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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that most of the people who profess to believe that everything in the DPRK is hunky dory are on the extreme political left. The right does not have a monopoly on crazy people.

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I can't imagine these people are on a left-right scale. They seem to be perpendicular.

I've never met a DPRK supporter, but I have met Cuba supporters. They were white, non-Cuban, and leaning so far left I was surprised they could remain upright. (And I'm pretty far left myself by contemporary U.S. standards.)

I'm not a Cuba "supporter" but I do think that the quality of life in Cuba is not terrible, Western sources are not to be particularly trusted when it comes to Cuba, and that if we were serious about our opposition to authoritarianism internationally - Cuba would not be towards the top of our list compared to autocracies like Saudi Arabia.

This is very different from the DPRK.

I did not mean to draw a parallel between Cuba and NK with respect to the facts on the ground, merely with respect to the arguments that are advanced for them, which in both cases are based on the premise that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Everyone I have ever met who advanced that argument with respect to Cuba was on the political left. The political right has their own version of this argument, except that they focus their skepticism on "the mainstream media" rather than "Western sources" (but IMHO both of these phrases are clearly dog whistles without an actual referent other than, "any source that disagrees with my position.")

I feel like the "West" [0] is a pretty clear referent and is not synonymous with "any source that disagrees with my position." What is it a dog whistle for?

> conventional wisdom

Talk about unclear referents! I question the existence of a universal "conventional wisdom" on political issues like these.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world

Yes, I don't disagree with that. But I will point out that the literature of the groups that advocate these positions could objectively be called "Western sources" since they originate in the West, but obviously those are not what the people who produce those sources mean when they say that e.g. "Western sources are not to be particularly trusted when it comes to Cuba."

It is actually very hard to characterize a reliable source in a way that does not exhibit any sort of cultural or political bias.

There are massive amounts of Cuba supporters outside of the Western world. From our point of view Cuba sucks, but for a lot of people the basic guarantees that Cuba gives and the lifestyle is actually not so bad at all. Their government also isn't much more corrupt than in the rest of the world.

I'm sure that, unsurprisingly, if you live in a majority white country, most Cuban supporters would be white and left-leaning. If you were a Cuban that supported the Cuban regime and were happy, why would you leave, taking on so much risk and expense?

> If you were a Cuban that supported the Cuban regime and were happy, why would you leave, taking on so much risk and expense?

I met a Cuban like that. Simply put, to make more money. He knew the nuances of their system and was thankful for the good parts and the opportunities he had, but at the end of the day knew that for him individually it was more convenient to leave when he had the chance. It's just something that doesn't work for everybody by necessity.

I think he had a relative abroad that sponsored some sort of student visa, and he just never went back.

I have a 10% rule. ~10-20% of any group is gonna be a little nutty about something. 10-20% of the population doesn't believe in the moon landing. Similar with the flat earth.

They've always existed, just have microphones now.

In South Korea, the most pro-north political parties are on the left. With the most extremely-pro-north being the extreme left.

How is North Korea left? It's an absolute monarchy, pretty much exactly the other side of the political compass.

Horseshoe theory in action:

Nazi Germany (fascist far right) -> totalitarian dictatorship that invades its neighbors and executes dissidents

Soviet Union (communist far left) -> totalitarian dictatorship that invades its neighbors and executes dissidents

That is, empirically, where forms of government commonly labelled as "left" ends up when taken to extremes. North Korea is just the most extreme example.

Yeah, bullshit. What other "left" government ended up with a hereditary monarchy?

You're right, left-wing dictatorships tend not to be hereditary. NK is unique in this regard.

NK is really the odd one there with the hereditary thing and all. Almost all other communist "dictatorships" are really not that different from US style corporations. Basically, organizations staffed by common people jockeying for position. Sometimes climbing the ladder on merit, sometimes politicking but you get the point. Being family with the CEO helps proably as much as being family with the head of the politburo.

And if you think about it, how much of American culture in the 20th century was a result of things that came out of corporate boards?

> NK is really the odd one there with the hereditary thing and all. Almost all other communist "dictatorships" are really not that different from US style corporations.

Wait, are you saying equity ownership and therefore control, of “US style corporations” isn't inheritable?

I'm saying public companies -as in trading in the stock market- (and to a lesser extent private ones too) and corporate culture is very similar to communist government.

Schumpeter said something in the lines of "it's ironic that in democratic free-market countries most economic activity happens under hierarchical top-down organizations".

> Schumpeter said something in the lines of “it’s ironic that in democratic free-market countries most economic activity happens under hierarchical top-down organizations”.

It’s only even slightly ironic if you ignore that “free-market” is the capitalist euphemism for a society whose structure is top-to-bottom regulated (largely, through the exact shape of the imposed definition of “property rights”) around principals engineered and fought for tooth-and-nail over centuries by the capitalist (née mercantile) class to allow their heirarchical top-down organizations to replace those of the feudal aristocracy as the main driving force in society.

Social hierarchies emerge in even the most well intentioned left-wing society. It isn't really that odd in Vietnam, China, North Korea, all have developed new highly stratified social hierarchies. The alternative is probably unstable when extreme ideologies are imposed (which really can't survive without authoritarianism).

They declare themselves to be a socialist utopia. If you believe what they say at face value, and also believe that anything negative said about the DPRK by the Western media, etc. to be total lies like some of these people being discussed here do, then I guess you could think North Korea is a leftist paradise.

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