North Korea's silent football matches
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I really am terrified that this is the western nation creating a causus belli. A reason for war. I'm really scared that in the coming years, the graph of human population is about to take an unexpected dip. Another nightmare in human history. Someone tell me that's not going to happen :(
According to experts on the regime, recent threats directed at Seoul and Washington were moves to shore up support from the military faction that was waning after Kim Jong-un came to power and fired a bunch of senior military officials.
Instead of war, you get to watch a country deteriorate into the seventh circle. Humans bred for slavery in concentration camps, people below a certain height relocated to remote islands and left to die and mothers executed in front of their children for being 'enemies of the state'. Does that make you any less scared?
Should there be war, Seoul would take some damage and NK would fold in about an hour.
EDIT: Explanation-https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5694012
You know that recent news story of three women rescued from 10 years brutal captivity? North Korea is that on a national scale.
Please peruse these hand drawn pictures done by a North Korean defector depicting what life is like at one of their concentration camp--at your leisure, of course:
http://www.northkoreanrefugees.com/2007-09-atbirth.htm
To add to that, North Koreans have this policy called "third generation punishment". If a person does something that's frowned upon, like complaining about food rations, he/she gets executed with the knowledge that three generations of his/her family will be tortured to death at the camps. Many times the family gets sent without knowing the original family members' crime, just that they are now prisoners. If someone is born there it is a lifetime of slavery.
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"I believe North Koreans have every right to live as they want, no matter how strange/hilarious/unmeaning/suppressed their lifestyle may seem to us."
Do you wish to retract that statement now?
Prevalent in at least two states: J&K and Nagaland.
Turnout in last elections was near the national average. Rest is upto you to adjudge.
He/she was pointing out that people the children, and childrens children of people who are deemed enemies of the state are not free to live how they want.
People here, of all the people, know better that wisdom is not based on age. It is rare at young age, but not impossible.
Now if a 35 year old were to come along and outright dismiss him because he's too young, oblivious to how bad that would look to a herd of hackers, then that would challenge your assertion that wisdom is earned from experience.
My moneys on the 21 year old
but hey, I'm 25. You know us young fools, right?
Do you realise that this article is highlighting the point that they _don't_ have this right?
Those who manage to escape the concentration camps and leave the country.
The reporting of our own media? which are not being allowed into NK, or if they are, are they being allowed the time, freedom to scrutinize? And if someone would think, that because they are disallowing media, they have something to hide, while indeed they have! but would you allow your neighbor to come inside your house, and get the truth about any fight you had within your family?
"""When Shin was 14, he overheard his mother and brother planning an escape attempt and informed the guards, which was something he was taught to do from an early age.[4][5] Rather than reward Shin for turning his family members in, the guards tortured him for four days to extract more information from him.[4][5] According to Shin, the guards lit a charcoal fire under his back and forced a hook into his skin so that he could not struggle,[12] and this caused Shin to receive many large scars from the flesh being burned and other abuses.[13] On November 29, 1996, camp officials forced Shin to watch the public execution of his mother and brother, and he knew that he was directly responsible for the execution """
Its reasonable to assume that the right to not have your malnourished six year old daughter beaten to death for stealing a few corn kernels is one that homo sapiens everywhere find worth fighting for.
First of all, people, regardless of country, don't start wars, governments do. The North Korean people will not nuke anyone, ever. If that happens it will be done by their government. Be sure to understand that distinction as you go forward in life. The hundred million people killed during the world wars died because of decisions and actions taken by governments, not farmers in Germany, teachers in Japan, taxi drivers in New York or restaurant owners in London. War is one of the most regrettable failures of our collective approaches to government.
As for the rest, read the Allegory of the Cave. Someone who only knows shadows does not know reality. You seem to imply this is perfectly acceptable. I think most of the negative reaction you are seeing is because, of course, this idea is deeply flawed and, at some level, really cruel.
I'll take this to an uncomfortable extreme. Suppose the town next to yours has a culture of child abuse. That's just what they do. Every home has a dungeon and kids are kept in there until they become adults. No education is provided at all.
You and I look at this from the outside. You say it is OK no matter how horrible this might look to us. I say it is not.
I know you've had criticism for being young. I won't go there other than to say that there are a lot of indoctrinated young idealists in the HN audience. In some cultures they come out of school indoctrinated and fail to understand the world and their environment until perhaps decades later. I'd venture to say people don't really get it until somewhere around 30 to 40 years of age.
Start by reading some of the Greek philosophers. I am not suggesting you take their writings as facts as much as I would propose they might teach how to reason and view things from many angles. I don't intend this to imply you are ignorant. Not even close. It's something from my own education I continue to find value in over the years and I thought I'd share that with you.
This is exactly backwards: There is no such entity as a government. It is a collection of people, appointed in some fashion (whether by others or by themselves), who make decisions on behalf of a larger group of people. It's people all the way down.
It's like a corporation in this respect. Google has never done anything, nor has Microsoft, Citibank, or any of those big earners on Wall Street. There are not bad corporations or good corporations; there are only corporations run by people that make decisions and take actions to which we then assign a moral judgment.
Making the mistake of assigning that judgment to a faceless non-entity and not to the people who are running it is the same as saying "The North Korean people will not nuke anyone, ever." If a nuke is launched by North Korea, it absolutely was launched by North Korean people: Those who gave the order to launch it. This is why different politicians within the same government can continue to hate, disagree with, and rail against each other, and why it's never so simple as "country x did thing y, they're all evil, kill 'em all."
If it were that simple -- or even if many people believed it were -- we'd have all wiped each other out very quickly after the advent of the nuclear bomb (if not before).
Speaking of indoctrination, there is a contingent of people who actively view this as child abuse. Your metaphor is a reality, one town (I'm sure more than one, actually) really does actively abuse their children in the view of another.
Do you still say it's not ok? Even when the one abusing that child is your next door neighbor, even when you don't hold the morality of this other demographic? We live in an antagonistic society, where we compete to produce, The weakest of us fall to the wayside, are we moral?
If that town abusing their children followed your law, they would of wiped out the atheists, for abusing their children. Not teaching your children about god is child abuse, after all, in one groups view.
The parent did not say that. You did.
I know you've had criticism for being young. I won't go
there other than to say that there are a lot of
indoctrinated young idealists in the HN audience. In
some cultures they come out of school indoctrinated and
fail to understand the world and their environment until
perhaps decades later.
I suppose it technically isn't, actually. I find that position pedantic though.
When you see a headline titled "Is Obama trying to destroy America?" you know exactly what their position is. They just can't swap the "Is" and "Obama" words, because it's slander at that point.
None of this is to be commended.
Yup. You got it!
What I am saying is factually correct. There are a lot of young brain-washed (indoctrinated) folks who post on HN. How can one tell? Experience. When you read some posts from the perspective of having lived a life outside of academic and religious indoctrination long enough you detect sometimes subtle cues that reveal it. These posts are always detectably different from those of someone with what I might call "independent" life experience.
One of my favorite examples of this is the "blame the rich" meme. It's a very popular meme. Rich businessmen (never women, BTW) are greedy, get paid too much and oppress the little guys. Such statements can only come from a position of indoctrinated ignorance. You can derail such ideas with a few well-crafted questions that quickly point out just how ridiculous a concept it is.
Indoctrination is a powerful force. People will blow themselves up and kill others because they've been brainwashed into a belief system that makes zero sense to someone watching from the outside. What most don't want to accept is that indoctrination isn't limited to extreme quasi-religious ideologies.
Since rikacomet is not indoctrinated, the suggestion to read the works of Greek philosophers was also not a suggestion to correct that line of thinking, and I doubt you were referring to the people responding to him. So it must just be an off the cuff remark. I like carrots. Carrots earned their reputation for improving eyesight in world war two, when the allies spread the rumor that they were giving their pilots a high dose carrot diet to improve their eyesight, as a cover for their shinny new radar system. After all, given the fact that they arn't related, it doesn't seem to apply to anyone really in this discussion.
Or maybe I'm wrong? Did your comment about indoctrination relate, in some way, to something? I think I'm missing it's purpose.
No, unless you are North Korean citizens for years, it is hard to grasp the truth.
Of course, we all made this judgement, by comparing our life, and putting ourself in what NK's seem like living in right now, and adjudged that we would hate such a life, so the actual North Koreans must be hating their life as well.
But truth be told, Many of the people there haven't even seen foreigners in their whole life, they are like a modern tribe, living in seclusion, we have to let their curiosity take its course, instead of pointing fingers at them saying, "look how boring is there football" "look at that, they don't have any fast food chains " etc etc.
To run with your point for a moment - it is possible to consider the idea of a caste system. Most hacker news readers would be disgusted at it, but you could imagine it being run humanely, and the people there would be content to live as they are.
Here's my rule zero of political freedom: do you live in fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night?
So long as someone lives-and-lets-live, they should never need to live in fear of an authority with a power to arbitrarily do nasty things to them.
To me - that's valid for North Korea, The Lives of Others, middle eastern dictatorships, black helicopters, people who live in gangland Baltimore, domestic violence, children, pets, farm animals and the cold war.
A British citizen was extradited to the US to be jailed for a crime that did not violate the principle of live and let live. That's an evil that's got long arms.
I guess I can see it as a limited dystopia - one of the worlds that Heinlein puts Job through. But I'd avoid using a word like that for this, for risk of overuse.
well, there is a need for scrutiny, as to why there haven't been a popular revolt, against the government, if people are that oppressed, as we are being lead to believe.
Your argument that "Given north koreans haven't revolted, might mean they don't mind", would be similar to saying "Maybe the jews didn't mind the holocaust, else why didn't they just overrun the prison camps"
You seem to just be trolling this whole article. There are number of accounts of how bad NK is from people who have escaped the country. There are a number of independent media groups who have made very compelling unbiased reports of what is happening in NK. There are a number of journalists who have been imprisoned while reporting in and around NK.
That coupled with the very public (false) propaganda that is produced by NK itself. Paints a very compelling case that NK is ruled by a single family that is controlling the entire population through miseducation (propaganda) and violence.
Could you show some evidence that suggests it is just media hype?
There's lots of room for talking about knocks on the door, and who fears who in Pulp Fiction too.
Thinking about North Korea is interesting because the media coverage is so slim. What can I trust? Maybe I'm just living in a personalised version of the Truman Show. But the closest we have to a knock on the door is fear of economic strife, and very rare but overhyped incidents of domestic terrorism.
> why there haven't been a popular revolt, against
> the government, if people are that oppressed
I assume North Koreans have to deal with twisted language as well, and they're not allowed to talk to one another to work out their ideas. Marxism is filled with weasel words like "permanent revolution".
Imagine how your brain would work if you had been born and bred on a diet of astrology, and taught that even discussing interpretations of what the people with guns say will have immediate, dire consequences.
Most of history is dictatorship and compliance. What we have at the moment feels normal because it's what we know. But really it's a special exception to everything that has come before, and the reality for most of the people who are alive even today.
I'm glad you challenged the post, I didn't have a bunch of these ideas an hour ago.
But the fundamental issues of a country are poverty, education, shelter, etc. Why?
Well, if you are hungry, a lifetime of servitude to psychological brainwash, would not turn the millions of years of instinct. If that situation worsens, people across North Korea would have been angry, even if they don't express it immediately.
This anger, increases overtime based on atrocities caused by the government.
But imagine, America coming in to NK, in the name of liberalizing the people, and causing more death, famine, and stuff in the process, which is not avoidable.
It would be too easy for the great leader to propagate, and even easier for the people to accept, that all fault lies with America and its allies, thus causing a failure of attainment of objective, i.e to provide people a way to better life.
The war against NK, if it exist, is at the base level. Organizations like RedCross, UNESCO, and others have to be pressed upon.
Not more economic sanctions, and threats to a society, that understands very little about your intention.
Ugh, this dichotomy of America as world police vs. cultures it doesn't really understand is juvenile at best.
The US drone strikes on Pakistani civillians are horrible, but if you want a lesson in brutality towards non-combatants, look no further than Pakistan during partition or the Bangladeshi independence war. The U.S. dropped nukes on Japan, but the atrocities carried out by the Japanese military at Nanking and Unit 731 are about the most terrible you'll read about outside of the Third Reich.
Morality, especially in terms of the actions of nations over time is complex and nuanced. Pointing out that the North Korean regime is fucking insane does not imply that you think the U.S. should roll in guns blazing.
> Organizations like RedCross, UNESCO, and others have to be pressed upon.
Pressed upon to do what exactly? Provide even more aid to the North Korean regime who will distribute it to citizens it deems fit to eat?
I applaud the sentiment here, but this belies either naivete about the complexities and long-term effects of supplying aid to developing countries (especially dictatorships) or a complete lack of knowledge about the North Korean track record.
The grim western consensus on the North Korean problem has always been to sit-tight and let the country implode and hopefully unify with the South, though whether this is likely to happen soon is anyones guess.
Then again, nothing more depleted uranium rounds can't fix because terrorism.
Those who were born there, lived there for years or decades, then escaped, grasp the truth, and have told others how it is.
It does not take any leap of imagination to say that North Korea is a hellhole. All it takes is paying a little attention to what's going on.
Read this and think again: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nothing-Envy-Lives-North-Korea/dp/18...