I was walking into work the other day and hearing my coworkers talk about North Korea and how crazy oppressed they are and if you defect they kill your entire family unto 8 generations and I just had to keep my mouth shut and get my coffee and not talk about how fucking ridiculous an assertion that is on so many levels and how Worst Korea pays people to lie about North Korean conditions and treat those who don't like second class citizens, let alone speak of those who defected and then went back because they were so miserable
I like my coworkers, they are great fun to talk to and I love going to karaoke with them, but Jesus Christ I really had to bite my fucking tongue and not cause any drama, I don't need to get a reputation as the guy who stans Kim Jong-Un at work
Oh god I am doing a liberalism he's coming for me now oh god :mao-aggro-shining:
It's bizarre how many otherwise normal people think other countries operate on magic. Especially when it comes to the DPRK. They think the whole place is just starving peasants, soldiers, and Kim Jong-un. How that's supposed to be a functioning economy doesn't matter. Sanctions don't matter, the DPRK's history doesn't matter. It's a topsy turvy funhouse mirror of a country.
Americans will hear a news story about North Korea, declare "that's unbelievable!", and then insist on believing the story is 100% truth.
It's easy to believe other countries operate on magic when you've been raised to believe that your own country operates on magic.
invisible hand / trickle down economics / everything good somehow destroys jobs / all economics is finance and production does not matter
Even moreso when you're told from birth that you live in the best country on Earth and every other nation is a shithole with oppressive governments and living standards far below you're own.
anonymously print out Red Sails articles and post them in the break room
There's cameras literally everywhere, there is no anonymously posting communist propaganda in the break room
In Bad Country you can be stripped of your livelihood for political agitation against the oppressive regime
trip the power, spray black paint onto the cameras
this kind of hellish existence is probably why they are trying to make themselves feel better with tales of how bad it is in Bad Place
I try not to hit people with direct propaganda anymore and just get them into propagandists. Like IDaT, and then eventually I hit them The Haircut. Also. The Dollop or Citations Needed they might be into, etc.
Blowback series on the Korean War was very revelatory for me. I had no knowledge of that conflict beyond episodes of MASH.
Oh, yeah same for me for all the seasons. Even the Iraq stuff covered a lot of behind the scenes I was unaware of. I had no clue about the Exiled Iraqi royalty guy and all the crap he was involved.
What do they mean by "8 generations"? Like, if they mean the next 8 generations, that's not possible, because if they kill all living descendants, they can't have more. If they mean all 8 generations of ancestors, up to 8th cousins, then that will likely kill almost the entire population of North Korea.
I've heard several explanations of this. They think your descendants will also be in prison, because they think there are like arranged matings in Korean prisons where the guards will force a woman and man together, then the baby will spend their entire life in prison.
They think it's basically chattel slavery, forced breeding and everything.
I believe this all comes from exactly one guy's testimony by the way
So North Korea has two prison programs. One where they force prisoners to push trains all day, and one where they force you to have babies only to watch them die in prison. And they do this with 50% of the country and still somehow have a functional society. Wow
Wait. They literally refer to themselves as Vaushites? :kombucha-disgust:
I think it's "ironic". Or started that way. Funny how that seems to happen and then quickly become unironic
Meanwhile, there's that North Korea TikTok account that shows people having totally normal, enjoyable lives and all the comments on it are about how they staged every video. Western propaganda is something else.
https://www.tiktok.com/@northkoreanlife
Look at this wacky North Korean propaganda. Hard to believe Kim Jong Un managed to force all these people into performing as though they have normal lives and feelings and relationships.
edit: omg the comments. I said this in jest but it's 100% what the commenters believe.
The most ridiculous comment I saw when I first discovered the account was someone pointing out that a child was wearing a brightly colored jacket, to stand out, so you'd look at the happy child.
The obvious answer is that children like bright colors, but because it's North Korea it must be malicious.
Korean: "Here's a bunch of people on their morning commute to work."
Westoids: "Actually these people are just walking for this video because if they don't the government will throw them into camps where their entire families will be eaten to death by rats."
liberals when north koreans aren't living in a literal nightmare: :alex-supplements: "These are crisis actors!"
The North Korean brainpan evolved to only knowing how to please westerners. As soon as the westerner is no longer in their vicinity, they simply stand still and stare ahead like powered off animatronics.
Source: The KCIA told me
Westerners think every Asian exists to serve and entertain them, so suggesting this with North Korea makes it easy for them to accept
It’s insane to me that you’re allowed to openly advocate for political action that would kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people but if I say that I’m currently working on passing legislation that makes it legal to beat that specific poster to death with a baseball bat I’d get banned. At least I’m going through the democratic process of the legislature!
Anyway, anyone want to sign my petition
It’s fine if they live halfway across the world. Typical western mentality.
Typical of Liberals. Be kind and non-violent when protesting local issues. Foreign adversaries? Let's bomb and gas them out. The roaches deserve it.
Liberalism was cooked in the oven of colonialism. The violence against the other on the periphery offset by the domestic pacifism and idealism is baked in. Dialectics baby
They know cell phones need a centralized infrastructure to function, right?
Are you trying to bait an It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia title card? They do not know this. Now let's see what kind of shenanigans they get up to!
Smuggle in a collection of satellite phones, each with a $120/mo service cost, and use them to... uh... tell the North Koreans that they were being oppressed?
I want all the Vaushites to invade DPRK and go storming across the DMZ. Please do it, lead the charge Mr. Vaush
man I would feel bad about traumatizing all those conscripts that have to mow them down, can we just force them to get a job? (they would die instantly)
“Oh, haha I didn’t mean ME when I said ‘we.’ I meant you. I’ll be doing equally brutal jobs, like summarizing Vaush streams in North Dakota to maintain morale for the troops.”
Ah yes, the North Korean people yearn for a 70 hour work week
Just create a thread asking whether loli should be banned and these pedo libs will forget all about North Korea, these people are dogs and they have a similar attention span
Is it weird that I hate these people more than I hate outright chuds and shitlibs?
me when I can't find the :gotta go fast" sonic emoji :deeper-sadness:
as annoying as vaush fans are, they aren't going to try to kill queer people for simply existing
Plenty of people thought the same thing of Destiny and his fans, then one protest movement later he was calling for the murder of protesters by chuds
The only reason these people don't identify as chuds is for cultural aesthetic reasons, they find the earnestness of MAGA cringe, but it takes only one catalyst before online suburbanites like this begin howling for blood, granted my money isn't on queer blood, but the blood of Black people judging by their obsessive hatred for any form of black radical politics
They want to kill DPRK for simply existing, which is probably more likely to be attempted
A lot of bright NK not gonna go to SK, they're gonna go north to China. There's a reason why many NK nuke design look like DongFeng. Even if the smuggle smart phone, they could do it through China or even Russia. Don't need american slave like ROK
everyone who browses that sub should be turned into dog food
Come on, now, that would be straight up animal abuse. May as well feed the dog poison.
That’s what North Korea does with its prisoners. Then they feed the human dog food to the other prisoners because dogs don’t exist in North Korea
Do...do they not know how smartphones work and think they're satphones? Even if they're being used as an ad-hoc WAN you're easily trackble once BoAn gets inside the network (ie. Day one)
Also things are improving economically in DRPK at a massive rate, with China giving them favourable trade and internal production recovered from 20 years of isolation after the SU fell. People are generally ok with the leadership in a way they might not have been in 2000.
Natalie Everheart and Sera Jade are great Twitter follows.
Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul is mandatory viewing.
My Brothers and Sisters in the North is much less political, just meant to humanize the citizens.
Palestinians should be free but the ramifications of their self determination will probably have worse effects than oppression from Israel.
:stalin-gun-1:
Subscription estimates to mobile networks are currently at 20% of the total population using smart phones (what other phones are there these days?) with about 50-80% total network coverage of the country in 3G.
https://www.38north.org/2022/11/twenty-years-of-mobile-communications-in-north-korea/
This person probably imagines that only a few thousand mega elites have phones and everyone else is starving.
what South Korea has by comparison
There are plenty of stories of defectors from the DPRK who end up hating it in SK (mostly people who don't sell salacious stories about the DPRK) and want to go back, but are legally barred by SK from doing so.
Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul really does a great job of showing how reality is the inverse of what we're taught. People coming from the North to the South are detained, tortured, monitored, and utterly controlled.
CW: suicide
A scene that really stuck with me is the woman talking about how her grief over her inability to ever see her family again caused her to attempt to take her life, only to have spooks swarm over her within minutes. Dystopian.
