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East Germany balloon escape

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Re: East Germany balloon escape

#301

Post by qcnguy »

bregma wrote: post #227
Squarex wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak of Czechoslovakia, but from 1968 to 1989 there was no ideology. After the soviet occupation, there was normalization era, that was explicitly about compliance with the regime, not about believe in communism. I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange f…

Would that be possibly because while Venezuela and Iran have oil to extract and sell on the international market to enrich the coffers of the oligarchs in power, the only resources Czechoslovakia had was labour. The oligarchs could only enrich themselves by exporting manufactured goods like shoes and buses, mostly made from imported materials, extracting the excess wealth from the labour of others the way Venezuela a…

No, the whole USSR had exit visas but it was resource rich. Russia still is. It's not the case that the USSR's only resource was labor.

Re: East Germany balloon escape

#302

Post by fc417fc802 »

honzabe wrote: post #279
fc417fc802 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable. I agree. But it was not my intent to portray them as even remotely similar, hence the misunderstanding. Reading about things like the balloon escape and what surrounded it gives a very real sense of just how bad things were. So when you see just how much better we have it, the sheer amoun…

There is no doubt in my mind that your intent was good. > A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus What connection between bioengineering and Torment Nexus do you have in mind? The advances of bioengineering that pop up in my mind are mRNA vaccines and new cancer trea…

Nothing more than a fictional hypothetical for use as an analogy. Suppose advanced technology T requires broad societal effort to develop, for which societal mastery of advanced scientific topic S is a prerequisite. The analogy is nothing more than "first society achieves X, then it can achieve Y" where X is desirable but Y is not and both are fairly difficult.

I chose bioengineering because I was imagining something like the neural lace from the culture series except without having any "good" usecase.

The panopticon we've constructed may have individual components driven by a single personality and fabricated by a single company but a great number of such pieces is required. Even something like Flock that more or less stands on its own requires individual adoption by countless local municipalities. An awful lot of independent groups have to approve of it.

Re: East Germany balloon escape

#303

Post by 0928374082 »

nephihaha wrote: post #214
0928374082 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After all, they kept Paul Robeson in by simply pulling his passport, no wall needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson#:~:text=A%20month...

I don't need to go to Wikipedia to read about Robeson. Guy became a Stalin fan and crumbled mentally when he realised the USSR was not what it claimed. Great singer though.

I think part of what they didn't like was that in Old Man River, instead of singing:

  Git a little drunk
  An' you lands in jail
for Moscow audiences he sang:

  Show a little grit
  And you land in jail

Re: East Germany balloon escape

#304

Post by wolvoleo »

tim333 wrote: post #198
wolvoleo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes he was so cool. The plane is still in a museum. PS: He was dumb as hell too of course, and it was only due to incredible laxness of the air force that he was never shot down.

I'm not sure any countries really shoot down light aircraft unless it's an active war zone. They are not much of a threat and it's also hard to tell if they are there legally or not. You're more likely to get hassled when you land like the Ethan Guo guy ( https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04rql923kdo )

This was the soviet union in a very tense time. If he hadn't been shot down he would have been forced down. But yes that would have been a more likely outcome, true.

PS: Don't forget the Soviets knowingly shot and killed an entire airliner full of people. I saw an interview with the fighter pilot later and he didn't even have remorse for what he was doing, "just following orders". What a monster. But that was pretty typical there. Anyone with a backbone questioning orders was already dying in a gulag.

Re: East Germany balloon escape

#305

Post by js2 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #29
lukeweston1234 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2018 film is a really good movie, I would highly recommend checking it out!

+1 to this! I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.

> I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences.

The film The Lives of Others should give folks a pretty good idea of what the Stasi was.

Re: East Germany balloon escape

#306

Post by __turbobrew__ »

api wrote: post #246

Other than North Korea, are there still countries that are literal prisons that you can’t leave? It’s astounding to me that this was a thing. The fact that it’s so rare now is one of the quiet ways we have in fact progressed.

Cuba had exit visas up until 2013.

Re: East Germany balloon escape

#307

Post by CMay »

Squarex wrote: post #157

It is interesting how dictatorships for resourceless countries needed to keep the people in like east germany or czechoslovakia. But current dictatorships with natural resources like Venezuela or Iran let dissent go. It makes them more stable sadly.

From the reports I'd read and the interviews I'd seen, it's not that Venezuela let people go so much as it couldn't stop them. Many people who fled the country state they had to hide their property and children to prevent it from looking like they were not coming back when crossing the border. This might have been an agreement with Columbia, since Columbia doesn't want mass migration into their country. In some cases it was starve, jail, die or flee which is not the same as "let go".

Do they put the persecution and threat on so thick intentionally to encourage them to leave, so that if democracy did return in some way socialist ideology would be all but certain to win? I don't know.

Re: East Germany balloon escape

#308

Post by CMay »

nrjames wrote: post #9

Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/ [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774

They have the 2018 movie free to watch on Fandango At Home, which doesn't even require you to login to watch it: https://athome.fandango.com/content/browse/details/Balloon/1...

Re: East Germany balloon escape

#309

Post by freakynit »

mfld wrote: post #185
freakynit wrote: post #118

Was curious to know the calculations involved. Found them to be pretty simple. Vibe-coded an online calculator for future escapists: https://balloon-lift-calculator.pagey.site

You can compare them with the original calculations that can be found at https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/ballonrechner.html !

I did compare with the wikipedia article linked in this HN thread. The results were comparable.
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