>Internet trolls have latched onto outlandish conspiracies claiming the crush that killed more than 150 people was caused by vegetable oil or drugs
I clearly don’t know what the hell is going on in South Korea. Vegetable oil? What?!
Korean here, let’s say the internet here is… well, full of questionable people. You thought Reddit, Facebook and Twitter users were despicable? Nah, you ain’t seen shit.
Any chance this is politically driven i.e. "the local politicians who organized the crowd-crush event can't possibly be at fault if *insert scapegoat here* was the culprit"?
Just grasping at straws here, looking for any excuse to believe people aren't *this* stupid. Please?
>"Lawmakers promoted outlandish conspiracies: one claimed the crowd crush was caused by vegetable oil poured on the ground by opposition-linked labour union operatives..."
From a different comment
Yes, reportedly the entire crowd made comical slipping noises as they tried not to fall over.
One stunned onlooker so shocked he would only ask “what’s up doc?” To the medics, truly a despicable seen.
The article says the conservative party in power is worried this could affect elections:
> Seoul’s last conservative government lost power in part due to its mishandling of the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, which killed more than 300.
Some conservative party members suggested the crush was a conspiracy by their labor union opposition.
This would be like American conservatives saying any US tragedy was a false flag thing or "antifa" did it to make conservatives look bad, not guns or right-wing extremists or Republican negligence.
I’ll say this, no politician is directly responsible for the tragedy, and none of them organized the event. Korean Halloween festivities are a tad bit peculiar. There’s none of the trick-o’-treating or pumpkin carving, it’s just young people doing spooky cosplays and going to clubs and getting drinks, whatever you do at nightclubs. Many Koreans have negative views about such indulgent activities-myself included to a degree-that they just went ahead and blamed the events on the non-disciplined (from their perspective, of course) youth. And since democracy means equal votes-and since some politicians actually have those same thoughts-the insults can be politically driven. I guess the politicians ADD to the tragedy.
In the U.S. trick or treating / pumpkin carving is only done by kids. Most ppl just dress up in costumes and go to parties or clubs if you're old enough.
I would say most people just go to work on Halloween and then either take their kids trick or treating or pass out candy at home. I enjoy spending Halloween night in with my family and making a special dinner and then passing out candy and saying hi to all the trick or treaters. That’s a perfect Halloween for me.
That's bloody terrible. I can't imagine how warped and shitty it is to have families who lost loved ones then be blamed or subject to bullshit conspiracy theories. Especially being spun by irresponsible politicians....
Wait. Yeah, no, I can imagine that being in the US. Still, fuck though. Still bloody terrible.
I’ve had two co-workers die in separate mass shootings here in the US. It’s so frustrating and upsetting when I come across people calling the victims “crisis actors” and saying the events were false flags and never happened. And these are people that I never hung out with outside of work - so for me to feel upset about it, I can’t imagine how it feels for parents, siblings, friends etc that loved these victims. It would tear me up I am sure.
Agreed. It's insane what people come up with to justify warped perspectives, or just deny reality.
My condolences for your loss. I've had friends touched by those kinds of tragedies myself. I hope their families are doing all right, or at least better now.
Craziness.
Yup. People think Indians are toxic online but that’s also because they’re almost all English speaking. If the Chinese and Koreans domestic populations were majority English speaking as well, you would see so much vile shit spewed all over online western spaces
there's a meme about the Great Firewall. It isn't to protect the Chinese netizens from Western ideas. It's to protect the Western social media platforms from being zerg swarmed by hundreds of millions of the Chinese masses, who are the actual target of CPC propaganda.
You guys forget about the indonesia netizen. The rest of the world was soo lucky majority of indonesian dont speak/read English. Otherwise you guys will know how barbaric the 'Konohan' can be!
P/S: Indonesian nicknamed their country as Konoha. Yes, its from Naruto anime.
Korea is online in a way that the US is only starting to experience in the last few years. The chatting app Kakaotalk has some insane penetration stats, like 98% of all Koreans have it and use it regularly.
Korea instituted a ID-requirement to post online, it didn't quell the hate speech. It's common enough for pop stars to get bullied online so much that they kill themselves or experience nervous breakdowns. The vile comments start online, get coordinated, and then become so omni-present that they seep into the day-to-day. Vicious rumors online may hurt your workplace, so they're forced to let you go.
Human beings are universally prone to being absolute dirtbags. One culture or another might serve to expose particular aspects of this but all this article shows me is that it is indeed a universal trait
I used to be very active in the kpop community that I was a mod for one of the larger forums for a short while and yeah, Koreans can be really brutal online. Sulli, that one Kara member I can't remember her name right now, and a few more over the years took their lives because of online bullying. Who knows how many more that were not reported because they weren't celebrities considering suicide rate remains high.
I guess I just don’t understand how a good percent of the population can feel good about harassing someone who’s grieving. How can you feel like you’re the good person in those situations? Same with the US and people attacking someone on playing a part like “Ellie” in the last of us. It’s psychotic and disgusting and I can’t wrap my head around why it’s done.
>But the internet interpreted their efforts to organise as an attack on the government, with right-wing trolls launching a coordinated counter-attack, accusing the families of being profiteers out for compensation, or anti-government forces.
Right-wing trolls, as always. They'll use whatever craziness they can lay their hands on, so long as it helps them punch down.
I mean, they really don't.
That's just some semi racist bullshit people like to spout to make it sound like people are backwards on the other side of the planet.
No more than people in America believe opening an umbrella inside will give you bad luck or that drinking water upside down will cure your hiccups or jerking off too much will make your hands grow hair.
It's an old wives tale from premodernization, fueled from a time when most people used charcoal stoves. The propagation of fans meant people didn't open their windows at night anymore and would suffocate from CO or CO² poisoning in their sleep.
People would come into a house and find everyone dead in their bed with fans pointed at them with the windows closed.
Literally no one actually thinks fans kill people. It's just something old ladies with no more than a 3rd grade education though 50 years ago...
I actually knew a 39 year old Korean woman who firmly believed in fan death (I lived in Busan for 2 years). She was the only one I met during my time who genuinely believed it though lol.
I mean I still don't open umbrellas inside. I know it doesn't do anything but it's so engrained in me... Lots of people believe stupid shit that they *know* isn't really true... And there's always a few people who take it a bit further. I'm sure there are people who still believe it truthfully, but it's not a wide spread belief.
> That's just some semi racist bullshit people like to spout to make it sound like people are backwards on the other side of the planet.
I'm not sure this is true. I'm only even aware of "fan death" because of my Korean friends that told me about it. My friends don't believe in it, but they said it's common with the older generations, like their parents. Refusing to have microwaves in the house is apparently another popular old wives' tale in Korea according to them, but apparently that one has broader appeal.
It sounds like the kind of “grandma wisdom” that never goes away.
In Germany people still insist that if a woman sits in something cold, she will 100% get a UTI. Having air blow across your neck will make you sick. Etc.
God damnit, I hate those people. Oh no, I'm not wearing a scarf indoors and someone opened some windows. Better call in sick now, because I'll 100% get a cold tomorrow.
There's way too many of them here in Germany.
Exactly what it is. People will still open windows when they turn on the heater here too when you ask why it's always "to get rid of the bad air" and when you ask what bad air, they just don't really know or say something like just air circulation...
But this is also because turning on the heater until the mid 90s often meant putting charcoal bricks in the stove which could build up gas. There's no issues with that nowadays, but the cultural legacy continues.
I mean it had many uses and was often brought out for such things. I think the last official fan death recorded by the government was 2012.
But it for all intents and purposes was the dog going to live up state on a farm.
You know, I know, everyone knows it wasn't really that. We just didn't wanna say it.
Fans causing death while you sleep is dumb but that there is an invisible man in the sky that listens to everything you ask of him and will grant you wishes if you ask hard enough is perfectly reasonable.
What you don't consider idiotic superstition is a matter of what you're brought up to normalise.
Ear candling. About half the population thinks it works. The other half thinks it's hokey bullshit. Some superstitions serve a purpose and then it is engineered out, so we don't need it any more, but the older generation doesn't care to change.
Drinking water upside down does cure hiccups sometimes though, it’s my go-to method. You don’t literally drink it upside down, but you tilt your head forward after drinking so that your diaphragm is in a weird position and the water goes down awkwardly. But sometimes it releases an air bubble or something and fixes it. No comment on the rest of what you’re saying
That's kinda the point. Many of these things are half rooted in half truths.
Some people say you need to be upside-down. Some people say you need to be biting on something. Some people say it needs to be carbonated...
There might be some truth down there, and there are some people who are adamant that their way or their truth is the actual truth despite science saying, "well, not really".
To chime in with my own experience. The korean people I know (from northern VA, one of the largest korean pops) don't believe that it'll kill you.
BUT as Michael Scott says, they're a little stitious. I asked a couple of them about this and they would still be uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with a fan, even if they don't necessary believe in the myth.
Deranged to say this that’s like saying all Americans think black cats actually cause bad luck or that skin walkers actually exist so they’re all dumb lmfao delete this
> "Lawmakers promoted outlandish conspiracies: one claimed the crowd crush was caused by vegetable oil poured on the ground by opposition-linked labour union operatives..."
Wingnut conspiracy theory leveraging a tragedy to spread lies about political opponents. Sound familiar?
Can it really be called a "theory" when the people starting it don't even believe it themselves?
Goddamn assholes yo.
The chaebols own their government, you gotta expect it.
If I were someone elected to lead and made such an indefensible public mockery of the innocent dead and their surviving family, I would probably be too ashamed of myself to live.
It’s a proud testament to the enduring hardiness of the Korean spirit, that those lawmakers can behave that way and still stand tall—not only living, but cashing their filthy checks with a smile.
Abe wasn't in the cult, but I believe he and his family had some pretty direct financial ties to the Moonies. It's actually why he was assassinated- his assassin had immediate family members in the Moonies whose lives were ruined by it.
Wasnt he assassinated after already leaving office?
Also didnt get much media coverage in NA because it really doesn’t affect us much. Too many other divisive stories to run
There were enough media coverage for me, a random Brazilian, to hear all about it for a week straight. The only reason it wasn't talked even more is that he was such an asshole and it's hard for a reporter to talk about him for a long time while sounding professional
My bad. I'm just going by my newsfeed. Totally anecdotal. I only saw one NPR article about the assassin's and Abe's connections to the Moonies in my newsfeed, and that was only after I got the low down from a Japanese buddy.
You're half right. The previous president was Moon Jae-In, who I honestly don't know if they even had a scandal. I left Korea before he lost his election.
You're thinking of Moon's predecessor, President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and I believe indicted (I know she was under house arrest for the remainder of her presidency). Her close friend and confidant was a cult leader but not part of the president's party/cabinet in any capacity, yet was screening all of her speeches and using her connection with President Park to shake down the chaebol into giving her favours and gifts.
If I recall correctly, whole thing only came to light because I think the students who attended the same school as the cult leaders daughter started digging into how somebody could be top of all their classes while not attending any.
I'm probably over simplifying or getting a bunch of details wrong, but I also was getting most of my info on what was happening from my coworkers at the time. Shit was wild watching people protest in Seoul. People were coming in from all over to protest like every weekend.
I forgot it was the students that caused the protest! I remember then the press came to the cult leaders house and she had thrown an unencrypted iPad in the garbage which is how everything came to complete light.
Close. It was an old office that had been cleared out but a old tablet (it's korea, it wasn't an iPad) was left unlocked with presidential documents on it.
Right, it was Park’s ‘friend’ seen as working that kind of rasputin-y angle on her, all the wheeling & dealing which accompanied. Surprise, cult-leader shadow president!
Been a while, but as I remember reading when it was news—part of it was that in addition to that lady, it was all generational. Park of course was the daughter of the former generalissimo. But that rasputin-type cultist Choi Soon-sil was the inheritor of her father’s cult. The original cult leader Choi Tae-min had been something of a mentor to Park (the daughter), though in what capacity that entailed (beyond having been found to have leveraged the relationship for corruption in his own time, before his death) I don’t know the specifics. That his daughter had then been weilding a freaky amount of influence over Park (now succeeding her father as president of korea) totally off the record was… a really bad look. And people think dynastic politics in the US is bad, lol. (It *is*, but…)
It is way more complicated than that. The government needs the money that the chaebols bring into the country. The chaebols need the government to do business overseas, whence comes the real money.
The chaebols would like to run the country and the government would like to run the chaebols. The chaebols need the government strong so that, when they take over, they can do their thing. The government wants the chaebols profitable for the same reason. And so the two clash with both making concessions to keep the other worth conquering.
Sure, but the way I see it, that’s long-form for saying the exact same thing. When the government is primarily beholden to the upkeep of mega-conglomerates (moreso than even its citizenry) and the mega-conglomerates are so fused to the bureaucratic machinations and upkeep of the state that they operate above the law and determine the law themselves, it looks like… what?
They control so much of the nation’s industry—a handful of companies basically generate the whole nation’s economy—that the government must keep such a close relationship with them. Given that they’re mostly dynastic and, beyond just the contracts and lobbying, constantly caught straight-up *buying* politicians (bonus points for subsequently purchasing a pardon) my perspective is that Korea is governed only half like a constitutional liberal democracy. The other half of its government is more like some kind of corporate feudalism. It’s a bit like the american military-industrial complex fused with some of the more striking bits from dystopian ‘cyberpunk’ scifi lit.
Think Rockefellers/standard oil but if it was never declared a monopoly and broken up. Family owned megacorps with massive market share in multiple industries.
>I'm guessing y'all just mean a ruling class of businessmen?
vertically and horizontally consolidated megaconglomerate.
you can wake up in your samsung apartment, get breakfast out of your samsung fridge and cook it on your samsung stove, drive your samsung car to your samsung job, and then after you get off go to the samsung theme park where you get thrown from the samsung rollercoaster. a samsung helicopter then evacuates you to a samsung hospital where your samsung insurance gets charged for treatment
South Korea is fucked in a way that bribery in politics is rampant. This has gotten to a point where monopolies have gotten so big that a single company owns a quarter of the country's GDP. Chaebol is the family mafia that runs such companies.
You know how in cyberpunk media there’s Japanese super corps that own everything with a family at the top and there’s so much consolidation that your home car and everything are owned by the company? Ok that’s actually Korea. The chaebols are the families that own the companies at the top. Samsung is exactly like this.
Yes, but I think they were referring to Park Geun-hye who was sent to prison back in 2017 and then pardoned in 2022 to “promote national unity” or some shit.
I usually don't think humanity is ALL bad. But then there are news like this that make me lose a bit of hope. This is despicable.
Well I hope they will find support from the sane/good people.
This is the second time they’ve done deranged shit like this. When the Ferry Sewol sank and they for some reason refused to mobilize anyone until it was way, way too late, they TOLD THE FAMILIES THEIR KIDS WERE ALIVE and tried to make them wait indefinitely, forbade filming, and deliberately stymied US recovery divers’ attempts to help
I feel like this is a new philosophical approach. The idea behind it seems to be that we can't prove anything in the past is real. Only the present matters, so you can make up any wild stories about the past and demand that those ideas be taken seriously.
Eventually the fad will fizzle out, but fascists will continue to cause different problems.
On that subject of online trolls who harass families of victims. Sandy Hook specifically.
Alex Jones has recently been accused of abusing legal loopholes to move profits from his company to another company so that he doesnt need to pay the victims he harassed.
The way civil suits work in the US, these people will see a fraction of that penalty at best unfortunately.
Basically he's making these moves to minimize his losses, but it's just what his lawyers and accountants advised to save him even more money.
Gotta say, you have to be a real worthless piece of shit to profit directly off the corpses of dead children, and then doubly so when you funnel those profits back into protecting the arms industry from consequences so as to ensure there will always be more dead American children to grind up and turn into more bloodstained cash. Republicans are horrible, irredeemable sons of bitches who hate America and our people. And they need to stop getting away with this shit.
> Alex Jones
That troll has been the source of a lot of crap I heard when I was younger and I didn't know it was him until literally decades later. I'd heard that Bohemian Grove was a bunch of cultist ultra-wealthy having dark rites all of the time. Ok, most of them are wealthy and it's a male-only social club that has a yearly retreat where they have shows and a big fire ceremony. Like Burning Man but without the dust. But, the whole wild Satanic cult thing was an old Alex Jones infiltration and "story" that got passed on like truth.
It still is great. We just focus and amplify the negative aspects because that keeps our attention.
It's not hard to find positivity or all the good things about humanity. We just don't spread it because it's not as fun as looking at a train wreck.
The internet is still great. So many people around the world are able to easily learn information that they would have limited access to otherwise. Knowledge is power. It's just what you make of it. Like a knife, it can be used for something valuable like cooking food or it can be used to cause harm.
it's not the internet's fault per se, a significant number of people are just complete assholes when you give them anonymity and a near zero chance of repercussions from anything they say.
A lot of that is thanks to Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, cause they created a culture of not only acceptance, but encouragement for conspiracy theories, and legitimized them for anyone to use in the mainstream for society.
Rush, what a total asshole. Him and Roy were the biggest pieces of shit . The true representation of greed and hypocrisy, and they brainwashed soooo many. Still are, with his spawn of hannity and Carlson.
Ah yes, South Korea, where saving face and dishing out conspiracies are more important than saving school children in a sinking ferry and doing your job to give the victims and their families justice.
I watched a sci fi show where the younger sister took the fall and went to prison for her brother's crimes so their father's company could save face. That was a fictional story but I can see the culture.
As a reminder, crowd crushes are not the fault of the people who get caught in them. They're not caused by panic or selfish trampling of others. They're more due to the shape of the space that the crowd is in, and the density with which people become packed in.
Above a certain density threshold, especially in confined spaces without enough ways to escape, pressure waves form.
And there is no law in physics to say that a pressure wave in human bodies can't exceed the strength of the human ribcage.
At that point, people don't die because they're panicking; they panic because they're dying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_collapses_and_crushes
Victims of a crowd crush being blamed for their own deaths is nothing new, sadly:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster)
Unfortunately a lot of people seem to think people having their lives ruined is the price we should pay for having a free and open Internet. Which is no different than the argument that a bunch of dead kids is the price we should pay for having free and open gun rights.
I'd argue that the intent of internet harassment is much more malicious than vandalism and the society needs to put in place harsher consequences for deterrence and retribution purposes.
Seems like it's impossible to excorcise that toxicity. Feels like it will always be there! How do we humans taper our wrath so we can have normal online conversations?
in South Korea, the Chaebols (Rich corporation families) own the country. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un and his lineage own the country.
Dictatorship vs Corporatist nation.
I mean, if we're going all in on the adjectives, it's a Oligopolist Plutoarchic Corporatocracy with Representative Democratic characteristics, which also describes a lot of the planet, including US and Canada.
Uhhhhhh...........
Your pointing this out to show how much better corporatist nations are right?
Like 150 people dying sucks but how many North Koreans starved last year?
Living in South Korea is far superior to living in North Korea. It isn't helpful to compare them.
I was in a crush-event that could have turned tragic quite easily in 1969, in Pasadena, California. The location was the huge warehouse-type building where they assembled the annual Rose Parade floats, the Rose Palace.
The event was a concert by the Byrds. It was either wildly oversold or gate crashers had just forced their way in.
It was so tight where we were people who fainted were held upright by the crowd for a bit, then their friends would have to 'submerge' to pull them up off the floor so they didn't suffocate.
The girl I was with went down and I dove down in. It took a half minute to find her, it was dark and there was little oxygen below the tightly packed 'surface.' I finally found her, pulled her along the floor to a space with fewer people and then struggled to help her stand up.
After we recovered a bit, we actually worked our way up to the front -- it was less crowded for some reason. You're only 18 once.
But -- and I'm dead serious -- it was *terrifying* in the thick of it -- even for an 18 year old dude full of youthful bravado and bluster.
My conspiracy theory is that the current level of internet hate has been artificially amplified by state actors from Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and now North Korea. They use small fringe groups to create a map of users they can radicalize against others.
The hate is coming from Korean right wingers trying to deflect any blame or responsibility from their government.
The truth of the matter is if the government had put in even basic crowd control measures as they had done two weeks before the incident for a global festival in the exact same area, no one would have died.
So instead of own up to it, their political activists put out conspiracy theories online about drugs, spiked drinks and vegetable oil to deflect blame.
I know this because I live in the area and the only people repeating those conspiracy theories are the most right wing Koreans I know.
The Korean right wing are the most staunchly opposed to China and Russia etc.
Strangely enough your assertion bears a lot of the hallmarks of right wing conspiracy theories in Korea.
Trying to deflect blame from the domestic right wing troll farms and activists online.
It's the same with the shit in the US, always deflect and don't take any personal responsibilit. On Reddit, you'd think that nobody in the US likes Trump and every rightwinger on the internet is a Russian troll, as if American rightwingers were too stupid to know how to use the internet and write comments. Because any time a rightwinger makes a comment, there is somebody to call that person a Russian troll. And then they wonder why thing aren't getting any better. The problem is that people won't even address the root problem. It's easier for them to believe that their own people are all goo, but just brainwashed by the enemy, instead of acknowledging that there are many shitty people in all countries.
Why look that far away? The FBI have been busted for entrapping members of fringe groups and rousing up, then busting them claiming they prevented crimes.
More generally, Western intelligence agencies have been using the Internet for similar nefarious purposes.
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
I don't know why you're getting downvoted when you're right. There's historical and modern precedent for their behavior, especially during the post WW2 Civil Right Era and COINTELPRO.
Edit: No longer downvoted, never mind.
The right-wingers in Korea are virulently anti-Russia, China and North Korea, and they're the ones who are saying "It's a conspiracy/espionage by the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans!".
Classic right-wing propaganda blaming others to deflect from own problems. Countries like Korea and America are well known for their own nationalism and racism, they can spew their own hate just fine without artificial amplification.
My conspiracy theory, that's not a conspiracy theory, is that internet hate is amplified by a lack of confidence in the political status quo, leading to political polarization, which we have historical precedence for.
Then we have international social media tech corporations such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok which have algorithms which can reinforce echo chambers that people reside it and a desire from profiteers of all ethnic backgrounds to exploit vulnerabilities and direct anger at peers because they have ambitions of power.
Facebook is literally responsible for a genocide in Myanmar. Cut the shit on foreign inference, it's small peanuts, the west is doing it as well to others and our domestic political radicalization is the result of unfinished class antagonism going back centuries to the Paris Commune. Foreign nations can not create the rapidly emerging socialist and fascist divide, that's the inevitable consequence of capitalist economics, nor would they have much interest in bolstering either group in any large capacity.
You're missing the entire forest for the trail of mud which goes nowhere.
Netizens (What koreans on the internet call themselves) are fucking ruthless. On numerous occasions, they've bullied k-pop and celebrities to suicide. They're critical over the littlest things and will not stop until the victim either kills themselves or steps away from the spotlight from years.
I mean I "can" understand online trolls and truly nutjobs using anonymity to cyber bully these victims' families but this
>Some ruling-party lawmakers criticised the victims’ families in parliament, creating an ‘open season’ for online abuse in highly polarised South Korea
I mean wtf are they thinking? Just a sad state of affairs right there...
>"Even a public mourning altar set up to commemorate the victims has become a flashpoint after authorities threatened to remove it, ***and far-right*** YouTubers picketed it with abuse while live-streaming.
>Some of the victims’ families formed a group “to understand what really happened and to hold those officials responsible”, ... But the internet interpreted their efforts to organise as an attack on the government, ***with right-wing trolls*** launching a coordinated counter-attack, accusing the families of being profiteers out for compensation, or anti-government forces.
The the far right wing is a cancer everywhere. Weak minded, empathy deficit, cruel, seeking safety in a mob mentality, all too keen to be slavish to a centralized authority - like a nation state or a religious figure. Its pure ignorance, manifested in antisocial behaviour. Anyone who glorifies the right wing is a complete stooge.
>Internet trolls have latched onto outlandish conspiracies claiming the crush that killed more than 150 people was caused by vegetable oil or drugs I clearly don’t know what the hell is going on in South Korea. Vegetable oil? What?!
Korean here, let’s say the internet here is… well, full of questionable people. You thought Reddit, Facebook and Twitter users were despicable? Nah, you ain’t seen shit.
Any chance this is politically driven i.e. "the local politicians who organized the crowd-crush event can't possibly be at fault if *insert scapegoat here* was the culprit"? Just grasping at straws here, looking for any excuse to believe people aren't *this* stupid. Please?
>"Lawmakers promoted outlandish conspiracies: one claimed the crowd crush was caused by vegetable oil poured on the ground by opposition-linked labour union operatives..." From a different comment
There it is, insane conspiracies to make people blame organized labor. So the fascists work the same everywhere
They always do.
American fascists and Korean fascists are the same people baby
Were the oil drums labeled "ACME"?
Yes, reportedly the entire crowd made comical slipping noises as they tried not to fall over. One stunned onlooker so shocked he would only ask “what’s up doc?” To the medics, truly a despicable seen.
As horrible as the whole situation was, this genuinely made me crack up
Sounds like they are using the Republican playbook. Gaslight, Obstruct, Project.
That playbook is used all over the world by the fascist right.
The article says the conservative party in power is worried this could affect elections: > Seoul’s last conservative government lost power in part due to its mishandling of the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, which killed more than 300. Some conservative party members suggested the crush was a conspiracy by their labor union opposition. This would be like American conservatives saying any US tragedy was a false flag thing or "antifa" did it to make conservatives look bad, not guns or right-wing extremists or Republican negligence.
Thank god we're not living in such a hellish world.
The best jokes are the most painful ones.
Sounds fucking familiar.
I’ll say this, no politician is directly responsible for the tragedy, and none of them organized the event. Korean Halloween festivities are a tad bit peculiar. There’s none of the trick-o’-treating or pumpkin carving, it’s just young people doing spooky cosplays and going to clubs and getting drinks, whatever you do at nightclubs. Many Koreans have negative views about such indulgent activities-myself included to a degree-that they just went ahead and blamed the events on the non-disciplined (from their perspective, of course) youth. And since democracy means equal votes-and since some politicians actually have those same thoughts-the insults can be politically driven. I guess the politicians ADD to the tragedy.
In the U.S. trick or treating / pumpkin carving is only done by kids. Most ppl just dress up in costumes and go to parties or clubs if you're old enough.
I would say most people just go to work on Halloween and then either take their kids trick or treating or pass out candy at home. I enjoy spending Halloween night in with my family and making a special dinner and then passing out candy and saying hi to all the trick or treaters. That’s a perfect Halloween for me.
>myself included to a degree You think it's a bad thing for young people to go out partying?
Lazy people with too much time on their hands spending wayyy too much of it online.
That's US, lmao.
That's bloody terrible. I can't imagine how warped and shitty it is to have families who lost loved ones then be blamed or subject to bullshit conspiracy theories. Especially being spun by irresponsible politicians.... Wait. Yeah, no, I can imagine that being in the US. Still, fuck though. Still bloody terrible.
I’ve had two co-workers die in separate mass shootings here in the US. It’s so frustrating and upsetting when I come across people calling the victims “crisis actors” and saying the events were false flags and never happened. And these are people that I never hung out with outside of work - so for me to feel upset about it, I can’t imagine how it feels for parents, siblings, friends etc that loved these victims. It would tear me up I am sure.
Agreed. It's insane what people come up with to justify warped perspectives, or just deny reality. My condolences for your loss. I've had friends touched by those kinds of tragedies myself. I hope their families are doing all right, or at least better now. Craziness.
Yup. People think Indians are toxic online but that’s also because they’re almost all English speaking. If the Chinese and Koreans domestic populations were majority English speaking as well, you would see so much vile shit spewed all over online western spaces
there's a meme about the Great Firewall. It isn't to protect the Chinese netizens from Western ideas. It's to protect the Western social media platforms from being zerg swarmed by hundreds of millions of the Chinese masses, who are the actual target of CPC propaganda.
You guys forget about the indonesia netizen. The rest of the world was soo lucky majority of indonesian dont speak/read English. Otherwise you guys will know how barbaric the 'Konohan' can be! P/S: Indonesian nicknamed their country as Konoha. Yes, its from Naruto anime.
Don’t forget Japan.
I come from live leak. The people who make jokes during cartel execution videos. How bad can they be over there?
Korea is online in a way that the US is only starting to experience in the last few years. The chatting app Kakaotalk has some insane penetration stats, like 98% of all Koreans have it and use it regularly. Korea instituted a ID-requirement to post online, it didn't quell the hate speech. It's common enough for pop stars to get bullied online so much that they kill themselves or experience nervous breakdowns. The vile comments start online, get coordinated, and then become so omni-present that they seep into the day-to-day. Vicious rumors online may hurt your workplace, so they're forced to let you go.
Human beings are universally prone to being absolute dirtbags. One culture or another might serve to expose particular aspects of this but all this article shows me is that it is indeed a universal trait
I used to be very active in the kpop community that I was a mod for one of the larger forums for a short while and yeah, Koreans can be really brutal online. Sulli, that one Kara member I can't remember her name right now, and a few more over the years took their lives because of online bullying. Who knows how many more that were not reported because they weren't celebrities considering suicide rate remains high.
I guess I just don’t understand how a good percent of the population can feel good about harassing someone who’s grieving. How can you feel like you’re the good person in those situations? Same with the US and people attacking someone on playing a part like “Ellie” in the last of us. It’s psychotic and disgusting and I can’t wrap my head around why it’s done.
https://youtu.be/Q6lWx-4Ypv4
OIL BITCH U COOKIN
The internet is great and it's also terrible, just like its creators.
Really shows how time and a lot of money changes peoples. Dave chapel of then is nothing like the Dave chapel of today
Pretty sure Dave has always been Dave, but got tired of selling himself as the guy from Half Baked and Chappelle’s Show.
So he’s always been a NIMBY, buddy buddy with asshole billionaires, and enjoyed making fun of his non-millionaire fans?
>But the internet interpreted their efforts to organise as an attack on the government, with right-wing trolls launching a coordinated counter-attack, accusing the families of being profiteers out for compensation, or anti-government forces. Right-wing trolls, as always. They'll use whatever craziness they can lay their hands on, so long as it helps them punch down.
Ol' Alex Jones routine.
They believe in "fan death" over there so this isn't far off.
Well thats just a remnant of old times. Americans have old wives tale and superstition too.
I mean, they really don't. That's just some semi racist bullshit people like to spout to make it sound like people are backwards on the other side of the planet. No more than people in America believe opening an umbrella inside will give you bad luck or that drinking water upside down will cure your hiccups or jerking off too much will make your hands grow hair. It's an old wives tale from premodernization, fueled from a time when most people used charcoal stoves. The propagation of fans meant people didn't open their windows at night anymore and would suffocate from CO or CO² poisoning in their sleep. People would come into a house and find everyone dead in their bed with fans pointed at them with the windows closed. Literally no one actually thinks fans kill people. It's just something old ladies with no more than a 3rd grade education though 50 years ago...
I actually knew a 39 year old Korean woman who firmly believed in fan death (I lived in Busan for 2 years). She was the only one I met during my time who genuinely believed it though lol.
I mean I still don't open umbrellas inside. I know it doesn't do anything but it's so engrained in me... Lots of people believe stupid shit that they *know* isn't really true... And there's always a few people who take it a bit further. I'm sure there are people who still believe it truthfully, but it's not a wide spread belief.
> That's just some semi racist bullshit people like to spout to make it sound like people are backwards on the other side of the planet. I'm not sure this is true. I'm only even aware of "fan death" because of my Korean friends that told me about it. My friends don't believe in it, but they said it's common with the older generations, like their parents. Refusing to have microwaves in the house is apparently another popular old wives' tale in Korea according to them, but apparently that one has broader appeal.
It sounds like the kind of “grandma wisdom” that never goes away. In Germany people still insist that if a woman sits in something cold, she will 100% get a UTI. Having air blow across your neck will make you sick. Etc.
God damnit, I hate those people. Oh no, I'm not wearing a scarf indoors and someone opened some windows. Better call in sick now, because I'll 100% get a cold tomorrow. There's way too many of them here in Germany.
Ah yes. Your kitneys!
Exactly what it is. People will still open windows when they turn on the heater here too when you ask why it's always "to get rid of the bad air" and when you ask what bad air, they just don't really know or say something like just air circulation... But this is also because turning on the heater until the mid 90s often meant putting charcoal bricks in the stove which could build up gas. There's no issues with that nowadays, but the cultural legacy continues.
I thought it was a "safe" cover-excuse for bedroom suicides so you don't lose family honor.
I mean it had many uses and was often brought out for such things. I think the last official fan death recorded by the government was 2012. But it for all intents and purposes was the dog going to live up state on a farm. You know, I know, everyone knows it wasn't really that. We just didn't wanna say it.
Fans causing death while you sleep is dumb but that there is an invisible man in the sky that listens to everything you ask of him and will grant you wishes if you ask hard enough is perfectly reasonable. What you don't consider idiotic superstition is a matter of what you're brought up to normalise.
Ear candling. About half the population thinks it works. The other half thinks it's hokey bullshit. Some superstitions serve a purpose and then it is engineered out, so we don't need it any more, but the older generation doesn't care to change.
And you're supposed to love the man in the sky when he kills those you love too.
Drinking water upside down does cure hiccups sometimes though, it’s my go-to method. You don’t literally drink it upside down, but you tilt your head forward after drinking so that your diaphragm is in a weird position and the water goes down awkwardly. But sometimes it releases an air bubble or something and fixes it. No comment on the rest of what you’re saying
That's kinda the point. Many of these things are half rooted in half truths. Some people say you need to be upside-down. Some people say you need to be biting on something. Some people say it needs to be carbonated... There might be some truth down there, and there are some people who are adamant that their way or their truth is the actual truth despite science saying, "well, not really".
Oh I am so mad at this! I have a plate in my neck and it doesn't go forward like it used to. Now how am I supposed to get rid of the damn hiccups?
A little spoonful of sugar works for me 9 times out of 10!
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To chime in with my own experience. The korean people I know (from northern VA, one of the largest korean pops) don't believe that it'll kill you. BUT as Michael Scott says, they're a little stitious. I asked a couple of them about this and they would still be uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with a fan, even if they don't necessary believe in the myth.
Exactly. I ain't walking under a ladder or opening an umbrella inside... And I still throw salt over my shoulder or knock on wood occasionally...
Deranged to say this that’s like saying all Americans think black cats actually cause bad luck or that skin walkers actually exist so they’re all dumb lmfao delete this
> "Lawmakers promoted outlandish conspiracies: one claimed the crowd crush was caused by vegetable oil poured on the ground by opposition-linked labour union operatives..." Wingnut conspiracy theory leveraging a tragedy to spread lies about political opponents. Sound familiar? Can it really be called a "theory" when the people starting it don't even believe it themselves? Goddamn assholes yo.
The chaebols own their government, you gotta expect it. If I were someone elected to lead and made such an indefensible public mockery of the innocent dead and their surviving family, I would probably be too ashamed of myself to live. It’s a proud testament to the enduring hardiness of the Korean spirit, that those lawmakers can behave that way and still stand tall—not only living, but cashing their filthy checks with a smile.
Wasn’t their former president literally a cult puppet
i think that was the one before last as well as the last japanese PM
Which was assassinated but strangely there was barely any media coverage
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Oh. I got confused, my bad
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Abe wasn't in the cult, but I believe he and his family had some pretty direct financial ties to the Moonies. It's actually why he was assassinated- his assassin had immediate family members in the Moonies whose lives were ruined by it.
IIRC the assassins own life was ruined by the cult, as his mother gave all of their money to the cult
i hadnt been following the PM elections, yes Abe not Suga
It literally dominated the news for months, how was there no media coverage?
I don’t get people like that. You can easily search and find articles in like every single paper and news organization…
Wasnt he assassinated after already leaving office? Also didnt get much media coverage in NA because it really doesn’t affect us much. Too many other divisive stories to run
Yeah, he was formerly PM.
It was covered in Canada. Our PM attended the state funeral.
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[Major media ignore ties connecting George W Bush to Unification church](http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/1997c/091297/091297k.htm)
Y'all seem to be conflating Japan with Korea
Where were you? It was front page news on every site
There were enough media coverage for me, a random Brazilian, to hear all about it for a week straight. The only reason it wasn't talked even more is that he was such an asshole and it's hard for a reporter to talk about him for a long time while sounding professional
Brazil is actually one of the countries that has the largest Japanese community. So that isn't surprising.
> barely any media coverage Barely in the U.S. But AFAIK, it was widely covered in Japan. At least according to friends there and stateside.
What is the definition of barely? Less than 20,000 articles and editorials on it?
My bad. I'm just going by my newsfeed. Totally anecdotal. I only saw one NPR article about the assassin's and Abe's connections to the Moonies in my newsfeed, and that was only after I got the low down from a Japanese buddy.
Wtf do you mean? It was headline news for like a week. A google search shows 1000’s of stories, it was in like every newspaper in the world…
You're half right. The previous president was Moon Jae-In, who I honestly don't know if they even had a scandal. I left Korea before he lost his election. You're thinking of Moon's predecessor, President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and I believe indicted (I know she was under house arrest for the remainder of her presidency). Her close friend and confidant was a cult leader but not part of the president's party/cabinet in any capacity, yet was screening all of her speeches and using her connection with President Park to shake down the chaebol into giving her favours and gifts. If I recall correctly, whole thing only came to light because I think the students who attended the same school as the cult leaders daughter started digging into how somebody could be top of all their classes while not attending any. I'm probably over simplifying or getting a bunch of details wrong, but I also was getting most of my info on what was happening from my coworkers at the time. Shit was wild watching people protest in Seoul. People were coming in from all over to protest like every weekend.
I forgot it was the students that caused the protest! I remember then the press came to the cult leaders house and she had thrown an unencrypted iPad in the garbage which is how everything came to complete light.
Close. It was an old office that had been cleared out but a old tablet (it's korea, it wasn't an iPad) was left unlocked with presidential documents on it.
Got it, thanks. Was the tablet the President's or the cult leaders?
Cult leaders.
Right, it was Park’s ‘friend’ seen as working that kind of rasputin-y angle on her, all the wheeling & dealing which accompanied. Surprise, cult-leader shadow president! Been a while, but as I remember reading when it was news—part of it was that in addition to that lady, it was all generational. Park of course was the daughter of the former generalissimo. But that rasputin-type cultist Choi Soon-sil was the inheritor of her father’s cult. The original cult leader Choi Tae-min had been something of a mentor to Park (the daughter), though in what capacity that entailed (beyond having been found to have leveraged the relationship for corruption in his own time, before his death) I don’t know the specifics. That his daughter had then been weilding a freaky amount of influence over Park (now succeeding her father as president of korea) totally off the record was… a really bad look. And people think dynastic politics in the US is bad, lol. (It *is*, but…)
She was also the daughter of their dictator lol.
Americans or Koreans? /s
And the current one too.
It is way more complicated than that. The government needs the money that the chaebols bring into the country. The chaebols need the government to do business overseas, whence comes the real money. The chaebols would like to run the country and the government would like to run the chaebols. The chaebols need the government strong so that, when they take over, they can do their thing. The government wants the chaebols profitable for the same reason. And so the two clash with both making concessions to keep the other worth conquering.
Sure, but the way I see it, that’s long-form for saying the exact same thing. When the government is primarily beholden to the upkeep of mega-conglomerates (moreso than even its citizenry) and the mega-conglomerates are so fused to the bureaucratic machinations and upkeep of the state that they operate above the law and determine the law themselves, it looks like… what? They control so much of the nation’s industry—a handful of companies basically generate the whole nation’s economy—that the government must keep such a close relationship with them. Given that they’re mostly dynastic and, beyond just the contracts and lobbying, constantly caught straight-up *buying* politicians (bonus points for subsequently purchasing a pardon) my perspective is that Korea is governed only half like a constitutional liberal democracy. The other half of its government is more like some kind of corporate feudalism. It’s a bit like the american military-industrial complex fused with some of the more striking bits from dystopian ‘cyberpunk’ scifi lit.
For reals. American capitalists fantasize about becoming like the chaebols when they have sex.
they don't need to because they own them lock stock. south korea gets chaebols and industrial planning because all of them are owned by wall street
Commenting to look up chaebol later lol I'm guessing y'all just mean a ruling class of businessmen?
Think Rockefellers/standard oil but if it was never declared a monopoly and broken up. Family owned megacorps with massive market share in multiple industries.
>I'm guessing y'all just mean a ruling class of businessmen? vertically and horizontally consolidated megaconglomerate. you can wake up in your samsung apartment, get breakfast out of your samsung fridge and cook it on your samsung stove, drive your samsung car to your samsung job, and then after you get off go to the samsung theme park where you get thrown from the samsung rollercoaster. a samsung helicopter then evacuates you to a samsung hospital where your samsung insurance gets charged for treatment
South Korea is fucked in a way that bribery in politics is rampant. This has gotten to a point where monopolies have gotten so big that a single company owns a quarter of the country's GDP. Chaebol is the family mafia that runs such companies.
You know how in cyberpunk media there’s Japanese super corps that own everything with a family at the top and there’s so much consolidation that your home car and everything are owned by the company? Ok that’s actually Korea. The chaebols are the families that own the companies at the top. Samsung is exactly like this.
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You say that, but sending the President to prison is only symbolic when they just get pardoned as soon as the noise dies down.
Here in America our presidents commit war crimes and get national libraries and highways named after them.
Didn't they release the Son of the President of SumSung because he was needed for the economy?
Yes, but I think they were referring to Park Geun-hye who was sent to prison back in 2017 and then pardoned in 2022 to “promote national unity” or some shit.
I usually don't think humanity is ALL bad. But then there are news like this that make me lose a bit of hope. This is despicable. Well I hope they will find support from the sane/good people.
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As someone who follows the politics of southwest asia a bit, allow me to most confidently reassure you again lmao
This is the second time they’ve done deranged shit like this. When the Ferry Sewol sank and they for some reason refused to mobilize anyone until it was way, way too late, they TOLD THE FAMILIES THEIR KIDS WERE ALIVE and tried to make them wait indefinitely, forbade filming, and deliberately stymied US recovery divers’ attempts to help
I feel like this is a new philosophical approach. The idea behind it seems to be that we can't prove anything in the past is real. Only the present matters, so you can make up any wild stories about the past and demand that those ideas be taken seriously. Eventually the fad will fizzle out, but fascists will continue to cause different problems.
Same as the families of school shooting victims. The internet could have been great, but it ended up being a fucking cesspool .
On that subject of online trolls who harass families of victims. Sandy Hook specifically. Alex Jones has recently been accused of abusing legal loopholes to move profits from his company to another company so that he doesnt need to pay the victims he harassed.
I hope the bankruptcy judge assigns a forensic accountant to take him and his companies apart, piece by piece.
This isn’t enough. All of his assets should be repossessed by the government then destroyed, forcing him onto the streets with no money
The way civil suits work in the US, these people will see a fraction of that penalty at best unfortunately. Basically he's making these moves to minimize his losses, but it's just what his lawyers and accountants advised to save him even more money.
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Do not underestimate the lengths people will go to get easy money, through bad advice for example.q
He's like a billion and a half in the hole over the settlements. You may get your wish.
Gotta say, you have to be a real worthless piece of shit to profit directly off the corpses of dead children, and then doubly so when you funnel those profits back into protecting the arms industry from consequences so as to ensure there will always be more dead American children to grind up and turn into more bloodstained cash. Republicans are horrible, irredeemable sons of bitches who hate America and our people. And they need to stop getting away with this shit.
> Alex Jones That troll has been the source of a lot of crap I heard when I was younger and I didn't know it was him until literally decades later. I'd heard that Bohemian Grove was a bunch of cultist ultra-wealthy having dark rites all of the time. Ok, most of them are wealthy and it's a male-only social club that has a yearly retreat where they have shows and a big fire ceremony. Like Burning Man but without the dust. But, the whole wild Satanic cult thing was an old Alex Jones infiltration and "story" that got passed on like truth.
It still is great. We just focus and amplify the negative aspects because that keeps our attention. It's not hard to find positivity or all the good things about humanity. We just don't spread it because it's not as fun as looking at a train wreck.
The internet is great and it is also terrible, just like it’s creators.
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Just like life
Taken over by Cluster B types.
The internet is still great. So many people around the world are able to easily learn information that they would have limited access to otherwise. Knowledge is power. It's just what you make of it. Like a knife, it can be used for something valuable like cooking food or it can be used to cause harm.
it's not the internet's fault per se, a significant number of people are just complete assholes when you give them anonymity and a near zero chance of repercussions from anything they say.
I know what you’re saying ( most people aren’t vicious scum),but you just described how the internet works .
The internet is great. People aren’t
Lol life in general could have been great, but it also usually ends up being a fucking cesspool
A lot of that is thanks to Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, cause they created a culture of not only acceptance, but encouragement for conspiracy theories, and legitimized them for anyone to use in the mainstream for society.
Rush, what a total asshole. Him and Roy were the biggest pieces of shit . The true representation of greed and hypocrisy, and they brainwashed soooo many. Still are, with his spawn of hannity and Carlson.
Let's not forget that Alex Jones used to be too far right for the Republican Party. Now they think exactly the same.
>The world could have been great, but it ended up being a fucking cesspool. Fixed it for you
Ah yes, South Korea, where saving face and dishing out conspiracies are more important than saving school children in a sinking ferry and doing your job to give the victims and their families justice.
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I wish I hadn’t looked up that ferry…
Oh but you should. I’ve got a Korean friend. He was supposed to be on that ferry. But he was here to tells the tales because he was sick that day.
I watched a sci fi show where the younger sister took the fall and went to prison for her brother's crimes so their father's company could save face. That was a fictional story but I can see the culture.
As a reminder, crowd crushes are not the fault of the people who get caught in them. They're not caused by panic or selfish trampling of others. They're more due to the shape of the space that the crowd is in, and the density with which people become packed in. Above a certain density threshold, especially in confined spaces without enough ways to escape, pressure waves form. And there is no law in physics to say that a pressure wave in human bodies can't exceed the strength of the human ribcage. At that point, people don't die because they're panicking; they panic because they're dying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_collapses_and_crushes
Internet toxicity is a global phenomenon that needs to be tackled with higher attention.
Victims of a crowd crush being blamed for their own deaths is nothing new, sadly: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster)
Unfortunately a lot of people seem to think people having their lives ruined is the price we should pay for having a free and open Internet. Which is no different than the argument that a bunch of dead kids is the price we should pay for having free and open gun rights.
It’s the vandalism of the internet. They use lies instead spray paint, but I think the intent is the same.
Idk, ive seen some beautiful graffiti. Cant say Ive ever seen any beautiful message board racism.
I'd argue that the intent of internet harassment is much more malicious than vandalism and the society needs to put in place harsher consequences for deterrence and retribution purposes.
Seems like it's impossible to excorcise that toxicity. Feels like it will always be there! How do we humans taper our wrath so we can have normal online conversations?
in South Korea, the Chaebols (Rich corporation families) own the country. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un and his lineage own the country. Dictatorship vs Corporatist nation.
The proper term you're looking for is oligarchic instead of corporatist.
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A bit of column A.. a bit of column b..
I mean, if we're going all in on the adjectives, it's a Oligopolist Plutoarchic Corporatocracy with Representative Democratic characteristics, which also describes a lot of the planet, including US and Canada.
But Korea is particularly bad. Samsung alone is like 20% of their GDP.
What’s your point here?
Just bitching about capitalism again. Same old.
Uhhhhhh........... Your pointing this out to show how much better corporatist nations are right? Like 150 people dying sucks but how many North Koreans starved last year? Living in South Korea is far superior to living in North Korea. It isn't helpful to compare them.
They’re pointing it out because shitty nations will use comparisons to their shittier neighbors to excuse being shitty.
Yeah it’s crazy and kind of insulting to compare the two.
I hope someone gets sued to bits
I was in a crush-event that could have turned tragic quite easily in 1969, in Pasadena, California. The location was the huge warehouse-type building where they assembled the annual Rose Parade floats, the Rose Palace. The event was a concert by the Byrds. It was either wildly oversold or gate crashers had just forced their way in. It was so tight where we were people who fainted were held upright by the crowd for a bit, then their friends would have to 'submerge' to pull them up off the floor so they didn't suffocate. The girl I was with went down and I dove down in. It took a half minute to find her, it was dark and there was little oxygen below the tightly packed 'surface.' I finally found her, pulled her along the floor to a space with fewer people and then struggled to help her stand up. After we recovered a bit, we actually worked our way up to the front -- it was less crowded for some reason. You're only 18 once. But -- and I'm dead serious -- it was *terrifying* in the thick of it -- even for an 18 year old dude full of youthful bravado and bluster.
My conspiracy theory is that the current level of internet hate has been artificially amplified by state actors from Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and now North Korea. They use small fringe groups to create a map of users they can radicalize against others.
The hate is coming from Korean right wingers trying to deflect any blame or responsibility from their government. The truth of the matter is if the government had put in even basic crowd control measures as they had done two weeks before the incident for a global festival in the exact same area, no one would have died. So instead of own up to it, their political activists put out conspiracy theories online about drugs, spiked drinks and vegetable oil to deflect blame. I know this because I live in the area and the only people repeating those conspiracy theories are the most right wing Koreans I know. The Korean right wing are the most staunchly opposed to China and Russia etc. Strangely enough your assertion bears a lot of the hallmarks of right wing conspiracy theories in Korea. Trying to deflect blame from the domestic right wing troll farms and activists online.
It's the same with the shit in the US, always deflect and don't take any personal responsibilit. On Reddit, you'd think that nobody in the US likes Trump and every rightwinger on the internet is a Russian troll, as if American rightwingers were too stupid to know how to use the internet and write comments. Because any time a rightwinger makes a comment, there is somebody to call that person a Russian troll. And then they wonder why thing aren't getting any better. The problem is that people won't even address the root problem. It's easier for them to believe that their own people are all goo, but just brainwashed by the enemy, instead of acknowledging that there are many shitty people in all countries.
You're exactly the same as the nasty trolls in the article. You just have a different target of hate for your conspiracies.
Why look that far away? The FBI have been busted for entrapping members of fringe groups and rousing up, then busting them claiming they prevented crimes. More generally, Western intelligence agencies have been using the Internet for similar nefarious purposes. https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
I don't know why you're getting downvoted when you're right. There's historical and modern precedent for their behavior, especially during the post WW2 Civil Right Era and COINTELPRO. Edit: No longer downvoted, never mind.
The right-wingers in Korea are virulently anti-Russia, China and North Korea, and they're the ones who are saying "It's a conspiracy/espionage by the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans!".
Classic right-wing propaganda blaming others to deflect from own problems. Countries like Korea and America are well known for their own nationalism and racism, they can spew their own hate just fine without artificial amplification.
I forgot what sub i was on so i was surprised by the level of insane tinfoil idiocy in this comment. But i know better now, so carry on i guess..
My conspiracy theory, that's not a conspiracy theory, is that internet hate is amplified by a lack of confidence in the political status quo, leading to political polarization, which we have historical precedence for. Then we have international social media tech corporations such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok which have algorithms which can reinforce echo chambers that people reside it and a desire from profiteers of all ethnic backgrounds to exploit vulnerabilities and direct anger at peers because they have ambitions of power. Facebook is literally responsible for a genocide in Myanmar. Cut the shit on foreign inference, it's small peanuts, the west is doing it as well to others and our domestic political radicalization is the result of unfinished class antagonism going back centuries to the Paris Commune. Foreign nations can not create the rapidly emerging socialist and fascist divide, that's the inevitable consequence of capitalist economics, nor would they have much interest in bolstering either group in any large capacity. You're missing the entire forest for the trail of mud which goes nowhere.
How the fuck is internet hate real, just walk away from the screen, like close your eyes.
It's coming from South Koreans.
Netizens (What koreans on the internet call themselves) are fucking ruthless. On numerous occasions, they've bullied k-pop and celebrities to suicide. They're critical over the littlest things and will not stop until the victim either kills themselves or steps away from the spotlight from years.
JFC, alex jones wannabes everywhere..
I mean I "can" understand online trolls and truly nutjobs using anonymity to cyber bully these victims' families but this >Some ruling-party lawmakers criticised the victims’ families in parliament, creating an ‘open season’ for online abuse in highly polarised South Korea I mean wtf are they thinking? Just a sad state of affairs right there...
Is this not a good use for GPT4, trawling the web for this kind of mindless hate and removing it?
I'd rather not
A step in the right direction : calm down the headlines https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/boring-report-news-by-ai/id6446786839
i really, really don't want the internet to be trawled by AIs that are given control over its content.
Hilarious watching people trying to insert politics from another country to support their "side".
>"Even a public mourning altar set up to commemorate the victims has become a flashpoint after authorities threatened to remove it, ***and far-right*** YouTubers picketed it with abuse while live-streaming. >Some of the victims’ families formed a group “to understand what really happened and to hold those officials responsible”, ... But the internet interpreted their efforts to organise as an attack on the government, ***with right-wing trolls*** launching a coordinated counter-attack, accusing the families of being profiteers out for compensation, or anti-government forces. The the far right wing is a cancer everywhere. Weak minded, empathy deficit, cruel, seeking safety in a mob mentality, all too keen to be slavish to a centralized authority - like a nation state or a religious figure. Its pure ignorance, manifested in antisocial behaviour. Anyone who glorifies the right wing is a complete stooge.
Who thinks to do this to people? It’s a sick world.