Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Isn't it pretty likely that Kim's brother (which was apparently his father's favourite, according to some documentary I half watched the other day) was assassinated because there might have been a high chance of there brewing a plot to replace him?

Speaking as Bay 12's foremost amateur self-declared Pyongyangologist: Not really. The clearest motive for the assassination has to do with why Kim Jong-nam was exiled in the first place: the Disneyland incident and his ideological shift. For the sons of most dictators, this wouldn't really be an issue and it definitely wouldn't lead to exile and assassination, but the style of the Kim family going all the way back to Kim Il-sung.

Kim Il-sung in his memoirs admits a very telling anecdote, one which starts to put a lot of the Kims actions in a more clear light. As a child, Sung's father was frequently tasked with bringing wine to one of his teachers, who was in fact a habitual alcoholic. This teacher eventually overdid his habit to the point he fell into a ditch in a drunken stupor, and at that moment, Sung's father lost all respect for the man and started to shame and order him around to the point that he gave up alcohol entirely.

Whether that actually happened to Sung's father is irrelevant, but it showcases the reasons for the Kims exaggerating their cult of personality to blatently absurd levels. They all, through a style passed down by Kim Il-sung, believe that the truest essence of leadership is is national myth and hype. Furthermore, they can never allow other people to see them as being just people like they are, because if they're of the same sort then they can be judged and overthrown.

The relevance to Kim Jong-nam is that he embarrassed the family, he cracked the myth by getting caught like a "commoner" trying to sneak into Tokyo Disneyland. If he had actually gotten in and out without being stopped it probably would have ended up in his own cult as an anecdote of how stupid and easily fooled capitalists are by an enlightened Juche revolutionary. The other aspect, the reformism, isn't so much because he "became a capitalist" like Kim Jong-il claimed but because he did things like talk to the media and expose "playboy" activities like drinking, gambling, and womanizing to the public eye. Other reformists in North Korea are usually tolerated, what Nam did differently was be public about his lifestyle.

By damaging the myth he presented an ideological threats to the Kims inside North Korea (by making them publicly rearrange the line of succession, introducing doubt) and outside as well (by showing the world that the Kims are not true madmen anymore than Nixon was). Kim Jong-Il may or may not have spared him due to the family connection and settled for exile, but Kim Jong-un had no such sentiments. Killing Nam, and killing him in such a supervillian fashion instead of with guns or knives like normal people would, repairs damage done to the grand myth that is the Kim family.

[smjjames]

And the getting rid of a potential threat to his rule was just an incidential bonus, right?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

At the time of his assassination, Nam was not a serious threat to his rule in the sense that he could replace Un. They started erasing Nam around 2003, and within North Korea I wouldn't expect most people not directly connected to him to care about his existence any longer. The only threat he posed in that sense was being installed as leader of the new government after an invasion - but that doesn't really alter the odds of an invasion itself.

His main threat was, again, through being a living gap in the Kim myth.

[redwallzyl]

really no discussion of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/technology/yahoo-hack-3-billion-users.html

This thread just keeps on going derail.

[Frumple]

Not... really? I'm both not sure how many people still use yahoo for much of anything, and not sure among those that do how much they care about a hack they already knew about being larger than initially reported. Technically seem to still have a mail account with 'em m'self, but looks like I did the compromised account boogaloo back when it happened.

[EnigmaticHat]

Doubt many people on this forum use yahoo.  My understanding is that Yahoo is kind of like AOL, its more of an older demographic that uses it.

In fact, now Yahoo is a lot more like AOL...

[RedKing]

I have a Yahoo account, but I mostly use it as a dead-drop account (like registering for websites that I'll probably use once). Don't really care if anybody hacks it.

I used to have a pretty active Yahoo account years and years ago, when it didn't suck goat balls.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Huh, I also have such a dead-drop account and just checked. Yep, reregistered to a gmail account I've never heard of. And Yahoo doesn't have any way to report that. Good job.

Oh well.

[TheDarkStar]

I had a yahoo account once when I was younger. I didn't ever really use it but I did get thousands (at one point it built up to over 1300) of spam emails.

[wierd]

I still have a spam acct on yahoo as well. I use it for those sites that seem to think they need one when they really don't. (Support downloads being a major offender)

Until I cleaned it out last month, I had over 10,000 junk emails going back 5 years in it.

[Sheb]

Don't you guys just use mailinator accounts for that?

[Reelya]

Plenty of people have old email accounts before they switched to e.g. gmail. Why make another thing when already have the thing? Also occassionally on my old yahoo account there's some connection to an old service i either can't change the email address, or otherwise. So I sort of need to keep it around anyway. Also if your throw-away logins are all tied to another less-used email account, you can reset passwords when needed if you need the site again. Why lose info you might need, if it costs you nothing to keep access to it?

And the thing is, i hardly get any unsolicited stuff in my Yahoo account, ever. It has a reputation for being a spam-magnet, but that reputation is decidedly out of date. It's no worse than my gmail account gets. Perhaps a reason gmail accounts were more spam-immune at first was that merely switching to a new account means you radically cut down the amount of spam you get. Until you start using that new email a lot. People might be misattributing merely the effect of switching (and thus not being on any lists of email addresses) with "gee this other email service gets less spam".

People just have unreasonably selective memories. e.g. yahoo spam problems from circa 2011 or whatever are held up as "don't use yahoo ever" but if you brought up usabilities issues from Facebook that existed in 2011 people would wonder wtf you were talking about, dredging up long forgotten tech issues. A good part of it is merely hipsters and what's fashionable. The real only reason for me to favor gmail is just that it's conveniently tied into a number of different services such as youtube and google docs accounts. Probably when something trendier comes along everyone will start taking the piss out of having a gmail account.

[wierd]

I created that yahoo acct in 1992, or there about.

Pretty sure the alternatives mentioned did not exist then. I have kept it around as a convenient garbage bin email acct for over 2 decades.

[Karnewarrior]

I have a Yahoo email account I use when I don't want to use the account afforded to me as Secretary of State. Unfortunately, people have been taking the piss out of me doing that lately.

lol

[wierd]

LOLOLOL.

Are you member of any yahoo groups for politicians too? (gigglesnort)