281–290 of 324 posts
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate. Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
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We're talking about North Korea executing children because their family members escaped. Doesn't get more left wing than North Korea. Not a good look to deploy a stock reply without thinking.
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You can spell out Hitler and North Korea here. Meta has no power here.
Incorrect. Users are running autoflag bots.
Usually people who feel (or are) targeted are not 100% innocent.
And then to build a working hot air balloon that even looks pretty cool, entirely in clandestine conditions with improvised materials. In a museum in Germany you can even see a homemade twin-engine airplane that was planned for an escape attempt (that didn't happen, maybe just as well) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_DOWA_81 ). Just incredible technical competence everywhere, that fades when the need is gone, when absolutely everything you could want is just an Amazon order away.
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Yeah I'd be curious into how they acquired so much money
What I've read about the GDR is that money was rarely the problem. You couldn't spend the money if what you wanted to buy was simply not available (except maybe in "Intershops" where you needed to pay in Western currency, that was in fact very expensive). It really was a different system.
Had a chance to ask a Russian / Soviet historian how one could spend a million rubles in the late 70s, early 80s. He just shrugged and laughed about it. Almost no way to spend that much. Nothing cost very much and there wasn't much of it.
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We're talking about North Korea executing children because their family members escaped. Doesn't get more left wing than North Korea. Not a good look to deploy a stock reply without thinking.
North Korea is an extremely class based society. About as far away from left as it gets.
This true story moves us because it resembles much of human history, in which clever but powerless people struggle against morons -- morons who somehow gain control over a modern industrial state, then use that power to punish innocents who dare to assert simple human rights. People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?" Too many morons. Too…
> Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan. This is got me laughing out loud.
It would help if you could spell "Tehran". Then notice that in either place you can be killed for annoying authority figures, without due process or recourse.
> This is got me laughing out loud.
I suspect that by 2028 you won't be laughing quite so loudly -- or at all.
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>Ballonfahrt in die Freiheit Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle. This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
You can only move so 'fast and break things', when failure can land you and your family in jail or get you killed. That being said, the timeline is remarkably short for such a hardware project.
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Incorrect. Users are running autoflag bots.
Every day you make comments that are downvoted (and probably flagged) by several people... I think it's quite possible that the real issue is not "other people." Usually people who feel (or are) targeted are not 100% innocent.
It's not just my comments - you see something similar with headlines on the front page that contain certain names like El-n M-sk. They will accumulate hundreds of points and comments and then be cens-red.