167 points | by gnabgib4 days ago
Examples:
There is something deeply wrong with that. It's kind of like saying that every time you watch a documentary on the Holocaust you are happy the fate of the rolling stock that took people to Auschwitz. It is almost literally the same thing.
https://www.vox.com/2014/10/27/7073029/north-korea-gulags-pr...
There is absolutely nothing to be happy about when it comes to North Korea.
Such blast. Much wow!
> “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/3/9089913/north-korea-us-war-crim...
[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/35-million-dea...
1) is the person now banned? 2) did insiders get punished?
For this one, I worry for those insiders. They made their choice but I can’t imagine Kim is happy this got out.
From a distance, it seems remarkably normal to me. I have no desire to visit and certainly wouldn't want to live there, but it looks not all that bad.
If you meet him, ask him about the other stuff he can't document... :)
I caught up and was like "wtf can we do this? they dont mind?"
He told me yea, no problem go wherever you like in the parade just dont do anything stupid. So we did.
He was very clear about when we needed to hold back, but also knew exactly which boundaries could be pushed.
He's a regime supporter who brings in desperately needed foreign currency to help pay for the nuke & missile program and elite luxuries. Hence, given that he has talked about and posted this, he is almost certainly correct when he says
> Some media has portrayed the idea that North Koreans are embarrassed by the empty hotel or the length of time it took to finish, Cockerell said, "but I never found that to be true"..."That's ludicrous, and never been true. Absolute nonsense. It used to appear on the front of books and magazines, even when it was an incomplete concrete shell with a crane up top. So that's complete rubbish. It was not a cause for embarrassment." Cockerell said the Kim family simply put the blame on America, falsely explaining to the North Korean people that the delays were "the fault of jealous conspiracies" from outside Western powers...Cockerell has also observed how Pyongyang locals interact with the structure. "It's not like people sit on their balconies, watching the slogans go by. It's just part of the nightlife. It's a futuristic building to North Koreans, very modern, unlike anything else."
That is, this post is sort of a quasi 'submarine' for North Korean tourism. 'Come see our unique pyramid, which we think is cool rather than a symptom of totalitarian dictatorship (and pay us a lot of renminbi/dollars/yen)!'
Yes it's incredibly paranoid and authoritarian, but when you learn the history it makes sense why it is like that.
This is a country that was utterly destroyed by a superpower, who crowed about it, and which still threatens it.
I take it, monumental effort for close to zero functionality is North-Korean.
Except the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are standard supertalls built out of reinforced concrete?
> Due to the huge cost of importing steel, the towers were constructed on a cheaper radical design of super high-strength reinforced concrete. High-strength concrete is a material familiar to Asian contractors and twice as effective as steel in sway reduction; however, it makes the building twice as heavy on its foundation as a comparable steel building. Supported by 23-by-23 metre concrete cores and an outer ring of widely spaced super columns, the towers use a sophisticated structural system that accommodates its slender profile and provides 560,000 square metres of column-free office space. [0]
Even by using this special reinforced concrete, the towers are twice heavier than if they had used a steel structure.
This is in fact doubly painful, since the whole reason they built the Ryugyong is (apparently) that a South Korean company built what was then the world's tallest hotel in Singapore.
https://nationalpost.com/news/new-photos-reveal-inside-of-no...
2012
> Cockerell began running tours to North Korea with the company Koryo Tours in 2002 ...
> Ten years later, Cockerell met a North Korean who was working in China, and that man had the contacts necessary to arrange a visit.
Though the article has some later information:
> No doubt a source of pain for the Kim dynasty, the impressive 554m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea, which was finished in 2017, dwarfs the Ryugyong Hotel.
Back in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later Secretry of State was asked about the 500,000 Iraqi children who died due to economic sanctions and she replied "we think the price was worth it" [1].
The next century for the Korean peninsula is going to be interesting. Looming large is the collapse of South Korea. The current fertility rate is the lowest in the world at ~0.71 children per woman. What that means is if you take 50 men and 50 women in 3 generations you have 8 people. We haven't seen anything like this before.
I, too, find NOrth Korea fascinating but what I find more fascinating is how and what we talk about with North Korea and how it's never about the starvation and death we directly cause.
That distinction is nonsencial in this context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_in_North_...
Is that to be expected with frequent famines?
The people against sanctions want countries around the world to be forced to trade with North Korea. We don't have to be forced to trade with anyone. Free trade is earned, not a right for all the dictators of the world.
It's not simply "We've decided to not buy and sell goods from a certain country."
more info here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/us-...
What really happens with US sanctions is the guys we sanction all decide to band together with each other and to oppose and hate America, and eventually withdraw from using the US Dollar, reducing the US's influence. That may be good or it may be bad but its definitely not what the US has in mind when it sanctions a country.
Is this expected under regularly occuring famines?
Another way to put that is it's been 75 years since Korea split, and half that time North Korea has been much worse than south Korea.
Let's not even get into what that chart would look like if humanitarian aid wasn't shipped during those famines.
And, any way, the North Koreans started it.
North Korea infamously refuses foreign aid, do you have a source that describes more in detail the aid you're referring to?
https://www.wfp.org/countries/democratic-peoples-republic-ko...
Here's more details about the aid I'm referring to.
700,000 tonnes in 1999 alone, from one country.
My point is that economic sanctions never work against enemies. They only work against allies. Apartheid South Africa is the example that springs to mind.
Take the economic sanctions against Russia after it's unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. What have they done exactly? Russia is now basically a war economy. It still has energy exports because there's always a market for that.
Conventionally, now that we're in era of cheap drone warfare, harder to extrapolate NK/SK force disparity anymore. Risks no longer limited to artillery a few dozen km south of DMZ. NK building loitering munitions that can cover entirity of SK - SK has no longer have even modest strategic depth to hide high end hardware unlike few years ago. Ditto with Iran being able to credibly hit Israel. But that's more factor of tech proliferation.
Since the days of president Kim Daejung (1998-2003) every liberal South Korean regime tried to build trust with North Korea, including the controversial Kaesong industrial complex (housing factories owned by South Korean companies inside NK, with NK workers), which North Korea unilaterally shut down in 2013. Railway connections: severed by North Korea. Group tour of mount Kumkang: stopped after a North Korean soldier shot and killed a South Korean tourist who walked into a restricted area.
Basically, every time South Korea tries to give North Korea money in exchange of better relation, North Korea pisses it off, to such a degree that these policies (and their perceived failure) are now regular talking points by conservative South Korean pundits.
At this stage, there's not a lot of things we can try, unless we want to just give NK money and say "Oh please develop more nuclear weapons with this money, we don't care what you do."
NK literally and figuratively puts guns to the heads of their citizens and kill’s people trying to escape from the country.
NK “government” (quotes since they act like a gang) forces a cult following of Kim Jong-(Il, Un).
NK aligned with USSR and China and tried to out Communism. But like USSR and CCP, the centralization of power into a single leader squashed the good hopes of communism and turned into totalitarianism (absolutely power corrupts absolutely).
How about ‘we’ treat NK as a grown up country that has responsibility for the welfare of its people? “We” are not responsible for the starvation in NK, just like all the how all the villains in movies say “You’re forcing me to do <horrendous act>!” No, really, you’re doing it yourself because you’re insane and care about other things over the lives of people.
It is like the cracyness in NK makes people assume SK is sane.
The same cannot be said for a certain other famous country ...
The "coming sooner" problem with such low fertility rate is the bell-curve of your population by age. It starts to center on lower-productivity ages, more medical resources are needed. The system can't sustain itself with a thinner base on age.
That's not true. I mean we can look at Russia, which is currently under the maximum number of sanctions and doesn't seem to have any problems with food. It is leftist regimes, that bear responsibilities for starvation, not sanctions. Food is rather easy to grow (unless the communists forbade it, of course).
>strengthens support for it as those enacting the sanctions are (with merit) seen as the enemy.
That's also doesn't work in such way. Appearance of new enemies does not lead to the support of the more hostile and dangerous old ones.
Moreover, due to the sanctions, NK can't acquire Euros or dollars essential for international trading, and only afford to pay with its own currency. This means that unless there is equal trading between NK and other countries, any trade imbalance in favour of NK would mean the other country would get stuck with a lot of NK's currency in their banks with no real idea what to do with it. That is why China and Russia actually do barter-trading with North Korea (i.e. they mostly exchange goods and services, instead of money, when they trade).
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If you have hundreds of skyscrapers, an unoccupied one isn't crazy. But that's not North Korea. Trying to find equivalence here is ludicrous.
Trump saying the plane crash was a DEI hire caused event? What about WMD’s in Iraq? What about conservatives believing kids use litter boxes in schools now? We can take it so far.
I’m not saying China is the world’s greatest country or anything but I don’t think they’re as bad as the media wants us to believe.
