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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

This makes me upset. Its upsetting because while yes, information freedom is a very important topic and needs to happen, but it does not trump human freedom. I'm not sure if this is a straw man or not - but how can they justify working with an entity that has such a horrid human rights record?

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Yes, definitely, we should not stand by while companies host their content in countries known to use torture to extract information, hold prisoners with out trial, hold prisoners with out charge, allow their leaders to execute citizens summarily, execute minors and the mentally retarded, incarcerate people at a rate higher than any other country on earth merely in order to serve as slave labour for the state and state sponsored corporations.

Even worse is many of the citizens of this 'republic' have been brainwashed by a compulsory education system that they actually live in a democratic republic.

If you think you can legitimately compare the living conditions, political environment, and human suffering in North Korea that with the USA, you might have also brainwashed yourself (it happens when you take everything you have for granted).

In NK you'd be lucky to get 1 meal a day. Over here poor people are morbidly fat.

And at the end of the day, you're not a prisoner, if you hate it here so much, you can leave this country any day you want to. But can't say the same for people in NK.

How is it that you think I was talking about a country other than NK? Is there a country other than NK with such a piss poor human rights record?

Generally when someone murders one person we regard them as a horrid individual we don't say their not that bad because they only killed 1 instead of 10 like that Ted Bundy guy.

I didn't say I was living in a police state, the country I live in hasn't executed anyone in 40 years, and we certainly didn't think it was a big deal to destroy our nuclear weapons arsenal, stop stockpiling nuclear weapons, or ban landmines. I simply said we should stop hosting websites in countries with numerous years of history of horrid human rights abuse. Imagine living in a country where as recently at 1960 that certain classes of people were forbidden from eating lunch with other classes of people.

I find your definition of police state interesting, would you say that NK would stop being a police state with different emigration policies?

Stop being obtuse.

And what country are you from?

Edit: Oh I get it, if you you don't say what country you can pretend they are perfect. Brilliant.

> the country I live in hasn't executed anyone in 40 years, and we certainly didn't think it was a big deal to destroy our nuclear weapons arsenal, stop stockpiling nuclear weapons, or ban landmines.

From all countries with nuclear weapon 40 years without death penalty match only UK.

Ok, then he can go to jail for a tweet.

Except the UK is nowhere near destroying their arsenal; in fact, they are trying to figure out how to replace their current missile boats. The country described by that line does not actually exist.

You're right! The United States is JUST LIKE NORTH KOREA! It's uncanny. Like that one time Obama starved the entire population of the country and proved his international bona fides by meeting with Dennis Rodman.

"Is there a country other than NK with such a piss poor human rights record?"

Sure. Germany and Russia to name just two. Several European countries in degree if not in sheer magnitude.

Fantastic - And I mean no sarcasm. Your previous comment was brilliantly written, allowing the user to draw his own conclusion. Except for that part 'incarcerate people at a rate higher than any other country' which gives it away...

> If you think you can legitimately compare the living conditions, political environment, and human suffering in North Korea that with the USA, you might have also brainwashed yourself

The parent comment wasn't comparing NK to the USA.

It was comparing the USA to every other developed country, where the USA ranks very poorly.

Don't deny them their straw man.

"It was comparing the USA to every other developed country, where the USA ranks very poorly."

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

It does?

Doesn't Europe have at least one violent ethnic conflict going on at any given time? Usually several?

Here's today's:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/at-least-22-peopl...

> It does?

Bottom of the list for everything that matters.

http://www.oecd.org/statistics/

"Bottom of the list for everything that matters."

Except for "first choice to which to immigrate", oddly.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.NETM

It's called "voting with your feet".

..and by capita it's barely 20% of Australia's net immigration growth.

U.S. immigration is severely restricted. The waiting list can be up to 20 years long.

If the U.S. had the same immigration policies as, say, Canada or Australia, you could add an order of magnitude to those numbers. Easily.

If the best example of current US performance relative to other developed countries you can think of is "killed fewer people than other protagonists in last century's World Wars" (which is essentially what your cited stats show) you may as well not bother.

n.b. I'm sure Rummel would grudgingly admit that the US is far worse than any other developed country for committing acts of "democide" this century. In fact it's probably the only metric in which a sane person could argue the US might have performed worse than North Korea in recent years.

Yeah, I rank governments that murder millions of their own people pretty low on the scale of "human rights". Sorry.

Edit: Most of those people weren't "killed in World War II". They were murdered. By their own governments.

> Yeah, I rank governments that murder millions of their own people pretty low on the scale of "human rights". Sorry.

You seem only interested in comparing the US to undeveloped and developing countries, which is not a useful comparison.

Why not compare the US to developed countries?

You responded to a comment that the US ranked poorly in relation to 'every other developed country' with an outdated casualty count implying the US government might have been less deadly to human life than Germany, Japan and the UK before 1945 (and also less deadly than a few non-developed countries since then). I'm pretty sure the same set of statistics points towards the US government causing more deaths than other developed countries since 1945, which is why I thought it probably didn't help your case. Sorry.

Yes, I take the long view when it comes to goverments.

I fully expect the current Eurozone crisis to devolve into bloodshed before it's over, by the way.

Trail of tears...

It is almost like the difference between 1984 and a Brave New World.

Ok, maybe not, but you can compare the two. The US is not getting better.

I wouldn't be so fast as to dismiss obesity. Especially when the culture is saturated with body images that are so far from the folks who are that size, and are so far from being able to easily lose that weight.

Assuming this is not in fact a reference to NK at all what is the execution of minors and the mentally retarded that you refer to?

i lol'ed

I'm honestly confused, are you talking about the United States of America or North Korea. With the exception of the execution of minors, it describes the USA fairly accurately.

He was probably wrong on that and meant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_juvenile_offenders_exec...

Correcting myself: "The youngest person to be executed in the 20th century was George Stinney, electrocuted in South Carolina at the age of fourteen on June 16, 1944. [...] The last execution of a juvenile may have been convicted murderer Leonard Shockley, who died in the Maryland gas chamber on April 10, 1959, at the age of 17."

Besides for executing minors/mentally handicapped, the US does all those things. Torture (waterboarding), hold prisoners without trial/charge (Guantanamo Bay), allow their leaders to execute citizens summarily (drone strikes), incarcerate people at a high rate for benefit of state sponsored corporations (drug war - privatized jails). I'm not arguing politics - I don't think HN is the place for it, but you should evaluate your perspective and how it might be changing how you view the world.

The US also executes people that were minors when they did their crime and mentally handicapped people.

Texas has executed people with IQs as low as 61. Google for Marvin Wilson.

If you are so upset about those issues in the United States how about you sign up to adopt some of the citizens who vote for them? We'd be happy to ship a few off.

Don't really know why or if they are doing this, but the PirateBay's primary purpose is to stay up.

If they are pushed to such extremes as to go to North Korea, then it's ultimately your fault, the citizen of a Western country, for allowing your government to take such drastic anti-copyright measures that ultimately lead to corruption and censorship.

Kind of ironic that Internet freedom will be increasingly achieved in our countries by befriending our enemies.

>it's ultimately your fault, the citizen of a Western country, for allowing your government..

Yeah, no. I didn't vote for these assholes. If you think even part of the nonsense professed by the MafiAA organizations has popular support, you're terribly deluded. I don't take kindly to being told I'm at fault for something I oppose and took every positive and reasonable step available to me to oppose.

I used a generic you, not you per se. My hat is off to the minority of people that care, but we are a minority.

> but how can they justify working with an entity that has such a horrid human rights record?

As pointed out yesterday on the Bradley Manning discussion, the US is starting to get to the point where it can't credibly criticize other countries for their human rights abuses, given what goes on in this country.

I don't want this to turn into a discussion of whether the US is worse than North Korea, but both have abused - and continue to abuse - human rights in abysmal ways.

Wow. I'm happy to turn this into a discussion. North Korea has it worse. There is no way in hell, you are going to convince me that the US is a bigger domestic human rights violator.

> There is no way in hell, you are going to convince me that the US is a bigger domestic human rights violator.

Good, because the grand-parent wasn't trying to.

Ah, I apologize. It seemed like the poster was making a comparison between the US and NK when he said that the US could no longer credibly criticize NK for human rights violations, and that "both have abused [...] human rights in abysmal ways".

That can be true. But that doesn't mean the US is on the same level as NK. Maybe the poster could have been clearer, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea says, "The total number of prisoners is estimated to be 150,000 to 200,000."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States says, "According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2010."

It seems like the United States is about an order of magnitude worse, even if you subtract the tiny fraction of US prisoners who are locked up to keep other people safe. And that's not even getting into how the countries' respective foreign policies violate human rights outside their borders, but I suggest reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War to start to get a handle on that.

It's not that the Korean rulers are more moral than the US rulers. It's just that they're less effective.

You need to compute this per capita for this to be the slightest bit meaningful.

WTF are you talking about? You are aware that you are comparing a ~300m country with a ~20m one, right? "It seems like the United States is about an order of magnitude worse". your own numbers prove you otherwise. And that's not even counting the proportion of them that are political prisoners (for posing even the tiniest threat to the regime)...

Using your numbers

USA: 0.71% of the population NK: 0.63-0.83% of the population

Taking into account population:

200000/24,451,285 = 0.0081 2,266,800/313,914,040 = 0.0072

I'd say those are roughly the same - it certainly doesn't support a claim that the US is an order of magnitude worse.

Comparing the actual number of prisoners in two countries isn't very useful since the two countries have different populations. It would be a little like comparing the food consumed each day by everybody in China, compared to the same number in the US. China will consume more food, simply because they have more people! You can't conclude that Chinese people must be 2-3x fatter just from numbers that don't take the population into account. Instead, you want to use the per-capita food consumption; in your case, you would want to look at per-capita prisoner numbers.

The population of the US is around 315 million. The population of North Korea is around 24 million. [1]

If we divide the number of prisoners by the countries' populations, US incarcenates .69% if their people. Assuming NK incarcenates 175,000, that is .71% of their people. These numbers seem similar enough, so perhaps we should instead look at prison conditions. By all reports, North Korea has significantly worse conditions. It's incorrect to claim that North Korea rulers are "less effective".

1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populati...

Karla Homolka raped and killed 50% of the people who fell into her power. Adolf Hitler tortured to death only some 10% of the people who fell into his power. Nevertheless, I think it is defensible to assert that Adolf Hitler was "a bigger domestic human rights violator" than Karla Homolka, since she only had three victims, while he had some eleven million.

North Korean rulers are less effective in that North Korea remains a small, poor, weak country; consequently North Korean rulers are only able to incarcerate 0.7% of a much smaller population. They would be much bigger human rights violators if they were able to establish control over a larger territory that included more people, as the US government has over the past century and a half.

How you could say that is an order of magnitude????? The US has an order of magnitude more people! Using your numbers and Google's population estimates, 8 per 1000 people in NK are prisoners, while 7 per 1000 people in the US are prisoners.

Furthermore, in NK prison camps execution--including child execution--is commonplace. Maybe that will give you a clue as to why their prison population isn't higher.

Grow a brain.

The wars that the US have been waging are fucked up, I agree, but we're talking about the way a country treats its own people.

I don't think the US is perfect, and I readily admit that it has a shameful level of police brutality, but NK is a completely different ballgame.

Non-police brutality in the US is still a much bigger problem than police brutality.

I'm disappointed at the level of your response.

That quote is out of context. 150,000 to 200,000 is an estimate of the number of political prisoners in North Korea.

There is no way in hell, you are going to convince me that the US is a bigger domestic human rights violator.

This in itself is a disturbing statement. So what are you saying, it's ok as long as the US is not as bad a NK? Very disturbing. In a modern society, in what the US should be leading as a shining example to rest of the world there should be -no violations of human rights-

I don't think anyone here is saying that what the US does is ok. But this thread is about North Korea, not the US. Why are we bringing the US into the discussion if not to compare it to North Korea?

Nobody here is saying that.

The US treats a lot of people very reprehensibly, but comparing living conditions in the US to living conditions in NK is like comparing a Mercedes to a pogo-stick.

I understand both your comments, I didn't bring up the US, other people did and I am just responding to that.

My comment is not about comparing anything to anything, it's about the throw away comments that "x isn't as bad as y so we're not doing too bad" when instead of pointing fingers we should be looking inward towards our own flaws. People in glasses houses and all that.

(Yes yes, it's still not as bad a NK but you should still try to fix these issues)

The point of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5320630 was to address the fact that you were putting words in my mouth.

You said "So what are you saying, it's ok as long as the US is not as bad a NK?"

That statement is completely orthogonal to what I was trying to say. Nowhere did I ever imply that something is okay just because it's not as bad as something else. That whole concept is completely nonsensical. If Australia became as bad as NK and then NK grew to be even worse than it was before, Australia wouldn't suddenly be doing something "okay" just because NK has set a new bar for despicable. Hopefully nobody in this thread is so stupid that they couldn't deduce that on their own.

What I was saying is that you're a complete asshole if you think the US is "like NK". That sort of comparison is completely inane and extremely insensitive to actual North Koreans actually being executed because their father was caught devising a plan to escape the country or whatever. None of them can leave. The US is NOTHING like North Korea and I wish ill will upon everyone who makes the comparison. I hope you all sit on a thumbtack or something.

The day no citizens can leave the US is the day I will acknowledge a similarity between the US and NK.

Everybody has the right to leave the US

Nobody has the right to leave NK

That alone says loads.

The most essential freedom is the freedom to disagree and leave. North Koreans don't have that right.

Oh well, that's just because US thinks it owns every other country.

Just see what they tried to do with Assange and Kim Dotcom.

They could've done that countless times with less public people.

I suppose having an extradition treaty with another country implies ownership, now. Thanks for having an enlightening discussion!

The treaty only work when their actions constitute a crime on their resident country. In both cases this is not true.

This didn't stop US from bullying NZ and UK. NZ police even acted unlawfully because of this bullying.

"Everybody has the right to leave the US"

Like all generalisations (even this one) that is completely incorrect. I believe there are a lot of people in US custody who are denied that right?

I'm not saying they shouldn't be where they are, or that they should have the right to leave, but your blanket statement is wrong.

Also see Dmitry Sklyarov for an example of when stepping on the wrong corporate toes can get you into all sorts of trouble in the USA.

"I believe there are a lot of people in US custody who are denied that right?"

Like in every other country? This is pretty much a given, so I generalized within obvious constraints.

"Also see Dmitry Sklyarov"

Yes, that's very bad

So everyone can leave except the people we say can't leave?

I know, and I know that it's (societally speaking) a necessary tool. But many see the rate of incarceration in the US as a massive problem itself.

Note that I in no way compare the DPRK with the USA, I just think that talking in absolutes or framing them as opposites doesn't really help. We got a lot of problems in the west too...

> Everybody has the right to leave the US

that's not true, both in terms of citizenship and geographical position

Bullshit. Who would let them in? How can they even afford to get out, if anyone would let them in?

Not to the extent of keeping thousands of prisoners in Holocaust-like conditions, I think.

US prisons are no place for civilized people.

>I don't want this to turn into a discussion of whether the US is worse than North Korea, but both have abused - and continue to abuse - human rights in abysmal ways.

Sorry, no. Making the comparison assumes there's some parity, which is completely misleading.

In a different context, it's about as outlandish as claiming the space shuttle is really no different from the wright flyer. After all, both are capable of flight.

I think this can help you understand their mentality, PRQ, the hosting company behind TPB, have hosted pedophiles.

I don't know if they still do because I haven't kept track, but they did for sure host pedophile message boards in 2005-2006 where pedophiles discussed things like raising children for sex.

Why? I can only guess that it's because they believe in freedom of speech over everything else.

Do you think child raping pedophiles will stop raping children if they can't host their boards at PRQ?

Just because something will continue to occur does not justify your contribution to it occurring.

No, but it means they aren't choosing freedom of speech over child abuse, like GP was insinuating.

And I find the accusation of supporting child abuse rather unfair, unless one plans to accuse Tor and Freenet node operators (like me) of the same; after all, we all know actual child porn, not just talk, probably goes through our machine. The obfuscation just offloads our moral dillemas, it doesn't change the facts.

I see it like this.

Anyone can have freedom of speech, but it's up to the people if they want to listen.

If a pedophile started preaching their beliefs in town square to a group of people, it wouldn't be long before they would be run out of town or beat up.

The same goes for any services offered to people who's ideology you don't agree with.

The primary function that the Pirate Bay serves is to illegitimately take other people's work and give it away for free - ohh, while displaying ads.

Why would you hold them up to a higher standard?

Yeah, not like those social networks or anything.

I feel the same way. I personally think there have to be priorities in life and they might have lost some perspective about things here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/survivors-liken-north-korean-...

http://www.fastcompany.com/3006452/fast-feed/north-koreas-co...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea

I don't even know how to approach the moral quandary of seeking asylum in a concentration camp. Am I supposed to be impressed by the Fresh Young DPRK? There is no opening of relations here, just PR. Have TPB truly been hunted to the darkest corners of the Earth?

In the end all this means to me is that I'm going to save the $65 that I was about to spend on a PB hoodie. Assuming TPB are paying for their NK servers, I'd rather not risking providing funds for lil' Kim's holocaust.

I agree. Comparing the right for free information to freedom of speech is debatable. But comparing it to freedom of individuality and the right of existence does not strike me funny at all. Joke or not.

Keep in mind that our news media reports only the facts that fit their story of "NK is evil" and don't report any facts to the contrary. I assure you without a doubt it's a lot better place than our media makes it seem. Sure, their undemocratic system of government is a bad one, it's a CVS system when the rest of the world has moved to Git, and they will be A LOT better off when they switch, but the place has a lot of good going for it, and the reports we see are almost always chosen not for their objective value but to support the one sided argument that our media has been telling for years.

To point to a specific example, yesterday I watched George Stephanopoulos interview Dennis Rodman after Rodman's NK trip and George made some comment about the human rights record and to back it up he mentioned that NK has 200,000 folks in prison camps. Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now.

NK has a bad system of government. Their human rights record leaves much to be desired. But so does the human rights record of every country on earth, including the US.

>Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now.

The US also has 13 times the population. And conditions in US prisons are not comparable to conditions in North Korean prisons.

Bull. Shit.

North Korea is a totalitarian hell hole where there has been an ongoing holocaust of citizens for 6 decades.

And the entire western hemisphere is an imperialist hell hole where there has been an ongoing holocaust of (native/indigenous) citizens for 6 centuries.

  | Rodman's NK trip

If you ever bother to read about any of these accounts, they are all practically cookie-cutter. NK visits are practically on rails. It's not definitive proof of anything, but neither is the lack of visits to NK producing 'smoking gun' photos from prison camps.

  | Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with
  | 2.2 million people in prison right now.

1. The US doesn't throw entire families in jail to punish the actions of a single person.

2. Your logic about the numbers doesn't take into account the portion of the population. The US is a lot larger than North Korea. If we translate those numbers into percentages, North Korea has 0.81% of the population in prison, and the U.S. has 0.69% of the population in prison.

3. As bad as the US prison system is, I don't think that it's reach GULAG / Auschwitz levels, which by all accounts NK has.

  | Their human rights record leaves much to be
  | desired. But so does the human rights record
  | of every country on earth, including the US.

That's like saying that GW Bush started a war in Iraq. Hitler started a war in Europe. They both started wars, therefore GW Bush == Hitler! My logic wins!

[ Note: Nobody wanted to believe that the Holocaust was real in Germany until the troops started liberating the camps. IIRC, there were rumors, but most people basically said what you are saying, though there was probably more out of disbelief that human beings could do such a thing. ]

You have some very good points.

Brief note: Rodman's trip was very different than most NK trips. He spent a lot of direct time with Un.

#1) Good point. I don't know anything about who gets sent to the prison camps in NK.

#2) 1/31 of the U.S. adult population is in prison, which is higher than 0.69%. If you were a black male, that number shoots up to 9%. If you were playing the ovarian lottery and wanted to optimize for not being in prison and could choose between NK and being a black male in the U.S., you should choose the former.

#3) Good point. I don't know anything about the prison camps in NK.

In general my point is, don't make decisions based on facts provided by homogenous sources. Gather your own sources, see things first hand, and make judgements and decisions based on your own findings. If you make decisions based on data provided by a single source (in this case the U.S media), you aren't making decisions at all--they've already been made for you.

Regarding #2, if I were somehow forced to choose between being in an American prison and living in North Korea, not in prison, I'd have to sit down and do some serious thinking and research before I could make a decision.

:) Good point!

NK has 200,000 folks in prison camps. Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now.

Per capita calculations or it is meaningless.

Exactly! That was the problem with GS' argument. He didn't compare per capita.

If North Korea has a lot of good going for it, I'm sure you can give us a few examples.

For sure. (And if you're curious there are some great sources online including one interesting account recently was Eric Schmidt's daughter's blog.)

- Millions of people who have families and I'm sure are pretty happy even if their government sucks. And this is all that really matters at the end of the day.

- Those wide streets look pretty darn cool

- People look healthy (compared to obesity in the U.S.)

- Those massive games they hold each year are pretty impressive

- I'm impressed they figured out how to engineer an n bomb (not happy about it, but impressed)

- I'm impressed they figured out how to get a device in orbit

- Hosting the pirate bay

- Seems like they have a decent subway system, which most countries don't have

- I thought it was really neat that when the power goes out in the subways, everyone is prepared with a flashlight. Smart populace!

Let me also be clear, I think the government of NK sucks! Like, they get the basics wrong. Very wrong. Democracy, capitalism, those things have proven themselves as far superior than their system, imo.

But I don't think there's some dramatic struggle between good and evil going on here. I think in reality it's a lot more practical.

I honestly cannot tell if this is satire or if you think these are actually legitimate points.

  | I thought it was really neat that when the
  | power goes out in the subways, everyone is
  | prepared with a flashlight. Smart populace!

Or you could just look at it as, "this happens so often that the people expect it, and are not complete idiots."

Putting stuff like "frequent power outages make public transport unreliable" in the "pros" column is why I can't figure out whether or not this is satire.

Ah yes Dennis Rodman is such a reliable source of information. He has to suck up to low life dictators. He's broke as shit! At this point Rodman is hoping to be anyone's lapdog just for rent money. There are people in prison camps for things their grandfathers did in North Korea. At least the people in the US had a trial by their peers for something they were actually were accused of doing.

I like that Dennis Rodman does what he does. He lives on the outskirts of our norms and enriches all of our lives by pushing the limits and exploring our options.

It just reminds me of Sean Penn kicking it with Saddam Hussein and trying to tell the US about how everything was cool and kosher in Iraq (just prior to the US invasion). Do you really think that if something bad is going on that a foreign dictator is going to openly admit to crimes against humanity just because some US celebrity shows up on their doorstep?

Entertainment is one thing, diplomacy is completely another.

you mean America?

on a more serious note, your country is pushing them to leave their own country. Where to go? To your enemies of course.

the justification is what they say, that if that said body is ready to mend its way, then it shall be helped.

Pirate bay has been offered, they haven't accepted it for now.

Perhaps it's as simple as... money?

Free movies.

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