World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
Constitutional Monarchy are very different and limited form of monarchy, where the monarch have very limited power or are simply there for ceremonial purpose. The king doesn't command the parliament, and cannot make policy, and at most can suggest it.
I live in a country with constitutional monarchy and they mostly just there, occasionally making remark and have their opinions. They however still have the power to veto bill and reject project, but it happen very very rarely. They're mostly there as religious leader and political weapon for some.
So to answer your question, yes, Netherlands and Denmark both practice constitutional monarchy, hence they're still considered democracy.
Ok, now, can you conceive that the Kim family's role is more representative as in a constitutional monarchy (such as that of my homeland of Spain) than it is de-facto monarchical power? I'm not saying that the DPRK's parliament is democratically elected, I'm questioning whether we can, with the information at our disposal in the west, affirm that the politics of the DPRK are controlled by one particular family and not by, say, the cadres of their communist party.
Firstly, to say that Kim family is merely ceremonial mean you have to proof that someone else is running the show, that hatched all the plans, that have the final say. We don't have that information. What we have is he is the single most powerful person in North Korea, that rule and guide the country, that inherited the power from his father.
Of course, a king need a general and a treasurer, whether they are the one in control or not is not a known fact, and that will remained a mystery until someone close to them speak.
So yes, with the information the world have, we can safely say North Korea is run by a single family.
I don't doubt this, but you could have said the same about Queen Elizabeth before she got in a box
This requires more evidence. What's your evidence for this? What material reasons do you have to believe that the decisions come from Kim personally and not from the communist party?
I absolutely would not have described Queen Elizabeth as the most powerful person in the country at any time of her reign.
What non-democratically-chosen capitalist owner would you have chosen then?
I'm going to invite you to go ahead and rephrase that in a way that is not completely nonsensical. Cuz I don't know what the fuck you're trying to say there or what it had to do with anything I said.
I can also say the same for all prime minister and president in country without monarch and with constitutional monarch. That is exactly what a leader of the country are. What is exactly your point here?
Let me do one better: what is your evidence that say otherwise?
A society whose results don't match those of a personal monarchic dictatorship. For example, Saudi Arabia, a widely known example of a monarchy with absolutist power, has 80% of the population composed of immigrants without rights who get stripped of their passports and get treated as slaves. There's no public healthcare, no infrastructure for poor people (trains, public schools, people-centered urbanism...), etc.
In the DPRK, there's widespread public transit infrastructure with trains and trams, public education for everyone, public healthcare, good workers' rights relative to their level of development, people-centered urban planning, collectivized agriculture... You wouldn't expect any of these things from an absolutist monarchy.
I would love to have source for your claim on north korea, because your claim on saudi arabia is all but nonsense, and is really easily dispelled with a little bit of internet search.
And across the history, some king are known to have build a lot of public infrastructure, while others don't. That isn't a sign of governance type, that is the sign of the competence of the leadership.
About Saudi Arabia:
Demographics in Saudi Arabia:
When 40%ish of the population is without basic human rights, idk what you're claiming false about my arguments
Regarding sources for North Korea, the YouTube channel "DPRK Explained" does a great job of showing the realities of North Korea. You should have a look if you're interested.
You:
Also you:
Wanna try again?
Then you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Saudi_Arabia
Then you also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Saudi_Arabia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Mashaaer_Al_Mugaddassah_Metro_line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riyadh_Metro
There are several other line being planned.
I thought it was 80% migrants? Also, except for the bit about permission to leave country (crazy, imo) that sounds like a normal work permit in many conventionally democratic countries, where employer also uses it's power over migrant workers. It might be worse in practice, of course, that depends on courts
Sorry, mistook it originally for the Qatar figure, which has a similar system and 88% migrant population.
When immigrant workers aren't given access to basic rights like healthcare, it's an apartheid state. You could read about it instead of speculating about the extreme levels of exploitation of those poor people.
My point was more along the lines of specific democracies doing almost as bad, and being a counterexample for extracting political system information from unrelated data
Yes, we can definitively prove that the NK political theater is run by the Kim family. Watch any video of their "congress" meeting, and it's just a group of NPCs clapping mindlessly to everything Kim Jong il says.
"Political power comes from televised claps"
-No serious political analysis ever
Being intentionally obtuse doesn't make you look smarter.
Your entire knowledge of the DPRK comes from western propaganda, I'm not the obtuse one here. Tell me how many times you've gone "actually, let's see" and tried to read something about the country? You're analyzing the political structure of a country based on 3 news shots from western sources.
Ah yes, South Korean interviews of North Koreans that have managed to flee the country- classic western propaganda. Fellate yourself less, maybe?
Unironically yes. Russia literally does this with the right wing US émigrées that move to Russia because gay rights are shit there and "they have no woke", these people literally get paid to do such propaganda.
You tankies are a different brand of stupid, aintcha?
South Korean media reports of North Korean defectors are notoriously not trustworthy. North Korean defectors suffer from a lot of stigma if they go to the South and usually struggle to find a job. Tabloids pay them for their stories. Obviously, the taller the tale, the more likely they get a paycheck.
The fact that NK is so closed off means it's hard to disprove a lot of the claims, but we can still know that they're false when they're contradictory. For example, some NK defectors have claimed having KJU's haircut is illegal, others claim it's the only haircut men are allowed to wear. Some claim that abortion is totally banned, others claim that the state forces women to get abortions.
Probably the epitome of this phenomenon is Yeonmi Park. Are you really gonna die on the hill that NK defectors like her are trustworthy sources?
Yes, because if we discount every first-hand account because of some people who don't say the exact same thing- then we wouldn't have almost any evidence that what went down in concentration camps during WWII actually happened. First-hand accounts are all we get (outside of tankies running interference for a violent dictatorship) so finding commonality among all of them is how you can at least attempt to verify.
That's completely different. The Nazis kept records that corroborate the first-hand accounts. There's photographic evidence of how the camps were laid out, the conditions their prisoners were kept in, bodies, experiments, and more. Honestly I find this line to be bordering on Holocaust denial because it's so absurd: you think the Holocaust could have been carried out in such a way that only first-hand accounts provide evidence of it?
Also I'm not talking about getting slight details wrong, I'm talking about different defectors telling stories that directly contradict each other, or things that are simply impossible. Have you ever seen an interview with Yeonmi Park?
If not uncritically swallowing Radio Free Asia propaganda makes me stupid, I guess I am. Go on believing your fairytales of forbidden/mandatory haircuts, multigenerational prisons and belief in unicorns
This is the truest thing you've said.
They are objectively correct that Radio Free Asia has propagated false narratives about North Korea. That's a big part of what the organization exists to do.
Constitutional monarchy is pretty clear about what it supposed to be: it must have a democratic elected leader and a monarch that have very limited power. Not only that, to be a democratic country, one must go through an election with two or more opponents, so single party election with no opposition is not quite a democracy. While autocracy need none of those feature, and it usually ruled by unelected, and mostly inherited power from the predecessor.
With that in mind, we look at what North Korea is. It doesn't have a fair election with multiple parties(only one single giant coalition), that alone would disqualify NK as a democratic country, and it doesn't have a monarch as well. Thus it's not considered a constitutional monarchy.