Galaxy Brain: Yeonmi Park is a DPRK operative, and her goal is to destroy the US narrative on North Korea by pretending to be a culture war profiteer and telling ridiculous stories so Americans are more likely to question any story they hear on North Korea.
Like, at this point when someone makes fun of her and there are inevitably idiots who say "You're defending North Korea", those guys are mocked, because truly, that is the weakest defense possible. It's not perfect, but it's way better than it was even last year.
Not the point, but I believe the root cause of the 90s famine was due to major flooding. Sanctions absolutely exacerbated the situation into what it was of course.
DPRK was also highly industrialized until the dissolution of the USSR, so they exported heavy industrial products, raw materials, and some light industrial goods to the USSR in exchange for grain and other foods.
When that market collapsed, they were suddenly cut off from their primary food supply and had to rapidly rebuild their agricultural sector. Which is why you see almost every new DPRK housing project build with greenhouses and small farm plots attached to the houses.
They always had the option of "re-integrating" into the capitalist markets, but they had seen what happened to other nations literally overnight when they did that.
The famine was seen as something they'd be able to overcome (which they did) as opposed to integration with global markets which would have had the same outcomes, but with their agency to fix it removed.
It's hard to "prove" definitively, but through like the 70s the DPRK offered a much higher quality of life than the ROK which was still under a right wing dictatorship. Hard to imagine, but I was shocked seeing photos of 1970s south Korean towns, compared to what a comparable Japanese town would look like at that time.
Yeah, ROK was an absolute shithole for decades and the DPRK was leagues ahead in terms of culture, quality of life, and general development until the US started investing heavily in ROK to create an alternative industrial hub in the Asian markets after the rise of Japan and a light industrial powerhouse.
There were constant protests and revolutionary movements in ROK during that time. One of the largest contingents for a long time was the unification movement that sought to abolish the dictatorship and unite the north and south. Something that the US didn't want so they allowed Rhee to live in America and installed a puppet republic that still exists to this day.
A puppet that was largely composed of the old guard of the dictatorship and served no purpose to the Korean people beyond silencing of dissent and destruction of any revolutionary movement through overt subversion (KCIA) or electoral capture by diverting revolutionary energy into the new "democratic" systems.
This reminded me of that Japanese man who tried to have a ridiculous number of kids with the end goal of using their votes to win elections
This is an entire subculture in America. It's called the Quiverfull movement
This was a big right wing “conspiracy”, for lack of a better term, theory around 10 years or so ago
I remember my dad going on about it, they all live in a super nice house somewhere together and they drop them off on the roads where they panhandle and make an inordinate amount of money. Then they scoop them up and go back to their big house.
I think they even ran some Bs stories on like fox back in the day
yeah my dad (the literal irl true brexit geezer - but even more racist) is still repeating stuff like that constantly, like i was talking to my younger sister once when i went out with her to get some snacks from the shops after i finished work and it turned out that he'd actually convinced her that there was a giant cabal of homeless people who organise together to leech money from middle class neighbourhoods and secretely all live together in a communally owned mansion or something
she's well meaning but just way too trusting of anything that my dad says
I remember a while ago hearing the statistic being repeated that the average person begging makes about 40K/yr in a major city. Seemed sus to me at the time, now it just sounds laughable.
Lol I think I heard that somewhere as well. Like that’s twice what the lowest earners around my are make, if that was true we’d have a lot more panhandlers than we do even now
The newspaper in the city where I grew up did a whole series on that ~15 years ago. It definitely got people talking about what a scam panhandling is and how none of "those people" are really poor. They actually investigated some panhandlers and found their homes, and since they weren't literally living in cardboard boxes that naturally meant that they were fine actually and didn't need help from anybody. Of course, if you knew that part of town (I do, I'm from the wrong side of the tracks), you know that houses in that area are shit and there were likely multiple families crammed into one small house. I specifically remember 2 of the neighborhoods they were talking about, and I knew people who lived there when I was a kid. Believe me, those folks weren't living high on the hog from the largess of strangers.
My dad used to say this but I thought it was a joke? He was saying it with the tone of a joke?
I mean maybe your dad thought it was so preposterous that it was funny as a concept? Mine was very serious but my dad is a dumbass so lol
I mean my dad can sometimes be casually chud-adjacent. He's very much conservative-minded in a lot of ways but not politically engaged. He does the "if you want to give to a homeless guy buy him a sandwich" type (and constantly brags about the ONE time he did so lol). So right now I have no idea.
The homeless could easily afford a home if they stopped spending all of their money on sharpies and cardboard
They say the homeless are super rich but live in squalor to avoid paying taxes or some shit. Idk how common this nonsense is in the west but it used to be a thing where I live a few years ago. Now its "poor should pull themselves up by bootstraps" instead.
The version I've heard goes like this:
My brother's neighbor's colleague has heard of a guy who lives as a hobo all summer and he makes enough money panhandling/collecting bottles for recycling that he owns a big house that he can live in without having to work the rest of the year!
The version of something somewhat similar I heard was "yeah my brother's college best friend's uncle studied [fancy title, eg medicine] with one of the homeless you see around campus, they were bright and graduated with honors but then something really bad happened to them and choose to be homeless forever"
Plus real stories like this: https://www.minutouno.com/sociedad/la-tragica-historia-del-medico-argentino-que-vive-como-indigente-y-conmueve-las-redes-sociales-n273444
something really bad happened […] choose to be homeless forever
How can you say these words so close to eachother and not understand how much of a "choice" that was?
The myth of the "choice" of homelessness is as socially harmful a take as it is idiotic.
I heard this story on a morning zoo show second date update segment. The girl rejected a second date because the guy was a software engineer who already made enough money to support himself but he moonlighted as a panhandler on nights and weekends as a hobby.
To be fair, panhandling is probably more lucrative than getting people to fund your open source npm packages.
they have no data, they just repeat anecdote ghost stories to scare each other and/or confirm biases
since the Civil War
their "Elder" ... who lives in the sewers
they will find out and make you disappear
my guy, this is just a Nosferatu brood from Vampire: The Masquerade
Ok, I was certain this was going to be a reference to some piece of fictional media, but apparently not, because no one here has figured out the reference. But are we sure it isn't one? Like, this is just a book or tv show or movie or video game plot explained weirdly, right? It sure reads like it...
Ok, alright. Glad my "this is fiction explained as though it's real" sensors are working. Thank god
It's probably a composite of a bunch of things from media. It's evoking the nosferatu vampires in Vampire: the Masquerade like other people have mentioned, it also has a similar feel the the Bowery King in John Wick 2.
The Hobo Illuminati is one of the dumbest things from that movie and I love it so much
this is basically a subplot in higurashi (although less homeless there)
:doubt:
The reality is that if something truly unbelievable is going on, the best way to do something about it is to contact some YouTube journalist like Boy Boy or something
Local news isn't going to bother with wild, unsubstantiated claims that the illiterate McHobo Clan controls the entirety of a local government when instead they can cherry pick some racist crime statistics or scare you about what your kids are probably not doing on them there tikkytoks.
National news just parrots whatever the white house tells them to say or publishes op eds from Adolf MacMussolinisburg III
Vice and BuzzFeed News were basically the only major "small stories" outlets but now they're bankrupt and defunct.
Nobody in the US or Canada pursues high risk, high reward investigative journalism but YouTubers and podcasters these days.
Vice and BuzzFeed News were basically the only major “small stories” outlets but now they’re bankrupt and defunct.
Vice alternated between doing the Babies Ripped From Incubators story that got us into Iraq in '91 and doing the Satanic Panic shit from the 80s, but saying "This is cool, aktuly". It was late stage Gen X counter-culture that never challenged more than vibes.
BuzzFeed was alternately better and worse, with some legitimate investigative journalism that kept getting people pissed at them alongside a bunch of tabloid and listical crap that couldn't keep up with The Algorithm's evolution.
Nobody in the US or Canada pursues high risk, high reward investigative journalism but YouTubers and podcasters these days.
There's no such thing as "High Reward" anymore, because media is so damned entrenched and calcified. The closest thing we had to serious investigative journalism in the last decade was Wikileaks, and look at the "Reward" Julian Assange got for his trouble.
By contrast, consider the modern New Media success stories - Joe Rogan, Barstool Sports, Substack - its all incredibly sterile and safe by comparison.
Going to YouTube or a Podcast isn't rewarding. Its just the only fucking way to get any kind of audience.
There was also just a generalized shift in "investigative media", where nowadays investigative journalism, what shell of it is left, is only valid if it's targeting Bad People or Bad Countries.
If it directly targets the Good Countries, like Seymour Hersh or Julian Assange, it's now propaganda for the Bad Countries.
There was also just a generalized shift in “investigative media”
I don't know if I'd call it a shift. We've always had spooks and propagandists working the "Foreign Man Bad" racket. Periodically, we'll have methods of discourse that aren't heavily policed. Whether we're talking about the pamphleteer era of the 17th-20th centuries, the early regional radio/TV era, or the early-modern internet era, there are channels of communication that have gone largely under-surveilled and controlled for centuries.
Its in these moments when investigative journalism can build up an audience based on reports of scandal. Whether you're Martin Luther issuing scathing critiques of the Catholic Church or Eugene Debbs and Vladimir Lenin stirring up popular opposition to capital or Edward Snowden tipping folks off to the dark underbelly of the US security system, cracks in the wall of entrenched opposition appear and messages slip through them.
But as soon as they appear, the entrenched dominant social forces seek to patch them back up again. Maybe they do that by burning books or maybe they do it by assassinating popular leadership.
If it directly targets the Good Countries, like Seymour Hersh or Julian Assange, it’s now propaganda for the Bad Countries.
Sure. And if you protest WW1, we throw you in prison even if you're running for President, for the same reasons.
Hard to say when the next cracks will emerge in the social ecosystem, but I have no doubt that they'll appear again and we'll have another spat of investigative journalism leak through. But getting news out there and building an audience are two different goals. And then monetizing the audience is another problem further removed. So how do you expand your messaging in a capitalist model, knowing that capitalists do at least have a very effective model for rapid growth and improved distribution models? Idk.
Yep. There truly is nothing left of western journalism. It's just propaganda and advertising. :same-picture:
Maybe it's a REALLY nice part of the sewer they live in, lol
this is what i would also believe. like some county seat in a county time forgot that is down 50% in population from 1970s numbers, where the land plats got damaged in some floods and nobody wants to fuck with the logging company's lease claims since the mines are all busted. and then there's this very extended, multi-generational family on 30 acres with their own water source at the top of the watershed in the back of a box canyon/hollow/"holler" in cobbled homes, shanties and trailers. maybe the patriarch has a nice old home. maybe they're tapped into some old mine's electricity.
[as a side note, i've seen really old, played out mines that were abandoned that still have to have electricity to run huge fans to keep coal dust and gas from pooling up and exploding / starting a fire underground. so sure, why not.]
back to the family. they were on the side of the strike breakers in the 30s and the 70s, so the sheriff and half the deputies have the same last name. and somebody's somebody is married to somebody connected to the closest state police barracks. maybe even a note in a safe at the governor's mansion that says "leave [x] alone." just enough rumor that nobody knows who to blab to.
they're doin' the dirt with pills and crank and whatever the fuck they want. there are rumors of exotic endangered animal breeding. all the county magistrates, the judge executive, the superintendent, the principle, and county positions go to the family and nobody makes a stink unless they want lose what little they have.
I know a crusty old dude who paid to have a fiber line run up the mountain to his homestead but still shits in an outhouse. I guess he streams vidya or something.
Edit: nvm he streams himself writing music in his cabin and hosts festivals where they stay up all night blasting music and doing shrooms. Dude had some of the stinkiest weed I’ve ever smelled. Straight up ruined my backpack.
In any town big enough to have sewers you can live in the corrupt officials will also be smart enough to launder their money.
Like the sewer hideout in TMNT 2, has like some old cable cars in it.
i mean you get all that tax money you gotta spruce the place up a bit at least
We are a week away from a post claiming this is what’s happening in SF hitting the front page of :reddit-logo:
