| 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!
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.