Comment by ocdprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocdprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

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I don't understand why all this urge in the "west" to change the north korea ? Not only that you believe all the western propaganda against NK but you have no doubts that you definitely know whats better and best for NK. Yes, you have no doubts that the west should rob them like they did with Irak and "set them free" and give them the shitty innefective democracy which strangely works only to make the western rich richer and the rest rich enough to not die.Why doesn't the west mind his damn business ? Why this arrogance that you know what others had to do ? If the US/Europe is a paradise, why are the poverty/corruption/unhappiness levels so high ? Why are u still in denial about what's really going on home but u have no doubts about whats really going on in NK and China ? This is some incomplete and not structured rant but still i make a case that the west and it's cool kids are arrogant, doubtless and biased like hell and work involuntarily to fulfill their invisible master's plan (again and forever ?).

I guess you're trolling, but anyway. All politics aside, the people in NK are hungry. Hungry as in "I don't have anything to eat". There's no doubt about the fact that the Western World managed to get this right.

I'm not trolling. Even if the people in NK are hungry (but they are not more hungry then the poor in the west), this does not give you the right to "save" them and take their little left posesions in the process, because you know, US never saved anyone without the army taking ground. If you see a poor man hungry on the street and you give him food, that's "saving him" but if you take his home and take his belongings because you can "manage" them better than him and if you force him to work for you, that's not "saving" him. That's slavery hidden in the form of charity. Isn't it strange that US goverment never saves the real poor of the world (saharian africans - they leave their salvation to red cross and independent charity) instead somehow US gov. always finds some richer "poors" and if they can't be "saved" by corruption and bribery, they are "saved" by armed invasion?

  > I don't understand why all this urge in the "west" to
  > change the north korea

Going in and 'freeing' a country is never as simply as it seems. That said, North Korea is not in a very good situation currently. There is a very real temptation to 'swoop in' and 'save' them. The idea being that rather than waiting for (possibly) decades for change to happen (and all of the suffering along the way), we could instantly change things for the better. The problem is that this drastic change is tantamount to revolution, and revolutions are never easy or clean.

Assume for a second that the US was perfect, and we could somehow attempt to impart this to the North Koreans. The population of North Korea has under gone over a decade of anti-US/anti-West propaganda. A not-inconsequential number of these people are going to violently resist US/Western involvement in North Korea. Even if we were able to produce irrefutable proof that all of the propaganda was a lie, there would be enough people that would violently refuse to believe even the truth that was right in front of them to produce significant turmoil.

The US can't save themselves. US never saved anyone, they only changed regimes and took huge economic advantages from the chaos it generously created (include here the "saved" europe). US government + their corporate backers does not care about their own citizens, don't tell me they really care about third world countries. They want you to care because they need your approval to go to war.You get the illusion that the war is "freeing" someone and the corporations get their money. See Halliburton, Bechtel and so on. By saving and freeing others US actually is saving their corporations and their interests. Everything else is american propaganda which I have to admit, brainwashes more efectively and more people than the NK propaganda. You don't even slightly consider that you are disinformed by western media and thats a huge success for them.

Ah yes, it's so much effective than NK. Do you think you would be able to post a similar comment in NK?

The NK guys may not be right but that does not make the US guys automatically right. Today we approach the point when the main difference between China/NK and US/Europe is that in China u can't protest openly and say anything u want while in US/Europe you can protest orderly and you will be widely ignored (by commercially controlled mass media) no matter how much sense you make or if you will protest in a more "disorderly"(guess who decides what is orderly or not these days http://thedailywh.at/2011/12/19/this-is-all-kinds-of-wrong-o...) way you will be labeled as a hippie, crackhead, conspiracy theorist, terrorist, communist, islamic fanatic and beaten and pepper sprayed by the police like in China.Yeah, we're far much better in the west. We have the right to work and pay our forever increasing visible and invisible taxes.

And in the US, you have the choice to read things besides "commercially controlled mass media," or even to start your own newspaper if you'd like!

If people ignore protests, whose fault is that? The government or the people? And you know, there have been some very successful protests... the US didn't originally have things like the Civil Rights Act.

While perhaps your favored ideological points are not currently being heard by the people you think should hear them, that does not discount the fact that US citizens have pushed for all sorts of laws that have been enacted. To draw upon a recent example, a good number of Republicans voted against NDAA 2012 when they initially were going to vote for it, solely because of citizens contacting them and expressing their concerns. The very fact that that happened proves that, for all we might complain, representatives (and other citizens) do listen.

It might be hard to get people to listen sometimes, and we might see incidents like the misuse of pepper spray, but if you think that puts us on the level of China then frankly you're completely deluded! You do realize that in China you can be incarcerated for talking about democracy, and that they have their own party-appointed leaders for religions like Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism?

Your insistence on seemingly conflating "Rest of the world" with "The US" is fascinating.

In China they prevent you to speak. In the west they let you speak as much as you want but the state ignores you and propaganda machine covers you with noise. The european powers fear the referendums like hell. If still by some miracle some bunch of guys manage to unite over some slogan or message not tolerated by the state and put pressure on the state institutions in unauthorized meetings(unauthorized by the same state - duh conflict of interests) then the police kicks in and abuse and arrest everything that moves. I don't ask you to agree and praise some other regimes, I don't ask you to go somewhere else where it's better. I just ask you to see the bullshit and the hypocrisy of the west.

  > The US can't save themselves. US never saved anyone,
  > they only changed regimes

You're either incapable of understanding my post, or you're just trollin'. I'm not even going to bother continuing a conversation with you.

  > You don't even slightly consider that you are
  > disinformed by western media

This is the problem with your arguments. You're presenting counter-points (i.e. "western media is lies!") without anything to back it up. This has 'troll' written all over it. Why? You're not responding directly to anything that was actually said (e.g. what parts of my post are mistaken based on 'western media lies?'). You are also going out of your way to be as not specific as possible, just controversial (e.g. What is western media lying to me about? Everything? So when western media says that I need to eat to stay alive that's a lie too?).

The situation in NK is continuously presented in negative terms(lots of speculative numbers and information is presented as facts). The people "die of hunger" (and the media presents images with sick kids as if this is the fault of Kim Jong Il), they are oppressed and the immediate suggestion is that US and the world somehow has this obligation to solve this problem.They forget somehow (lie by omision) to mention that a lot of the hunger and sickness is provoked by the embargo imposed on them by US.The second lie is that the leaders of north Korea are crazy, and that they have atomic bomb and want to attack others around, without rational reason.This is a lie, they only threatened to defend themselves in case they are attacked (all this while they are surrounded and provoked by US and South Korea navy). If you watch closely, it's the same recipe applied to Iran and Irak. Present rumors about victims and atrocities, weapons of mass destruction, insane leaders and intentions of war as facts and propose an invasion if some vague terms are not respected by the "rogue state" all this because we have to defend ourselves right ? Did Iran or NK ever say they want to implement preemptive strikes like US ? No, but still they are seen as the aggressors here and not US which is all over them spying and making plans and publicly announcing that "nothing is off the table". And tell me this is possible because mass media tells the truth (we know in the case of Irak that mass media lied together with the Bush administration but now you want to pretend that was an "isolated case").

Are you able to consider North Korea's situation on its own merits, rather than harping on the deeds of the United States? Can't the Kim family dynasty be brutal and oppressive independently of the US? I think that they can be, and have proven it.

I suggest you look at the material that comes out of North Korea, from human rights groups and the like. The "rumours" of how life is inside of North Korea are backed by very credible evidence. Much less evidence exists to support the claims made by North Korea's government. Or do you think that there were actually celestial events to herald the birth of Kim Jong-Il?

This is ridiculous. In the West we have open discussions even in the "Media" about how much corruption and so forth goes on in the government. In fact everything you say is pretty common knowledge/cliche to hear on any Cable News network. These kinds of discussions could never occur in North Korea. Perhaps things could be better but you cannot compare this to a secretive state such as North Korea in which people believe their "Dear Leader" never had to deficate or urinate. You're hatred for the West is just making you miss a huge problem of scale.

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