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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

    > third-world living conditions [...]

I know that the phrase has gained an orthogonal meaning since the cold war, but if we use the original one it's funny to call what's arguably the only remaining second-world country "third-world".

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I mean if we're going by the original definitions, I think Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba are also still second-world though none of them are bizarrely neo-Stalinist the way North Korea is.

Are they really Stalinists? I would have guess Maoists, but then again, I wouldn't know the difference.

North Korea is Juche.

North Korea was generally more aligned with the USSR than the PRC. Kim Il Sung and Mao were on the way up at the same time, and were both students of Lenin and Stalin.

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