Yea and I'd also note that this is supposed to be like fluent or near fluent speakers. If you include the number of people with at least some basic level you are probably looking at a number that's maybe nearly double that I expect.

I don't believe you have ever attended or seen a protest in a country that does not speak English. English language signs are common in both right wing and left wing protests. By common, I mean that they are gonna be present, if not in big numbers, than in small numbers, basically at any protest.

Why?

Over 150 countries around the world have English as a required subject in school. Everyone learns English now, and in a few generations the majority of the world population will probably be at least slightly bilingual in English. It is the global auxiliary language. When a socialist from Japan and a socialist from Brazil want to talk to each other, what language do you think they use? Do they think they just refuse to use English (the only language they have in common) bc America is the Great Satan?

To assume that any message written in English is necessarily directed to Americans is just absurdly Americentric thinking

Do you think these pro-LGBT protesters in Thailand and Japan are seeking American military intervention? Or do you just think they want the whole world to know what they are saying?

Show

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Yes. When talking about North Korea I mostly restrict myself to discussing and analyzing their foreign policy. There's just simply not very good information available on their internal domestic affairs and living standards. There's only a handful of things we can say with any definiteness, and even tho, only in generalities rather than specifics. Certainly there is not enough to make some sweeping claim like this image has.

It is true that the Yeonmi Park variety of defector testimony is distorted and full of bullshit. It does not logically follow from this that they therefore have zero corruption or that Kim Jong-un enjoys wide popular support, maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. Maybe corruption is low, maybe it is high. Maybe it's different in different regions, maybe it goes up and down over time. We don't know and you should be skeptical of anyone claiming absolute knowledge about this kind of stuff. I've talked to people with advanced degrees in this topic and this is what they say, there's just a lot we don't know. It's very hard even for people fluent in Korean who spend years studying this stuff to talk definitively about this kind of thing.

I don't tend to spend a lot of time googling around for sources for someone else's claims, there's limited hours in my life. The person making the claim can do the googling imo. If i try two or three times and don't see it, I just tell them to cite their source.

she was dirt poor, dying after spending the equivalent of like $3 on produce after emptying her bank account. The same article also mentions:

Yea, being dirt poor tends to do a number on your mental health, she seems to have been dirt poor her whole life thru, both in NK, in China, and in SK.

There are still serious structural elements here that caused it,

Did I say there's no structural elements? You might have heard about this idea before but we do in fact live in a society. There's always a structural element.

Suicide or not, this was done by Seoul.

Someone starving to death in SK in the modern era is extremely rare, by which I mean that it is so rare that it is literally comparable to deaths by lightning strikes.

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2023/06/12/national/socialAffairs/korea-yangyang-surfing/20230612183746767.html "From 2013 to 2022, seven people in Korea died from a lightning strike, while 18 others were injured, according to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety."

A death by starvation is literally 1 in a million, and in fact, given as a deaths per year stat, it's probably less than 1 in a million, given that the pop is 52 mil, and it is truly impossible to believe that deaths from starvation could be as high 52 per year. I don't say this to excuse it, but merely for perspective. I mention suicide as the likely cause of death because deaths by suicide, unlike deaths by starvation, are common in Seoul. I'm not out here to say that Seoul is a utopia, as I have made abundantly clear in nearly every reply I have given.

Not that there aren't also defectors, whether they are people just fleeing crushing poverty or they're wanted for having committed some heinous crime. You know, a whole range of things.

I don't even even use the word 'defector' because it is loaded terminology. I also don't judge people for what reasons they might leave NK. I wasn't there, I don't know, and I can't judge.

Anyways, my buddy got back to me, said he didn't know much about the case, looked into it, commented that her inability to get welfare due to having a husband she had divorced in China seems to have been a "weird gap" in the welfare system for the emigres, said that his first impression is similar to mine, that she could have gotten food, but mounting psychological troubles from a lifetime of misery probably stopper her from doing so. He also sent me this video if you care to check it out, altho it's an hour long and with only automated machine translated English subtitles . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-BGhLoMJfE

Again im not out here to say SK is a wonderland. There's abundant problems to criticize and I have made that clear. I came in to correct the record about OP's bullshit, not to spread bullshit of my own about SK is perfect. And to return to the point, OP said that SK "lacked even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity." I don't think it is fair to take a single death from 5 years ago, even one as fucked up as this, and then use it as evidence to say that SK "lacks even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity."

Ok thanks. I'm going to look into this deeper. Actually I just sent this link to South Korean leftist buddy of mine who I incidentally met over on the old CTH sub back in the day. I'm gonna see what he has to say, he is quite knowledgeable

I tried to google around for it, but any google search with keywords about 'starve' and 'Korea' and so on just brought up stuff about the Arduous March.

Anyways, this story is certainly very tragic and disturbing.

Here's my initial thoughts. This wld be a really extreme situation, very rare, which is why it's getting reported even all the way over here in the western press. The reason this kind of story is so incredibly shocking is because death by starvation in SK is just incredibly rare in the present age.

My impression is that this likely has less to do with actual lack of access to food and more to do with mental issues. What I mean is that looks something like a suicide. Obv starvation is an extremely rare form of suicide bc it is slow and extremely painful, but there are documented cases of people doing it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suicides_by_starvation

Notice how the people they interview talk about depressed she was, and how the North Korean emigre community were so distressed and shocked by it. There's just absolutely no way that the North Korean community there in Seoul would have allowed that to happen to one of their own if she had gone to them for help. There's also private (religious and secular) charities. This woman also came of age in the Aldous March. Those North Koreans who went thru that are some hard core people, they know how to find and get food if you are literally dying. Digging thru the trash in Seoul would have given honestly scrumptious meals when compared with the kind of nasty stuff they were forced to eat to survive in those days. She also could have given her son over to a government agency.

The fact that she didn't do any of that, combined with the well known fact that a lot of ppl in S Koreans struggle with mental illness and that she looked sad all the time supposedly all point to this being a woman with severe mental issues. That to me looks like a sort of murder-suicide. It's simply a fact that food would have been available to her, had she sought it out.

That's not to victim blame or say that this isn't tragic or its just her fault and thats the end of the story, North Korean emigres to the South face a lot of discrimination. Leaving North Korea is fucking hard, people don't do it unless they have a really good reason. She obviously lived a hard live, both in NK, in China and in SK. It is completely understandable how something like that could produce someone with mental issues bad enough that someone might just say "ok, fuck this life, I'm just gonna lay down and wait for death."

Unrelated note, but I can't help but chuckle at the guy trying to blame this on Pres Moon for not being sufficiently hawkish on NK. A lot of those groups are psycho and are kind of like cuban gusanos in their zeal for sanctions and hawkishness on their family and countrymen back home.

Thank you

Is Korea lacking in many respects? Yes and I've talked about them frankly itt. Does it lack 'even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity"? No. Frankly it does not. Those who think so frankly are privileged first worlders, as I alluded to before.

Basic fundamentals of dignity are things like clean water, food to drink, sewage, public transportation, education, healthcare, a warm place to sleep with a roof over your head, public safety, the right to an education, the right to join a labor union, the right to fair trials, and more. The exact qualities that we socialists praise in a place like Cuba or Vietnam. There are lot of places in the world that lack that. South Korea is not one of them.

to call tone a concrete statement with a truth value.

TBH I have no desire to be charitable about his 'tone' when he has said numerously blatantly untrue things about concrete statements with concrete truth values, like that slums from the 1960s 'are common in Seoul'.

can even starve to death in the middle of a city

Can you provide a citation about someone starving to death in Seoul? It is frankly nearly impossible to imagine how that could happen. There's numerous charities and such that exist like food banks and so on. And a lot of North Korean emigres also form churches for themselves and support groups and other kinds of communities like that. They have a pretty strong community amongst themselves there bc there's only ~30k so its really an 'everybody knows everybody' kind of situation for them there. I struggle to believe, unless you can give me a good source, that they would just let one of their own starve to death. Even in a complete worst case scenario, food waste is quite high and people just put their food waste in plastic bags that go right on the street no bin or anything. Not to say that eating out of a garbage bag is awesome or whatever but my point is that food is available to keep you going until tomorrow if you are **literally **dying.

I imagine a number of poor North Korean emigres are malnourished or food insecure. Starving to death? maybe back in the 60s or something. If its happened recently, that is an extreme one in a million kind of situation, not common.

I'm glad to admit being wrong if you can cite me a source tho.

Yea obviously they are lib and bourgeois.

OP is explicitly saying that it isn't something anymore

The phrasing 'spent it's first 42 years as a dictatorship and only recently began to liberalize' is a distortion. Very obviously so for 2 reasons I will enumerate

1 The country is going to celebrate 80 years of independence from the Japanese fascists on August 15 of next year. They liberalized about 36 years ago. They have spent roughly half of their existence as a dictatorship, roughly half as a liberal republic. The phrasing '42 years' vs 'only recently' was clearly chosen to imply that the 'recent' liberal period is vastly shorter. Why use an exact number for one but a wishy-washy and vague phrase like 'recently' for the other? bc if OP used the actual dates and exact numbers, it would not sound as bad as OP wants it to. 42 vs 36 doesn't sound bad enough for OP, so he has to be vague with his numbers. Why not keep it exact? It is a distortion of the facts meant to fool people who do not know when they gained independence.

2 'began to liberalize' is a phrasing clearly meant to imply that they have not yet achieved very much liberalization. They did not 'begin to liberalize' they have liberalized and they are a full fledged bourgeois liberal republic. (and obv that's not great but its far better than being a fascist dictatorship)

That the photos of them with the lights off at night are fake. They don't have enough fuel due to sanctions to keep the power on all the time so they often are forced to practice energy rationing and shut down the power for entire cities at night so that they can keep things running during the day.

you are the ignorant child who made this entire fucking post comparing SK to NK. Now all of the sudden it is invalid for me to compare SK now to SK from a couple generations ago? good fucking lord the intellectual dishonesty from you is astounding. I hope that you are lying about having gone to Seoul in 2007 and that you are actually a teenager (or that you were still a child in 07), bc there might be hope for you to mature into a person who values facts above lies.

lmfao

a nearly perfect utopia

I've been exceptionally clear in EVREY fucking reply I have given that there is plenty to criticize in the South. Are you so goddamn dishonest that you feel the need to lie to people when the evidence that your claim is false is present right here on this exact fucking webpage? Here's what I said

There are factual problems in SK like sexism, homophobia, corruption, poor enforcement of labor laws and more.

yes quite a number of people are unhappy due to capitalist alienation, problems with sexism and toxic work culture etc.

Work remains for them

many live in poor quality housing

There are many many many problems in SK

Do you just lie like this all fucking day in real life too? Anyone on this webpage with a high school level of reading comprehension can see that I don't think SK is 'nearly perfect'. I'm talking about the positives because you are misrepresenting the facts to make them look like dystopia. When I talk to some dumb lib who wants to use Korea as an example of how America is awesome bc we helped the south and they build a perfect capitalist society, or a Kpop stan who thinks its perfect, I will talk about the negatives. It's because I care about the facts and I do fact-based materialist analysis.

shifting the goalposts,

Good lord, you are the one throwing out random shit that has nothing to do with anything I said, like that they have a bunch of churches. And just to show how honest I am, I will acknowledge that yes it is of course true that they have a problem with a lot of people belonging to insane right wing reactionary churches. Happy? I'm fine with shit talking the parts of Korea that deserve to be shit talked. I'll throw in another for good measure, they have a serious problem with bigotry and colorism against those from south Asia, as well as against those who are not """pure blood""" Korean, and racial discrimination is not illegal. Toxic beauty standards against women also does serious damage against the psychology of women there, esp growing teenage girls, many of whom still wear covid masks, not bc they are afraid of the virus, but bc they are afraid they are not pretty enough to show their real faces. I bet you didn't know all that, did you? Because you don't know shit about South Korea (or you do know but lie anyway, either way doesn't look good for you)

And btw, pls give me a citation, a real fucking citation not 'prolewiki' for these claims (the fact that you are old enough to have traveled to SK in 2007 but not mature enough to realize that 'prolewiki' doesn't qualify as a reliable source does not reflect well on you) You are the one who made these claims in the first place, you are the one who needs to demonstrate that they are true with real sources.

• That your photo is of current day Korea (I notice you didn't address this claim at all, because you know you are damn liar)

• That 'many people' cant afford housing

• that shanty towns are common

• that NK has enough energy to keep the lights on 24/7 and the numerous images showing them to be dark at night are fake.

EDIT:

And you know what, to further emphasize my honesty, I'm gonna walk back my earlier comment about suicides. While it is not literally 'by the millions' and it is still true that it has trended downward over the past ~10 years. It is indeed super high, one of the highest in the world and it's fair to bring it up. I was overzealous in criticizing that claim , I guess bc I wrote that comment right before bed last night when I was tired and cranky. I can admit when I was wrong, can you?

never have i claimed that the rok has achieved absolutely zero progress, this would be absurd. yet you, the supposed beacon of honesty, simply invent such statements of me.

You said they lack even basic human dignity. IDK how they could have made progress and still be lacking in basic human dignity. Again, free health care, fantastic public safety, nearly complete lack of food insecurity, universal literacy + HS education, extremely low rates of homelessness, top tier public transportation. Is that related to dignity or not?

in the context of their material conditions.

I'm the one here making factual statements about the material conditions in SK, acknowledging the positives and the negatives. If you like to do materialist analysis, why are you giving false facts about what the material conditions there really are?

you on the other hand use right-wing liberal logic

my terrible liberal logic that free health care, education, the right to fair trials and a lack of cops murdering people in the street give human dignity? and that seoul is not covered in shanty towns? You better put me up against the wall

chosun ilbo?

Do you read chosun ilbo? I don't think you do.

if you are claiming the present Korean society does not deserve harsh criticism.

Criticize all you want. But do so with facts, not with lies. There are factual problems in SK like sexism, homophobia, corruption, poor enforcement of labor laws and more. Saying that shanty towns are common is a lie.

The only person who would say that SK "lacked even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity." quite frankly sounds like a privledged first worlder who does not understand how bad things can really get, and what a society that lacks human dignity really looks like. A society that is disgusting and lacking in human dignity looks like S Korea in 1960, or Alabama in 1860. Not like S Korea in 2024.

Homelessness in the US is pretty high. A country having lower homelessness than the US is an extremely low bar.

It is VASTLY lower to be clear. 1.7 out of 10k, vs 19.5 out out of 10k in America

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_homeless_population

1.7 out of 10,000, obv that number should be zero, but does it sound like it's true to say that 'many people' can't afford housing and that slums from the 1960s are still around and are numerous? Or does it sound like a distortion made to make it seem like SK consists of acres and acres of shanty towns like Rio?

I compare with the US bc most of us here live in the US and I dind't want to bother with finding the exact stat bc I was getting ready for bed when I wrote that.

The dictatorship is still easily, easily within living memory,

OP is obv using that line to make it sound like SK is still basically a dictatorship. It's a distortion of the facts at best, outright lie at worst.

It is not conservative. And yes I am a socialist.

They achieved real advances in human rights and human dignity in Korea. Work remains for them to do to move the country further along, but to talk like OP is talking here is basically to say that they accomplished nothing and that is simply false. I think spreading falsehoods and saying that leftist activists in SK have achieved nothing is disrespectful.

That country was one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world in the 60s with some of the lowest living standards in the world. They have archived a lot

first ever activity on this account

I've had this account since literally the first week this website was created, I just haven't been active for a long time. Part of the reason why tbh is that I dislike how many people on here like to tell distortions about Korea.

language right out of chosun ilbo

Where? Do you see me ranting and raving about how we need to bomb the North? Or do you see me stating facts about Korea which you yourself know to be true, like that the photo on the right is from the 60s or 70s .(which you tacitly admit is a lie bc you didn't mention it) have But ur right ig, prob Chosun Ilbo would in fact say that this photo is from decades ago, just like I did, and just like anyone else who has been to SK would say.

first of all, ive visited seoul in 2007

Ok, so you know that the photo on the right is from decades ago and that slums are not actually 'common' and you are in fact deliberately lying. Fantastic.

and saw the misery of gulyongma-eul with my own two eyes. ive seen that the bagkaseu halmeoni are in fact a real thing.

You should be glad to hear that half the population has since been relocated

https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220926000213

and ive noticed the inescapable presence of western evangelical churches and other similar monuments of neocolonialism. even in more "economically fortunate" areas of the city most people did not seem happy.

I'm gonna ask you to not bring up irrelevant points, please. Yea there are a lot of churches and yes quite a number of people are unhappy due to capitalist alienation, problems with sexism and toxic work culture etc. That has nothing to do with the false facts, exaggerations and misrepresentations in your post here.

but what i saw there was an incredibly sick and disgusting society that lacked even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity.

Really? free health care, fantastic public safety, complete lack of food insecurity, universal literacy + HS education, extremely low rates of homelessness, and some of the best urban design and public transportation in the planet. None of that has anything to do with dignity?

you also for some reason decided to point out that the colonial masters you bootlick have an even higher rate of homelessness than your "country".

I'm not Korean to be clear, I just speak Korean + lived there. 'even higher' lol. One of the things westerners often comment on when going to SK is how you basically do not see homeless anywhere outside of a couple places like Seoul Station. Very, very, very few people are homeless, many live in poor quality housing like goshiwons or ban-jiha (the half basements, like seen in Bong Joon Ho's parasite) but they are not homeless and slums are not common.

you then proceed to claim that the suicide rate in the rok has been falling recently. this is a lie: according to the world health organization and the korean national statistical office, the number of suicides in south korea since your supposed democratization in 1988

(a great "democracy" that allows for people like bag-geun-hye or yunseog-yeol to be president and for jaebeols to control domestic policy)

You have to keep bringing up irrelevant facts bc you know you are lying. Anyway President Park was forced out of office once her crimes became public knowledge. There are many many many problems in SK, but that is the system working as it is supposed to. The South Korean people are extremely proud of having forced her out of office. and for good reason.

Notice how I skipped past your line about how there is corruption in SK? there is in fact an issue with corruption in SK, so I didn't comment on that or call it a lie, because I have intellectual honesty and I like to tell the truth.

2010s: The average annual number of suicides was around 13,000-15,000.

I assume you know math well enough to know that the 2010s was ten years ago, and that I said the rates have been dropping (slowly, not fast enough) for ten years. The early 2010s was the peak.

furthermore you somehow manage to accuse me of minimizing the accomplishments of the 1988 revolution. this is an absurd fucking accusation that you invented out of thin air while somehow wanting to accuse me of being dishonest. on the contrary!

People who want to defend North Korea like yourself are constantly telling distortions and exaggerations about South Korea to make it look worse than it really is, to make the North look better by comparison. Defend North Korea on it's own merits, please, and with out telling lies about SK.

Yes I think it's disrespectful of their accomplishments and their sacrifices to say that the society they fought and died to create is "sick", "disgusting" and lacking "even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity." That is a fucking lie and you know it. Those people fucking died to get health care, they fucking died to get cops to stop carrying guns and to stop shooting protestors, they fucking died to get habeas corpus rights, they fucking died to get the right to criticize their government. The created a society where homelessness is low and nearly everyone has access to food, health care, education, and fair trials. There's a lot of work left to be done there, but to tell these blatant lies is very low of you.

They built that society out of their own blood and you are calling it disgusting. It literally disgusts me to see you say this shit, and if you said these bullshit lies about literally any other country in Asia, you'd get called an anti-Asian racist and for good fucking reason. But when its SK, you feel free to lie as much as you want.

EDIT: btw I really think it says something of your mindset here that you thought I was a Korean talking about my own home country, which I obviously would know more about than you, and you still felt free to insult me and condescend to me. Do you talk to other POC like that?

I lived in Seoul and I speak nearly fluent Korean

Photo on the right seems to be from like the 60s or 70s. Seoul does not look like that today, not even close. So that is a blatant lie number 1.

"many people too poor to afford housing' homelessness is lower in SK than in the US by a HUGE amount. So that is blatant lie number 2.

'slums like this are common' Absolutely not. There's only a couple remaining slums, and they don't look like the one in the photo there bc again, that photo is from like 60 years ago. There small number of slums (there's like 3) that still exist are currently being removed and the residents rehoused. So there is blatant lie number 3

'kill themselves by the millions' suicide rate is high but not that high and has been falling for over 10 years. Exaggeration

'only recently began to liberalize' 1988 is recent to you? That'd be blatant lie number 4, and to be honest it's quite disrespectful to the many south Koreans who struggled against the dictatorship for you to minimize their accomplishment like that

'the famous "no lights"-photo' there isn't a "the famous 'no lights' photo" there's many of them and its because NK often doesn't have fuel to keep the power running 24/7 due to sanctions so they practice energy rationing and shut down the power at night. blatant lie number 5

I'm not gonna get into your stuff on the left hand column abt the DPRK but suffice it to say, none of what you wrote there is known for certain to be true because of how tight the flow of information out of that land is.

Did you make this image? why do you feel the need to lie? Or do you just not know what you are talking about?

Can any one tell me why I shoudl give a shit if she votes no or present when the thing passed with massive margins anyway? It literally makes no material difference. If she voted present and a no vote could have blocked I'd get it but this??? This makes no material difference, and I want to restrict myself to material analysis

Jesus fucking christ the left is so fucking powerless we are sitting around constantly whining about this one fucking soc dem representative and her meaningless protest vote and talking about if her dress was cringe or not?

Who fucking cares??

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