141–150 of 201 posts
I really wish that bill Clinton could have brokered a deal with china (right before NK got nukes) which would have done a two-pronged invasion with the assurances that China would control all of NK as a direct puppet state. A Chinese direct puppet state would be far superior to the current situation.
That was harrowing. There were a couple things I didn't understand: 1. What changed about China's surveillance systems or procedures to make them ~20x more effective at catching refugees in a couple years? 2. There's a bit about how North Korean refugees can apply for asylum in South Korea. I was under the impression (from Barbara Demick's book Nothing to Envy ) that all North Koreans are more or less granted asylum…
Recently read the book Escape from camp 13 I think it gives a good insight how life is in North Korea can recommend it
Any details you can share? Sounds interesting, but I probably won't get around to reading it.
I'm not saying North Korea is a paradise or anything, but the country is technically still at war with the South Korea, which is heavily backed by the US. I wonder how much can be trusted from a NY Times(a US media company) article written by the "Seoul bureau chief for The New York Times".
It’s also a country where the people are indoctrinated to believe their great leader is born under a double rainbow and descended straight from heaven, didn’t defecate ever, learnt to walk aged 3 weeks (yup) and to speak 5 weeks later at 8 weeks (yup), wrote 1500 books over 3 years, along with 6 operas (the bestest in the history of music, no less), and scored a 38 under par with 11 holes in one on the one and only N…
Doesn't sound too much different from countries where the people are indoctrinated to believe their leader was born from a virgin, doesn't it? You'll say the difference is 2000 years into the history, so, we just need to give NK ~1925 more years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a conversation about COVID. It's one about contact tracing. And yes I think that evidence should always be required when talking about potential tools for such mass surveillance. "It makes sense" isn't really proof for anything, as the last pandemic has proven times and times again. For example here in Quebec, contact tracing apps and tracking location of everyone with covid has had pretty much no measurable…
Contact tracing (contact investigation, etc.) is a standard practice in public health. In tuberculosis control where I got my start, it's what we do for any active case of TB we identify - we find the people who may have been exposed and widen the circle as necessary. It's also critical for STDs. The only difference with COVID was the scale, not the methodology. There is an argument that if the disease is everywhere,…
The entire effort, using essentially every technology applied, was useless.
It was for many reasons, but primarily because the asymptomatic rate was very, very high, that there was no way to actually trace anything. Where or who you got Covid from was pure speculation for a majority of positive cases.
Scales and rates matter. With TB you have a very high fidelity, testable, slow spreading causal chain. Which is why TB tracing programs are effective, and good public health policy.
Our national Covid policies were ineffective, to say the least.
I'm not saying North Korea is a paradise or anything, but the country is technically still at war with the South Korea, which is heavily backed by the US. I wonder how much can be trusted from a NY Times(a US media company) article written by the "Seoul bureau chief for The New York Times".
North Korea exists because 5 years after the US liberated China from Japanese oppression, the communist Chinese declared war against the US lead UN forces in South Korea. Fairly wild, in retrospect.
[1]
> Estimates of the death toll vary. Historians and experts on the Korean War estimate that the full total ranges from at least 60,000–110,000 (Kim Dong-choon, who stated that this was likely a very conservative estimate) to 200,000 (Park Myung-lim).
> The massacre was committed by the government forces of president Syngman Rhee and falsely blamed on the communists led by North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. The South Korean government made efforts to conceal the massacre for four decades. Survivors were forbidden by the government from revealing it, under threat of being treated as communist sympathizers; public revelation carried with it the threat of torture and death.
Moreover, the Chinese did not enter the war until UN forces had driven all the way to the Manchurian border, along with regular "accidental" cross-border air attacks. MacArthur, Kai-shek, and Rhee all fully desired war with China and were hoping to escalate the conflict.
I've posted these quotes before, copied below:
[2]
> In the fall of 1946, the US military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing "strong-arm" methods had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism, and only 14 percent capitalism. [...]
> Chung Koo-Hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers' attitude: "The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated." [...]
> Seventy of the 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.
> In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policeman, and the US military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.
> American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood, spending much of 1947 in a village west of Seoul, watched as police carried young men off to jail by the truckload. A "mantle of fear" had fallen over once peaceful valleys, he wrote. The word "communist," he said, "seemed to mean 'just any young man of a village.'" On August 7, 1947, the US military government outlawed the southern communists, the Korean Worker's Party. Denied a peaceful political route, more and more leftist militants chose an armed struggle for power.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre
[2] - quotes from The Bridge at No Gun Ri
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising (note that this was in 1980, under a different dictator that the US also backed)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the surveillance system got much more sophisticated but for anyone wondering what china's surveillance system was like before the pandemic, I stayed in China three times for a total of about a month and a half in the 6 months before the pandemic. When you get to the airport, you will likely notice the abundance of cameras, including paths which take you right under overhead cameras. Your photo will be t…
Your bit about taxis seems hard to believe. I haven't been in China in around 15 years, but there are still tons of foreigners visiting China for business reasons, and they need to get around. Requiring them to jump through these sorts of hoops to merely ride in a taxi seems a bit unbelievable. Granted, sometimes the business we were visiting would send a car to our hotel, but not always, and not when we were going o…
They're also way less convenient. Try calling for a taxi when you don't even know how to recognize a taxi advertisement, never mind finding a taxi company where the staff speak English in a non-major city. In Shanghai it's not hard, but try something off the beaten path and you'll seriously struggle. In fact, outside of Shanghai I struggled to find anywhere which would accept payment with anything other than cash or Alipay/Wechat (sometimes you weren't even able to use cash).
I was in China for business reasons, I needed to get around. Jumping through hoops was the name of the game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not the one insinuating that North Koreans are indoctrinated into thinking the great leader has magic powers. You should be the ones to present the sources to such bizarre claims. Jesus, the guy is saying people are indoctrinated into thinking the great leader "didn’t defecate ever". Do you really think North Koreans are that stupid and have zero biology knowledge? Or maybe, uh, this is just fake? Pure propaganda…
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/story-of-a-former... Yoyre like someone who thinks gravity doesn’t exist. Literally everyone knows this, they’re not stupid, they’re lied to their entire lives. There are tons of defectors who will back this up and you can’t talk to anyone in North Korea outside of carefully guided tours set up by the state
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. The article briefly discusses the impact of COVID, highlighting China's implementation of supplementary measures and limitations during this period. It is evident that having knowledge of individuals' travel destinations would undoubtedly assist in contact tracing efforts. However, as the article states it can also be used for malicious exploitation. 2. If your question is about why they go to Thailand instead of…
>It is evident that having knowledge of individuals' travel destinations would undoubtedly assist in contact tracing efforts. Any evidence for that? Actually, any evidence that contact tracing has actually had any benefits wherever it has been tried? I'm sure it helps at very, very early stages of a pandemic, and even then depending on which virus we are trying to trace... But I'd like to see actual proof that it hel…