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My doomed career as a North Korean novelist

theguardian.com

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Re: My doomed career as a North Korean novelist

#121

Post by credit_guy »

morbicer wrote: post #118
credit_guy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we then conclude that freedom of speech is a privilege because people in North Korea don’t have it?

Yes it is if the context is global. Oxford dictionary: privilege - a special right or advantage that a particular person or group of people has 1st example there: Education should be a universal right and not a privilege. Globally, it's a privilege. Worldwide many girls can not get it. Or poor. Even clean water is a privilege on a global scale. Perhaps in USA as well, ehm see Flint. Language evolves. It's 21st centur…

There's a danger when playing with words like this.

Privilege is bad. It's something we, as society, should strive to eliminate. When you say education is a privilege, what is the message there?

I understand that the OP, and you, are trying to convey a message of this type: I should be thankful that I get X, not everyone in the world gets X, and I will try to remind myself that X should not be taken for granted. Where X is education, but it can also be clean water, or maybe just the right to live, or the right to not go to a reeducation camp if you criticize the "dear leader".

I subscribe to that type of thinking.

I just don't think that using the word "privilege" is the best way to express this idea.

Re: My doomed career as a North Korean novelist

#122

Post by justworkout »

Veraticus wrote: post #120
justworkout wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socially, nobody would care. Apparently China even grants marriage visas for same-sex couples, although locally it's not really possible to get married yet. But the vast majority of countries still have legal opposition to it so China isn't unique in that sense, although China is making clear changes towards by granting couples various legal benefits similar to typical marriages. It's ahead of some European countries…

This is untrue. See articles like this: https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2019/4/21/fatherhood-fin... > Today in China, gestational surrogacy is illegal for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. Adoption is restricted to people in heterosexual marriages. This means gay people can't have kids. China lags significantly behind basically any European country in terms of gay rights and gay families and it’s gettin…

Italy has is forcing apart LGBT families as we speak but nobody talks about that.

> Today in China, gestational surrogacy is illegal for everyone

That sounds less like a problem for LGBT people and one for everyone. And that's not unique to China. Japan and Korea don't recognize it. And to bring up Italy again, it's illegal there.

China really isn't exceptionally bad in any of these aspects. It's really just at the global standard. The US, mostly due to places like California, New York, and Massachusetts, is paving the way for this. A large portion of the US (red states) is kicking and screaming and trying to find ways to get the courts to strike it down as we speak, or repeatedly passing laws to restrict it that get immediately struck down by courts.

And again, Italy is happily pushing the opposite direction. The consensus in east Asia as a whole is "whatever. Who cares" (with Taiwan being the sole exception), which is at least better than that. But Italy will keep topping travel and expat destinations despite being actively more antagonistic to LGBT families.

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