WarmBeer a spy?
no, he was a stupid kid that took a propaganda poster.
Who is facing years for touching floating paint chips? Link to article?
https://abcnews.com/Politics/olympian-arrested-reflecting-pool-damage/story?id=134078925
Three-time U.S. Olympian David Hearn told ABC News that police arrested him on Friday after he touched a piece of blue coating that was partially detached from the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
According to this, the charge is vandalism in DC Superior Court. That would be a misdemeanor, carrying less than 1 year in prison.
I wasn’t able to find a case entry in DC Superior Court’s docket system.
Unlike what most people seem to think, the US criminal court system is not broken in such a manner that would allow someone to go to prison for years for this. Trump prosecutors have a reputation for poor performance in court. All the competent prosecutors have quit or were pushed out for failing to prosecute obviously loser cases or sign legally unsound court filings. All that are left are the idiot Trump loyalists whose only experience in criminal law is being arrested for drink driving.
Grand juries refuse to indict these defendants for obviously trivial crimes, and trial juries will acquit.
They tried to charge someone with assaulting a federal agent for lobbing a sandwich at a Border Patrol goon during a protest. The Trump-appointed chief prosecutor in Washington made a TikTok about how they were coming down hard on protestors. It went to trial. The jury acquitted.
I remind that juries have to be drawn from the local area (i.e. Washington, DC) and the city hates Trump’s guts. He lost by over 80 percentage points in the last election there.
People have spent decades in prison for a bit of weed. It’s pretty fucked and I fully expect this person to spend at least a couple years in prison. It’s fascist dictator shit and this is a fascist dictatorship.
I’ll be willing to make a wager with you. If David Hearn is sentenced to at least 12 months imprisonment in this case, I will donate $20 to an international human rights charity of your choice. If their case is dismissed, he is acquitted, or he is sentenced to less than 12 months imprisonment, you have to donate $20 or equivalent in your currency to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Do you agree?
No, because that’s a meaningless gesture on an anonymous website, and I will be goddamned before I give any money to any charity that I haven’t personally vetted considering half of them participate actively in some genocide or other. Anyways I’m glad you have this level of faith in our criminal legal system (it isn’t a justice system when none is to be had) but all it takes is a maga prosecutor and a maga judge and it’s done. The rule of law is dead; republicans have lynched it slowly over the last 50 years.
You’re free to propose alternative charities. Maybe even a local food bank or some organisation. The point is: I’m happy to put my money where my mouth is, and I don’t think you are. In fact, even if you lose the bet, I don’t think you’d do it anyway. After all, I’m just some guy on the Internet.
I don’t have “faith” in the US legal system. I just know more than you about how it works and how it doesn’t.
Here in Australia our racist nutbag pollie is pretending a poster that was dropped behind her could have been a bomb… and now wants police protection
And people keep listening to her as if she’s a champion for the working class. Fuck off Pauline you vapid cunt, people with more than 2 brain cells can see through your facade.
You haven’t heard? She’s absolutely interested in uniting the nation into one.
Which is why she openly hates woke people, greenies, lefties, first nation ceremonies (and therefore traditional first nations), people who don’t speak english (also some of our first nations), trans people and migrants. She definitely tries to unite suspected war criminals too.
In her defence, she does spend 1 day a year trying to unite everyone… Australia day. Everyone MUST unite on that day, including first nations who were invaded that day at one time.
And, she at least waited until the day after Australia day to release her “anti-woke” video and song which started openly attacking Aussies she deems are “unacceptable”
I want to add (without prison sentences… for now) all the push of Europe to do the internet surveillance China style, after we have criticized it so much.
Is so sad how “autocratic government surveillance” suddenly becomes “protecting the children”…
Fuck politicians, hope they all die a terrible death. They deserve all the hate in the world and then a bit more.
The Chinese firewall isn’t surveillance, lol. It’s to keep American surveillance from surveilling Chinese citizens. I’m sure your familiar with Snowden and Assange?
Yet Chinese surveillance is surveilling everyone else.
What are CCTV, Ring, smart phones, smart homes, smart cars, and the Patriot Act for the daily double?
Got 'em.
Show me your work, then.
Define “work”
Surely there’s proof of the Chinese government surveilling the rest of the world, more so than the 5 eyes countries, otherwise the original statement of the EU doing surveillance “China style” is just xenophobia.
I didn’t mean “in relation to the Chinese government” when I mentioned “Chinese surveillance”, I meant “surveillance of Chinese origin”. If you check ad and tracking blocklists, by far most popular ones are either in the US or China. For me that’s equally as bad as government sponsored. Although “government sponsored” usually implies “of big(ger) scale”, it’s not necessary.
There are more than just 5 eyes.
I am going to refrain from arguing, for I have taken note of your instance being “lemmy.ml”. As much as I hate discriminating by instance, I have to do what I have to do.
I’m not arguing, nor am I looking for anecdotal evidence, lol. I’m asking you to prove your own statement correct.
It hasn’t “suddenly” become that- every single internet censorship bill ever proposed is named some flavor of “save children”
I’m all for burning Epsteins list at the stake at Super Bowl halftime; but the right to privacy is sacred and should be revered
Is so sad how “autocratic government surveillance” suddenly becomes “protecting the children”…
The saddest part about it is how well it works. People are still falling for this shit. We never learn anything.
to be fair, when EU adds firewall and blocks all traffic from USA, they will have like 99% less advertisements
Someone got 50 YEARS for protesting ICE
WOO! MURICA! FREEDUMB!
Two people who weren’t even there, who never discussed the illegal acts, who were only in a group chat where people discussed attending a legal protest, were sentenced to 50 years.
But they were trans women in Texas. So the jury had no problem sending them to a men’s prison without any crimes being committed.
Where they will be almost certainly subjected to v coding
They will be raped until they give up either caring or life
A life sentence for protesting.
This is America.
Our Constitution is effectively over and a frightening percentage of Americans aren’t even aware, or don’t even care.
Personally, I’m crossing my fingers for Balkanization. Staying chained to this sinking ship is not wise.
We live in a fascist country now.
“But there’s no mass graves.”
Not yet. And it doesn’t matter. There isn’t just one flavor of fascism. There isn’t just extreme fascism or no fascism.
This is a facist nation because it is behaving like a fascist nation. And it’s not going to get better unless voters start being more responsible. And it might even be too late for that.
Sigh, it’s always been a fascist country. Now the mask is off. Do something about it.
The idea that we have to wait until the worst cas scenario actually takes place before doing anything about it is ridiculous. We have seen all of this, many times before. We already know where it leads, unless it is stopped. We don’t have to wait, just because the people who benefit by that waiting demand it.
We don’t have to do what the worst people in the world demand. We’ve seen how this exact scenario leads to death camps, and the wholesale slaughter of millions. We have the people in place who think that’s a good idea, and they have already built and are populating concentration camps with cremation facilities. Do we have to wait until we smell roasting flesh from the smokestacks before we do anything? Are we going to accept their excuses when they claim they are only burning the bodies of those who died “natural” deaths? In a concentration camp?
We already know where this leads, every time. We don’t have to make them prove it, and we don’t have to accept their lame denials, or their rationalizations. We know what they want, and we see them moving quickly and decisively in that direction. We don’t have to wait until it actually happens before we stop them.
It’s the 'Murican way
Do nothing, until circumstances force action
It’s quite fascinating to see from the comfort of a civilised country.
Depressing, particularly because it keeps happening, but still grimly fascinating
“There are no mass graves”
Ask the hundreds of people who entered ICE internment camps and never left. Alligator Alcatraz. 2/3rds of the 1,800 people brought to Alligator Alcatraz “disappeared”
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/09/25/men-lost-from-alligator-alcatraz/
The article does not support your statement. Even if people have gone missing, the author doesn’t allude to a mass killing. I’m all for exposing ICE, but I’m also against creating misinformation or fueling rumors.
Concentration camps were discovered in 1945 I think. Fascists don’t care that you have no proof. They kill people and appease you with lies.
You’re at the step where the murders are still hidden. Next step is when they’re justified. Oh wait, it’s already happening when people are killed in the streets for opposing ice. Next step is more people join the ranks of the great enemy of the inside. And at some point, either you agree with all the killing, or you shut up because talking puts you on the wrong side of the government guns.
…so they just disappeared into the system and we have no idea if they’re alive or dead? You know that’s only marginally better right?
Not marginally, but quite the difference. There’s no need to be reductive just because you disagree and want to speculate.
It’s probably not that quantity today, but read about that statement “Wir haben es nicht gewusst”. There were “rumors”, but most people just thought about their own lot instead of worrying about those rumors.
Every fascist regime was established in democratic elections. No fascist regime was overthrown in democratic elections.
Fascism is proof that capitalism is incompatible with democracy.
Simply not true. Not all fascist regimes came out of elections. Many, many governments arose from coups, usually military.
You can’t shift a government from Democratic to fascist, if it was never democratic in the first place.
To be the pedantic smart ass that I am, Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain weren’t voted in.
Every fascist regime was established in democratic elections
This feels questionable at best— there’s a lonnnnnggg history of rulers in countries prior to democracy
