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Defecting from North Korea is now harder

nytimes.com

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Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#171

Post by l3mure »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #167
l3mure wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like saying Hitler was right because Germany is doing pretty well today and Russia isn't, which unfortunately would also not surprise me.

You know, not everything and everyone is a hitler-comparable situation. Now, there is currently a genocide going on in one of the discussed countries so if you were going to draw a hitler comparison I think it should be there.

> You know, not everything and everyone is a hitler-comparable situation.

Explain why the mass killings I mentioned do not qualify.

Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#172

Post by AbrahamParangi »

l3mure wrote: post #171
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, not everything and everyone is a hitler-comparable situation. Now, there is currently a genocide going on in one of the discussed countries so if you were going to draw a hitler comparison I think it should be there.

> You know, not everything and everyone is a hitler-comparable situation. Explain why the mass killings I mentioned do not qualify.

Your request for rigorous justification is selective.

"Rudolph Rummel estimated that the North Korean Army executed at least 500,000 civilians during the Korean War with many dying in North Korea's drive to conscript South Koreans to their war effort. Throughout the conflict, North Korean and Chinese forces routinely mistreated U.S. and UN prisoners of war. Mass starvation and diseases swept through the Chinese-run POW camps during the winter of 1950–51. About 43 percent of all U.S. POWs died during this period. In violation of the Geneva Conventions which explicitly stated that captor states must repatriate prisoners of war to their homeland as quickly as possible, North Korea detained South Korean POWs for decades after the ceasefire. Over 88,000 South Korean soldiers were missing and the Communists' themselves had claimed they had captured 70,000 South Koreans."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_crimes#North_Korea...

The korean war was a shitshow on both the south and north korean sides but the south koreans were still better and the US was still on the right side.

Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#173

Post by p_j_w »

peppermint_gum wrote: post #151
fndex wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you learned all that from other US/South Korean articles like this one, right? I watched a documentary about North Korean defectors that wanted to go back to North Korea, one of the many reasons was to be with their families. They never mentioned their family were imprisioned. And it wouldn't make much sense to want to go back if their family was imprisioned. Again, I'm no North Korean supporter or whatever,…

The reason why we learn about North Korea almost exclusively from the Western sources is because it's a totalitarian dictatorship that suppresses information. You can check out their media online and see for yourself that it's full of propaganda. We don't get tourists from North Korea because they aren't allowed to leave the country. We don't talk with North Korean people on the internet, because their access to the…

None of what you've just said justifies believing what the media or government say about North Korea, though, does it?

Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#174

Post by bitsage »

severino wrote: post #144
ornornor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 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.

The situation is drastically different. When considering your example, the source isn’t the leader himself nor are you imprisoned or killed for going against the narrative surrounding the leader.

Not a day goes past where I don’t see someone try to minimize commie atrocities…

Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#176

Post by avar »

classichasclass wrote: post #85
mardifoufs wrote: post #76

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 only difference with
    > COVID was the scale, not
    > the methodology.
There was a lot of novel contact tracing methodology during COVID-19, e.g. contact tracing though Bluetooth "contacts": https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#177

Post by srvmshr »

dtx1 wrote: post #156

I wonder how many more decades of suffering it will take for the NK People to finally rid themselves of their government. Or perhaps it's at a point were the indoctrination is so complete and the control of the government so absolute that it is essentially stable forever.

Human spirit of being independent and free is a feeling which cannot be caged forever.

Kingdoms and dictatorships have happened and fallen before. This too shall - when a certain breaking point is reached, where the human suffering will exceed the indoctrination that it will be impossible to ignore the living conditions anymore. It is a ticking time bomb on the Kim dynasty.

Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#178

Post by avar »

kijin wrote: post #74
karaterobot wrote: post #23

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…

The South Korean constitution treats North Korea as an integral part of its territory, currently occupied by hostile forces. Therefore, anyone from North Korea is automatically, and in fact always has been, a citizen of South Korea. It's not just asylum, nor "de facto" citizenship. It's full citizenship, period. There's a mandatory program that every refugee must go through, not only to get them accustomed to South K…

What's the legal basis for making their integration program mandatory if North Korean "refugees" are full citizens? What law would a person who refused the program be charged under?

Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#179

Post by mensetmanusman »

BoxFour wrote: post #73
mardifoufs wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Are you asking for evidence that knowing everyone’s locations and travel itineraries would assist in contact tracing? Because I think that one is obvious. Otherwise, I’m not particularly interested in having a COVID conversation.

We would also have to track all the animals that could carry Covid to be accurate. That's hard to do...

Re: Defecting from North Korea is now harder

#180

Post by amluto »

pantalaimon wrote: post #132
KronisLV wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 helps for pandemics like COVID. > Otherwise it is such an easy way to implement mass surveillance, that requiring very very tho…

I think this ended up pretty much useless. If you use the app in public transport, you would get a warning every day. What were you supposed to do with that information then? Most people just ignored it.

In an alternate universe in which Covid was very rare in a population (say 5 cases in an entire city), then contact tracing might be able to push ROf course, nothing of the sort happened in the US, and in a situation in which most of the population gets Covid anyway in relatively short order, the number of people getting false positive notifications per person protected from Covid was be very large, and the total benefit was very low.
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