Even worse is many of the citizens of this 'republic' have been brainwashed by a compulsory education system that they actually live in a democratic republic.
In NK you'd be lucky to get 1 meal a day. Over here poor people are morbidly fat.
And at the end of the day, you're not a prisoner, if you hate it here so much, you can leave this country any day you want to. But can't say the same for people in NK.
Generally when someone murders one person we regard them as a horrid individual we don't say their not that bad because they only killed 1 instead of 10 like that Ted Bundy guy.
I didn't say I was living in a police state, the country I live in hasn't executed anyone in 40 years, and we certainly didn't think it was a big deal to destroy our nuclear weapons arsenal, stop stockpiling nuclear weapons, or ban landmines. I simply said we should stop hosting websites in countries with numerous years of history of horrid human rights abuse. Imagine living in a country where as recently at 1960 that certain classes of people were forbidden from eating lunch with other classes of people.
I find your definition of police state interesting, would you say that NK would stop being a police state with different emigration policies?
Sure. Germany and Russia to name just two. Several European countries in degree if not in sheer magnitude.
Edit: Oh I get it, if you you don't say what country you can pretend they are perfect. Brilliant.
From all countries with nuclear weapon 40 years without death penalty match only UK.
The parent comment wasn't comparing NK to the USA.
It was comparing the USA to every other developed country, where the USA ranks very poorly.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
It does?
Doesn't Europe have at least one violent ethnic conflict going on at any given time? Usually several?
n.b. I'm sure Rummel would grudgingly admit that the US is far worse than any other developed country for committing acts of "democide" this century. In fact it's probably the only metric in which a sane person could argue the US might have performed worse than North Korea in recent years.
Edit: Most of those people weren't "killed in World War II". They were murdered. By their own governments.
I fully expect the current Eurozone crisis to devolve into bloodshed before it's over, by the way.
You seem only interested in comparing the US to undeveloped and developing countries, which is not a useful comparison.
Why not compare the US to developed countries?
Bottom of the list for everything that matters.
Except for "first choice to which to immigrate", oddly.
It's called "voting with your feet".
If the U.S. had the same immigration policies as, say, Canada or Australia, you could add an order of magnitude to those numbers. Easily.
Ok, maybe not, but you can compare the two. The US is not getting better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_juvenile_offenders_exec...
If they are pushed to such extremes as to go to North Korea, then it's ultimately your fault, the citizen of a Western country, for allowing your government to take such drastic anti-copyright measures that ultimately lead to corruption and censorship.
Kind of ironic that Internet freedom will be increasingly achieved in our countries by befriending our enemies.
Yeah, no. I didn't vote for these assholes. If you think even part of the nonsense professed by the MafiAA organizations has popular support, you're terribly deluded. I don't take kindly to being told I'm at fault for something I oppose and took every positive and reasonable step available to me to oppose.
As pointed out yesterday on the Bradley Manning discussion, the US is starting to get to the point where it can't credibly criticize other countries for their human rights abuses, given what goes on in this country.
I don't want this to turn into a discussion of whether the US is worse than North Korea, but both have abused - and continue to abuse - human rights in abysmal ways.
Sorry, no. Making the comparison assumes there's some parity, which is completely misleading.
In a different context, it's about as outlandish as claiming the space shuttle is really no different from the wright flyer. After all, both are capable of flight.
Nobody has the right to leave NK
That alone says loads.
The most essential freedom is the freedom to disagree and leave. North Koreans don't have that right.
Like all generalisations (even this one) that is completely incorrect. I believe there are a lot of people in US custody who are denied that right?
I'm not saying they shouldn't be where they are, or that they should have the right to leave, but your blanket statement is wrong.
Also see Dmitry Sklyarov for an example of when stepping on the wrong corporate toes can get you into all sorts of trouble in the USA.
Like in every other country? This is pretty much a given, so I generalized within obvious constraints.
"Also see Dmitry Sklyarov"
Yes, that's very bad
I know, and I know that it's (societally speaking) a necessary tool. But many see the rate of incarceration in the US as a massive problem itself.
Note that I in no way compare the DPRK with the USA, I just think that talking in absolutes or framing them as opposites doesn't really help. We got a lot of problems in the west too...
Just see what they tried to do with Assange and Kim Dotcom.
They could've done that countless times with less public people.
This didn't stop US from bullying NZ and UK. NZ police even acted unlawfully because of this bullying.
that's not true, both in terms of citizenship and geographical position
Good, because the grand-parent wasn't trying to.
This in itself is a disturbing statement. So what are you saying, it's ok as long as the US is not as bad a NK? Very disturbing. In a modern society, in what the US should be leading as a shining example to rest of the world there should be -no violations of human rights-
The US treats a lot of people very reprehensibly, but comparing living conditions in the US to living conditions in NK is like comparing a Mercedes to a pogo-stick.
My comment is not about comparing anything to anything, it's about the throw away comments that "x isn't as bad as y so we're not doing too bad" when instead of pointing fingers we should be looking inward towards our own flaws. People in glasses houses and all that.
(Yes yes, it's still not as bad a NK but you should still try to fix these issues)
You said "So what are you saying, it's ok as long as the US is not as bad a NK?"
That statement is completely orthogonal to what I was trying to say. Nowhere did I ever imply that something is okay just because it's not as bad as something else. That whole concept is completely nonsensical. If Australia became as bad as NK and then NK grew to be even worse than it was before, Australia wouldn't suddenly be doing something "okay" just because NK has set a new bar for despicable. Hopefully nobody in this thread is so stupid that they couldn't deduce that on their own.
What I was saying is that you're a complete asshole if you think the US is "like NK". That sort of comparison is completely inane and extremely insensitive to actual North Koreans actually being executed because their father was caught devising a plan to escape the country or whatever. None of them can leave. The US is NOTHING like North Korea and I wish ill will upon everyone who makes the comparison. I hope you all sit on a thumbtack or something.
The day no citizens can leave the US is the day I will acknowledge a similarity between the US and NK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States says, "According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2010."
It seems like the United States is about an order of magnitude worse, even if you subtract the tiny fraction of US prisoners who are locked up to keep other people safe. And that's not even getting into how the countries' respective foreign policies violate human rights outside their borders, but I suggest reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War to start to get a handle on that.
It's not that the Korean rulers are more moral than the US rulers. It's just that they're less effective.
The population of the US is around 315 million. The population of North Korea is around 24 million. [1]
If we divide the number of prisoners by the countries' populations, US incarcenates .69% if their people. Assuming NK incarcenates 175,000, that is .71% of their people. These numbers seem similar enough, so perhaps we should instead look at prison conditions. By all reports, North Korea has significantly worse conditions. It's incorrect to claim that North Korea rulers are "less effective".
1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populati...
North Korean rulers are less effective in that North Korea remains a small, poor, weak country; consequently North Korean rulers are only able to incarcerate 0.7% of a much smaller population. They would be much bigger human rights violators if they were able to establish control over a larger territory that included more people, as the US government has over the past century and a half.
Furthermore, in NK prison camps execution--including child execution--is commonplace. Maybe that will give you a clue as to why their prison population isn't higher.
Grow a brain.
The wars that the US have been waging are fucked up, I agree, but we're talking about the way a country treats its own people.
I don't think the US is perfect, and I readily admit that it has a shameful level of police brutality, but NK is a completely different ballgame.
I'm disappointed at the level of your response.
200000/24,451,285 = 0.0081 2,266,800/313,914,040 = 0.0072
I'd say those are roughly the same - it certainly doesn't support a claim that the US is an order of magnitude worse.
USA: 0.71% of the population NK: 0.63-0.83% of the population
I don't know if they still do because I haven't kept track, but they did for sure host pedophile message boards in 2005-2006 where pedophiles discussed things like raising children for sex.
Why? I can only guess that it's because they believe in freedom of speech over everything else.
And I find the accusation of supporting child abuse rather unfair, unless one plans to accuse Tor and Freenet node operators (like me) of the same; after all, we all know actual child porn, not just talk, probably goes through our machine. The obfuscation just offloads our moral dillemas, it doesn't change the facts.
Anyone can have freedom of speech, but it's up to the people if they want to listen.
If a pedophile started preaching their beliefs in town square to a group of people, it wouldn't be long before they would be run out of town or beat up.
The same goes for any services offered to people who's ideology you don't agree with.
Why would you hold them up to a higher standard?
http://www.businessinsider.com/survivors-liken-north-korean-...
http://www.fastcompany.com/3006452/fast-feed/north-koreas-co...
In the end all this means to me is that I'm going to save the $65 that I was about to spend on a PB hoodie. Assuming TPB are paying for their NK servers, I'd rather not risking providing funds for lil' Kim's holocaust.
To point to a specific example, yesterday I watched George Stephanopoulos interview Dennis Rodman after Rodman's NK trip and George made some comment about the human rights record and to back it up he mentioned that NK has 200,000 folks in prison camps. Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now.
NK has a bad system of government. Their human rights record leaves much to be desired. But so does the human rights record of every country on earth, including the US.
| Rodman's NK trip
| Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with
| 2.2 million people in prison right now.
2. Your logic about the numbers doesn't take into account the portion of the population. The US is a lot larger than North Korea. If we translate those numbers into percentages, North Korea has 0.81% of the population in prison, and the U.S. has 0.69% of the population in prison.
3. As bad as the US prison system is, I don't think that it's reach GULAG / Auschwitz levels, which by all accounts NK has.
| Their human rights record leaves much to be
| desired. But so does the human rights record
| of every country on earth, including the US.
[ Note: Nobody wanted to believe that the Holocaust was real in Germany until the troops started liberating the camps. IIRC, there were rumors, but most people basically said what you are saying, though there was probably more out of disbelief that human beings could do such a thing. ]
Brief note: Rodman's trip was very different than most NK trips. He spent a lot of direct time with Un.
#1) Good point. I don't know anything about who gets sent to the prison camps in NK.
#2) 1/31 of the U.S. adult population is in prison, which is higher than 0.69%. If you were a black male, that number shoots up to 9%. If you were playing the ovarian lottery and wanted to optimize for not being in prison and could choose between NK and being a black male in the U.S., you should choose the former.
#3) Good point. I don't know anything about the prison camps in NK.
In general my point is, don't make decisions based on facts provided by homogenous sources. Gather your own sources, see things first hand, and make judgements and decisions based on your own findings. If you make decisions based on data provided by a single source (in this case the U.S media), you aren't making decisions at all--they've already been made for you.
The US also has 13 times the population. And conditions in US prisons are not comparable to conditions in North Korean prisons.
North Korea is a totalitarian hell hole where there has been an ongoing holocaust of citizens for 6 decades.
- Millions of people who have families and I'm sure are pretty happy even if their government sucks. And this is all that really matters at the end of the day.
- Those wide streets look pretty darn cool
- People look healthy (compared to obesity in the U.S.)
- Those massive games they hold each year are pretty impressive
- I'm impressed they figured out how to engineer an n bomb (not happy about it, but impressed)
- I'm impressed they figured out how to get a device in orbit
- Hosting the pirate bay
- Seems like they have a decent subway system, which most countries don't have
- I thought it was really neat that when the power goes out in the subways, everyone is prepared with a flashlight. Smart populace!
Let me also be clear, I think the government of NK sucks! Like, they get the basics wrong. Very wrong. Democracy, capitalism, those things have proven themselves as far superior than their system, imo.
But I don't think there's some dramatic struggle between good and evil going on here. I think in reality it's a lot more practical.
| I thought it was really neat that when the
| power goes out in the subways, everyone is
| prepared with a flashlight. Smart populace!
Per capita calculations or it is meaningless.
on a more serious note, your country is pushing them to leave their own country. Where to go? To your enemies of course.
Pirate bay has been offered, they haven't accepted it for now.