Ok serious question, what is it about North Korea that causes a subset of HN commenters to leap to it's defense? Russia, China, Iran, etc receive a similar treatment sometimes but never to nearly the degree NK does, what's with that?
Guess I should include a "/s" next time lol
1. Extreme anti-Westernism, 2. Extreme anti-Americanism, 3. Extreme contrarianism.
The usual result is you believe that all the sources that agree about how awful life in Russia, China, North Korea and so on are lying because the uniformity of their reporting is so consistent. (The obvious answer, that maybe it really does suck there for a lot of people, is dismissed as propaganda.)
Surprisingly smart people can be paranoid enough to believe everyone is lying to them or there’s some hidden secret to the world or politics only they can parse out; it’s easy for such people to fall down this rabbit hole.
That’s how most wind up being a tankie or Putin apologist or whatever.
You can honestly have a pretty comfy life in the first two countries, especially as an expat. And at least with China, the brutality is hyped up to a point that it's disappointing when you arrive there expecting to be some rebel in some 1984 dystopia and find out people are happy and living a quality of life no different from Europe or the US. In some ways better (cheap cost of living, world-class public transport), and some ways worse (internet and freedom of speech is clearly restricted, but nowhere near the murderous levels of North Korea or even Russia arresting people disapproving of war. Just posts being blocked in 99.9999% of cases, like a heavy-handed version censorship you'd find on reddit but applied almost everywhere). Like a more relaxed version of the UK which arrests people for offensive twitter posts or teaching a dog an offensive salute.
Throughout east Asia, people really just do not care what others outside their family do and don't get upset about it. But because it's none of their concern, basically nobody bothers to march in the streets for it, and governments are slow to push for social change.
https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2019/4/21/fatherhood-fin...
> Today in China, gestational surrogacy is illegal for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. Adoption is restricted to people in heterosexual marriages. This means gay people can't have kids.
China lags significantly behind basically any European country in terms of gay rights and gay families and it’s getting worse:
https://www.latestly.com/socially/world/china-bans-gay-coupl...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna85528
Asserting people don’t care when the government continues to pursue obviously anti-LGBTQ policies is silly.
> Today in China, gestational surrogacy is illegal for everyone
That sounds less like a problem for LGBT people and one for everyone. And that's not unique to China. Japan and Korea don't recognize it. And to bring up Italy again, it's illegal there.
China really isn't exceptionally bad in any of these aspects. It's really just at the global standard. The US, mostly due to places like California, New York, and Massachusetts, is paving the way for this. A large portion of the US (red states) is kicking and screaming and trying to find ways to get the courts to strike it down as we speak, or repeatedly passing laws to restrict it that get immediately struck down by courts.
And again, Italy is happily pushing the opposite direction. The consensus in east Asia as a whole is "whatever. Who cares" (with Taiwan being the sole exception), which is at least better than that. But Italy will keep topping travel and expat destinations despite being actively more antagonistic to LGBT families.
My favourite kind of fan fiction about NK is... let me think... ah yes, when Kim Jong Un has had some family member executed... only for them to reappear a few months later.