*blocked in North Korea

This stupid pussy just admitted paying a $2 million ransom to N. Korea for Otto Warmbier, knowing they had tortured him into a coma, then went on to praise Kim's great leadership skill for years since.

Making America Grovel to Anyone

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Torture is good for getting someone to name any person they know. It is not good for getting useful information....so it's only barely useful if you torture someone weak who knows the name of others you are looking for, and gives them up. That's useless information, even to a monster like Saddam. He would never know if the important names were withheld and only acquaintances named, so would be forced to murder the entire country eventually. Only unknown hermits would be "safe".

Your example assumes dissidents with families would be allowed to have sensitive information.
Clearly it didn't work, too. There was a strong opposition to Saddam he utterly failed to destroy even though he tortured without pause. You create more enemies than you could ever catch by torture. Smart leaders start to wonder if torture for information is worth the cost. (Hint, it's not)

Torture for coercion, a different topic, that often works, but only until the tortured decide death is preferable and try to revolt, which requires you to keep them in N Korea conditions to keep any revolt from winning. Hardly a net gain for even third world nations.

@JiggaJonson,

When you say:
...I'm against promoting the idea that torture works...

I can see where you are coming from on this. In the sense that it might then encourage people to accept using it, because it works.

My problem with that line of reasoning though is that torture actually is effective. The simplest proof being that we wouldn't have every single national intelligence agency using it(directly or indirectly by a less squeamish ally as we 'civilized' nations prefer to do it).

Your links to the ineffectiveness of torture only look at the narrowest possible goals from it. Somebody like Saddam Hussein usually didn't care about Jack Bauer style, minutes count specific intel. Getting the names of everyone you knew or 'conspired' with mattered, and torture IS effective at getting people to talk. The trouble your links note is that torture victims will say literally anything to get you to stop. When looking for information though, victims can't name real people unless they know them. Better still for guys like Saddam, if you get yourself 3 victims in the same movement, you can cross reference things and build a list of suspects. To more ethical nations like us that's unactionable intelligence, but if you don't care if you sweep up 5 innocents along with the 5 people that really were a threat to you, it still 'worked'.

Torture also is widely used simply as a tool to instill fear. When your citizens have seen the broken shells of people who's loyalty was deemed questionable, fear keeps them in step. It worked for Saddam until external forces stopped him, and it's helped keep 3 generations in power in North Korea.

Getting back closer to the video, things we don't like don't go away just because we refuse to talk about them. Rape, torture, and violence aren't like the boogeyman that will go away if we just stop talking and thinking about them so much. We need to accept that there are terrible things in our world that people do and benefit from doing them. These are things that people use to gain a feeling of power, or to truly gain real tangible power over other people.

Of course we have to discuss them responsibly, and the danger of shaming victims is an equally real thing to be aware of. At the same time though, humor is one of the ways of bridging the gap to people dealing with trauma, so jokes about things that cause trauma like rape, violence and torture have an honest place in making things better as well.

You know, the history of communism is complicated. The idea in principle seems nice enough, a government where everyone owns everything. Or as Marx puts it: "all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs."

But in reality, it's never been implemented. It's invariably the case that a ruling party emerges as the de facto "we'll make sure everyone is following the rules so that everything is fair and as soon as it's clear that everyone is following the rules, we'll relinquish power completely to the people."

Except...that second part NEVER happens. Russia? China? North Korea? Those are communist countries in name only. In reality, those are all totalitarian states by any definition. Any opposition to the ruling class when they are questioned ends in murder or massacre by the state; see https://newrepublic.com/article/117983/tiananmen-square-massacre-how-chinas-millennials-discuss-it-now

Freedom of political thought, religion, matters of economics are simply unavailable under "communist" rule.

There's decidedly very few ideas that are less democratic and less American than communism.

@bobknight33 you claim to be a patriot, I think you're a Russian troll who's assigned to this corner of the internet. Go preach your anti American propaganda in between borscht bites somewhere else please.

A journalist's job isn't just to sit there and passively report what Trump says to you - that would be no different than any official party propaganda. Move to North Korea if that's what you want from your reporters. The media IS the conscience of any democracy, and it is their job to hold Trump accountable for his brazen lies.

That is why the first thing any fascist, communist, and/or dictatorship does to consolidate power is to attack the media and end free press. Trump is doing the same, lying to gullible people like you to discredit any news source that doesn't work in his favor. His lies seems to have worked on you because somehow you think CNN is the "trashiest", when there are things like Fox, Sinclair, and Breitbart, which are no longer news but have moved fully into the realm of blatant propaganda.

And it's laughable that Trump supporters are now crying for respect, when they showed no such thing to Obama. Just your every day Republican hypocrisy.

Also, I'm curious as to what "good" Trump has done. Sure if you're a racist bigot and you like the idea of separating Mexican children from their parents, Trump is your man. Other than that I'm curious what else you believe he's done for America.

Yeah seriously, how dare he provoke the president by asking questions that Trump doesn't want to answer. CNN should go to North Korea and learn how to properly respect the president - you should only ask positive things about our Great Leader! If Fox News can tout the official party line, why can't every one else?

Them democrats caring about such silly things like a free press - how childish!

I would love it if we all paid a proportionate amount of tax regardless of wealth. I would also love it if they would remove all of the various loopholes that let people like our President scam their way out of paying hardly any taxes.

One of the things people always forget about the 50's is that one of the reasons why 'everyone' (white people for the most part, ethnicities need not apply) had good jobs, etc. is because a good chunk of people died in WW2/Korea. We lost over half a million people during the years from 1942 to 1953. Additionally there was a dramatic shift in female employment, meaning that for the first time many households were not wholly dependent on one salary.

No one can confirm her testimony because all that she named refuted it-.. Guess this escapes the logic cells of the leftest brain.

Democrats never contradicted the latest FBI report. There is no there there. So they went with more smear and innuendo.

Conservatives are not spinning emotions, Democrats are. You "have to believer her" On what grounds? No one confirms her story.

Facts are 10 say one thing and Ford say the opposite. ..

Welcome to the new SCOTUS Kavanaugh.

I heard that RBG is disgusted by the Democrat tactics used. Can we say SCOTUS pick #3? Do you think Democrats can pull this sleazy slanderous stunt again?


Democrats are loosing bigly on every issue, Trade, NAFTA, Korea, Paris Climate accord, etc, Most of these are nothing more than major American Job killers and Trump is calling BS for what it is and bring jobs back. 4.2% GDP growth ,, unemployment down to 3.9,% lowest in 39 years.

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But... He wasn't considered a great national figure. He was considered to be a "rich bc he fucked people over constantly" con man who seemed to have less money than he claimed to have.

Do you wish you had attended Trump University? If you said you "graduated" (in quotes because students were not graded" from Trump University, would people take you seriously if you put that on a resume? Would you let someone who graduated from Trump University handle your own finances, knowing they had an education from said school alone?

I don't think so. And that's the crux of all of this. That fake University is the model on which his entire business is built. Say you're giving them the best the biggest and give them something that looks flashy; you'll net a bunch of fools without any good sense of what they're getting into, but pull back the curtain and is the cheapest X Y Z they could sell you at that price.

Similarly, his politics are all one guffaw after another.

Nuclear disarmament from North Korea! Holly shit! Awesome! Ftw! Oh... Wait... You don't have a detailed agreement... What do you mean the word "Denuclearization" doesn't mean the same thing in Korean as in English? Oh, it means they will give up all their nukes because they won't need them anymore because we will get rid of all of ours as well? It's is a made up term from the 90's ??? https://www.npr.org/2018/04/22/604789492/how-does-kim-jong-un-define-denuclearization

Wait, they still have all their nukes and are continuing to produce more? But we had a coin made and everything! And we signed that thing! How could they still be making nukes? We signed a half assed contact! He agreed to my terms that he should agree to keep his nukes until he feels like getting rid of them!

It's just Trump University in nuclear disarmament form. It's a whole bunch of pomp and circumstance. Celebration for celebrations/political sake without any substance. That's why I'm not surprised that they are still producing nuclear weapons and the dumbasses who voted for this assclown are.

Presidents have terms, dictators reign. Wanna reconsider your Freudian slip?
And it's pretty far from the beginning, likely closer to the end.

Compared to Trump, Obama was the epitome of honesty and strength. He opposed our enemies, he didn't offer to encourage their expansions (Russia) or hand them legitimacy and military victories (N. Korea) while getting nothing in return, or walking away from treaties after the other party has gotten what they wanted but we haven't (Iran).....oh...and there's also the fact that unlike Trump, Obama won the popular vote....twice, so at least he was a real POTUS. ;-)

or the British, who had the added dickishness of exposing their own soldiers to the blast.

sidenote: the hypocrisy of the US, Britain, etc criticising North Korea or <insert middle east bad guy> for developing nuclear weapons would be amusing if it weren't so tragic.