I have to say, I am scared. Very scared actually. I am scared of the grumblings around North Korea, the overwhelming and consistent negative media. This has sprung up recently (country scale timeline), over the past 1.5 ish years i'd say off hand, maybe?
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 :(
Very well, you get your wish: A war with North Korea is bad times for pretty much everyone involved. Seoul bombed into the dust, thousands of refugees crossing the Chinese border and a potential for a proxy war between the U.S. and (China/Russia/Iran). Nobody wants this, especially not the North Korean regime. For all their bluster, they are still begging for food from pretty much anyone who will listen to them.
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?
As long as they don't nuke anyone, 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.
The whole point is that they DON'T get to live anywhere close to how they want. The slightest dissent or disobedience is met with vicious punishment or death. They can't leave, even if they want to. Ongoing starvation is normal. They act odd at the football game because they never go to football games and have no idea how to act; most there likely were told "attend or die". If they "like" this it's because they at not allowed to know any options.
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:
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."
India has a policy called AFSPA, MCOCA, and POTA, that basically allow armed forces, not civil forces, to arrest, shoot, or kill any person without any trial, proof.
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.
I'm not quite sure how that answers DLays points. Care to elaborate?
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.
So you really think if they just opened up the border to South Korea and let people go as they please, NO ONE would leave the glorious nation of North Korea because it's how they want to live?
An adult's understanding of how people behave, and a parent's desire to give their children a better life...not a 21 year old's ignorant view of the world.
And of all things, you had to go to my profile, and adjudge me ignorant, based on my age. Well, I don't mind that. Some people are built that way to find illogical reasons to deny someone's opinion.
People here, of all the people, know better that wisdom is not based on age. It is rare at young age, but not impossible.
You're confusing "intelligence" and "wisdom". Wisdom is, without a doubt, based on age. It's something that can only be obtained through years and years of experience dealing with people, places, and situations in the world. While you may have more intelligence than an 80 year old Korean War vet, I don't think anyone would believe you have more wisdom.
and who exactly adjudged that, that they don't have this right? You? Me? Media? After having seen, what is the policy with foreign journalist? Do you say that any media report is 100% free of bias?
And I think, I said it clearly, that what is the proof of, that right being taken away is something NK's want to fight for? even if what nodata said is true, that it is indeed being taken away.
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?
No one is attacking you personally here. You have simply said some misguided accusations about a country whose history you clearly have not read very much about. That is fine, we all make mistakes. Digging your heels is unnecessary. Perhaps this story would make you pause and reconsider your perspective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Dong-hyuk_%28human_rights_... One exerpt is particularly chilling:
"""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
"""
If only 10% of one of the accounts of the concentration camp escapees is true, then NK is in the same cluster as Syria and Congo in terms of treatment of its people.
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.
First of all, people, regardless of country, don't start wars, governments do.
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).
Sorry, that's nonsense. Did the people of the US decide to attack Iraq? Nope. A few people in government did. Yes, they are US citizens. Still, it is a ridiculous stretch to say that the people of the US decided to go into Iraq. Nobody asked me. I would have said not to do it.
Out of curiosity. What was he indoctrinated into thinking? That objective morality doesn't exist?
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.
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.
So this is not calling him indoctrinated?
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.
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.
and you both are saying that from experience? You know the elites, and the poor, more than what we have seen through the media?
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.
Your first comment wasn't so good. But here you pose a great thought experiment.
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.
People fear knocks in the night in the USA, Canada, even Sweeden now adays. If you're damn fool enough to run afoul of copyright laws. In fact I would say it's a distopia, if all I did was focus on every incident of homes getting bashed in and governments misstepping. It's easy to fall into a focus illusion, and whenever mainstream media gets involved, there's going to be a focus illusion.
Yes, you have a very good point regarding caste system. About first post being, not that good, well I got that feeling (haha) No shit!
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.
please read about Soviet Union. on elites, i recommend you "Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class" by Michael Voslenski. the soviet elites were screaming happy when borders were finally opened. and it's not like NK's lower classes have absolutely no idea what the outside world is like. it is well-known that many have access to SK TV shows and so on. speaking of the poorest, i don't think that you can get used to or love starvation.
Being a contrarian will make you look interesting in some cases, ignorant in so many others. You should be a little more informed about what's happening in North Korea and about how exactly their people have "every right to live as they want".
Dictatorships are not unknown to the west. We know though, that it is more productive and fulfilling to live in a free democratic society. True, people in dictatorships can claim even a high level of satisfaction and happiness, but it's mostly a case of ignorance being a bliss. You are dismissing the power of oppression in altering minds. We have that in the west too, the media, yet we believe its marginally better due to pluralism
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 :(