Pacific wrote:I met a North Korean during my time in the country, she had swum to freedom over the border after teaching herself to swim. She left behind elderly parents but no other family, they had wanted the best for her and encouraged her to go. Incredibly strong character and certainly not a dumbo, although one has to only look at how the government manipulates the un-educated in the
developed world (let alone in places such as NK) to see how its possible to easily direct people so that they solemnly act against their own best interests.
I've not met anyone who's escaped the country, but I've read a lot from people who did so, and spoken to a few people who spent some time there. I think the question of what people believe is best answered with a line I once heard about whether people really believed all the crazy stuff about Scientology - (paraphrasing) "you don't believe it, but you've got so much personally and emotionally at stake you just accept it'.
And in getting people to act against their own interests - the trick is to understand that attempting resistance is acting against one's own best interest. The contribution an individual might make to the overall resistance is very small, but the personal risk for themselves and their loved ones is great - being part of a resistance is a very brave thing, far braver that most people will ever be.
You don't actually need to keep the people fooled to keep a totalitarian government in place, you just need the risk of resistance to be high enough that they're more willing to just go along, and maybe that means accepting some nonsense, or more likely just not thinking about it.
Automatically Appended Next Post: You can say one thing is like another, without having been in existance when those things were around. For instance, people on this forum are notorious for saying something is very much the Nazis or Hitler, despite most of them not having been before 1945.
Doing so is not non-sensical as much as it is a basic part of historical understanding.
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whembly wrote:It's absolutely laughable to state that "Cuban healthcare" is better than the US.
Also, any stats that comes out of Cuba are vetted by the government and are not independently verified.
Actually, WHO does its own research. And the findings are interesting, as Cuba does do better in some areas, they have a greater ratio of doctors to people, and the percentage of the population covered with a basic standard of care is higher - very few are unable to access a doctor or receive standard treatments. This doesn't mean their system is 'better', because the US does a lot better in a lot of areas... establishing that it is the idea of 'better' which is really the problem.
As to North Korea and food, it honestly doesn't surprise me that they do better than India. Thing is, India's problem with food is entirely with distribution - it's a country undergoing modernisation and that means that a lot of traditional means of ensuring everyone gets fed are in decline, but the overall standard of living isn't yet high enough to overcome that.
The issue in North Korea, on the other hand, is that food is basically the only they have to export, so they export a lot of it just to get the funds needed to buy any kind of material products from the rest of the world. Which is okay most years, but it's a still a low-tech agricultural sector and that means the crops will fail every so often. And then, because North Korea has no built up surplus because it was all exported, and nothing else to sell to access food, the North Koreans either starve, or receive food aid from the rest of us.
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Grey Templar wrote:But was South Korea really trying to get into space?
Putting something into space isn't really a big deal anymore, it isn't the 60s.
Yep. A handful of countries have built up industries launching satellites in to space, for other countries who want satellites up there it's much, much cheaper to simply book a flight than build their own industry from scratch.
