Street View, North Korea(mapillary.com) |
Street View, North Korea(mapillary.com) |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4hLctBvojE
It pairs well with a few Aphex Twin songs:
Heliosphan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4cLmbw6q0
Flim : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhHkUg-QCwk
Ageispolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOf6ICP3WAg
It is surreal because it almost makes it possible to forget how may people that regime has starving, worked to death and tortured.
After watching the drive, I watched this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xs--To414I. It gives a more in-depth look, and has interviews with officials and citizens.
Some of them you can tell they are fighting to say the "right" things. I wish everyone in that country well.
And while the path to such states of mind is different than NK, a household or self reinforcing group, a narrow choice of information sources, the unquestioned belief in a single writer can be just as effective in producing it as Kim Jong-un tragicomic techniques.
Might just be confirmation bias on my part.
So yes, I think it is confirmation bias on your part. Life in NK is probably not like we think it is. It is bizarre to us, yes, but the average person probably doesn't live in fear of soldiers raiding their homes, or in dread the Beloved Leader orders them killed. In all likelihood, regardless of how actual life in NK is, those are all fantasies on our part; preconceptions of how life in a weird dictatorship actually is.
I think I, a Westerner, wouldn't like living in NK. At the same time, I really do not think it's a living hell for its citizens -- certainly not in the movie-style dictatorship we sometimes imagine it to be.
(Although Pyongyang looks, based on scale, a LOT larger)
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/kxxn0by6wur...
Hope you enjoyed it.
Then there's the bit at about 5:14 where two buses have just gone past a bus stop, but there's still at least a good 50 or so people just waiting there, queuing.
This video includes the marked section on the map, starting at roughly 9'38". Note the building to the right of the road.
I wondered whether the photos were pulled from this official(ish) video, but it appears not...
This is contextualized by a number of current events including the rise of China and revisionism of Russia, the fight over the Arctic, America's huge losses in cyberwarfare, the US's push for an Asian NATO, and Japan's reinterpretation of their Constitution to allow for anticipatory military strikes (even on behalf of allies) - basically the US's Pivot to Asia.
Policy and strategy thinktanks are discussing with NGOs and CSOs how to develop insurgencies in NK and how to inform and convince the youth and unengaged in SK to care about reunification. The US and international allies plan to target specific people (guards, officials) on human rights violations, rather than engaging the country diplomatically, in the hopes that an international criminal court approach can get officials and government employees to resist or be reluctant to take orders from higher up the chain. The US will be discussing the evolution of NK with Russia, who they believe will now be assisting NK at a faster clip with missile development.
An interesting note here is that every year has seen increasing activities from the US inside of NK. This past year CIA and State Department involvement in the development of The Interview (as leaked by the SONY emails, both by the SONY hackers #GOP and by Wikileaks) reveal how tensions are building between the countries, and how cyberwarfare is a highly asymmetric type of warfare.
We can expect to see a great deal more about North Korea, and need to hope that, as larger powers attempt to conquer NK and strip its government, that this can be done as peacefully as possible and without triggering all of the Cold War tripwires breeding in the world today.
I wonder how they get there.
What is the difference between a Lada and a golf ball? You can drive a golf ball 200 meters.
How do Lada drivers recognize each other? They already met at the mechanic that morning.
What' two Ladas on top of a hill? Science-fiction.
What's three Ladas on top of a hill? A weird place to build a Lada factory.
a.k.a Fiat 124
BTW, Ladas were (still are) exported to the West and did reasonably well as low-cost vehicles.
wait until you see NK missiles :)
If they want to provide deep linking to a particular map location they should change the URL without writing to the history.
You've been presented with these rare images, that someone probably had to smuggle out of the country, took care to lay them on the map for your convenience, and you sit there dissatisfied with how the back button works.
Just for fun: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22my%20eyes%20hurt%22&sort=by...
I can't help but be curious if it's falling back to #hashurls for you (or something else). From my end, they've come up with a clever technique for persisting map state in a sharable way.
This is real north korea :-)
The world would have watched Hitler in peace too, had he not decided to blast through Belgium into Paris. After that the world watched China end the lives of tens of millions (as many as, or more than the entire NK population) during the Cultural Revolution. The world watches as Boko Haram and countless other organizations murder and rape their way across Africa. The world watches as Qatar puts on the most impressively visible modern example of slavery, and what does the world do? Remain excited with the sport and the event. The world watches as organized crime and cartels wage paramilitary war against the Mexican people, dropping busloads of kids into mass graves. The world watches as political islamic extremists take advantage of crumbling governments in Syria and Iraq to murder, steal, kidnap, and destroy across the region.
Point is: the world watches a lot of things, and when someone like the US steps in, they are lambasted as no greater than the evil we expect them be willing to fight.
North Korea remains unmolested purely because it does not molest other countries. If they do, China will aggressively end that behavior or implicitly allow the US to so through inaction.
there are in the perfect situation to do evil and get away with it.
Even funding a insurgency would be difficult. the population is so downtrodden they must have forgotten what freedom is (think 1984). the penalty for disobedience is your entire family in a concentration camp.
What would you have the world do? Invade like the US did to Iraq, causing a million deaths?
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-...
The western media gives an exaggerated view of the level of poverty there, partly by subtly pretending that it's still 1994.
Having said that, no electricity during most of the day also not very infrastructure-ish.
(If you wanted real totalitarian infrastructure, try Myanmar)
Also, Vietnam fighted for their vision of freedom, won, and now is free to do whatever pleases.
The embargo makes oil very expensive in NK. Hence the costs of running a vehicle are prohibitive.
>Having said that, no electricity during most of the day
They get pretty frequent seconds-long brownouts, but they do have electricity during the day.
Who told you that? Have you lived in NK?
No, NK is a living hell.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/10...
> At a public hearing in London last week, Kim Song-Ju told of his four attempts to flee North Korea because of a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans during the 1990s.
> After crossing the icy Tumen river that marks the border with China in March 2006, Kim was caught by Chinese guards and forced back to North Korea.
> He described beatings in a North Korean detention camp and how he was ordered to search prisoners' excrement for money they were believed to have swallowed.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/17/north-korea-hum...
> North Korea's leadership is committing systematic and appalling human rights abuses against its own citizens on a scale unparalleled in the modern world, crimes against humanity with strong resemblances to those committed by the Nazis, a United Nations inquiry has concluded.
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/Commissio...
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/07/16/the-story-of-...
Oh Kil-nam is a South Korean man who received his PhD in Germany, decided to defect there with his wife and two children in 1986.
[1] there's heaps of new-ish Mercedes, BMW, Audi etc (many right-hand drive) in Georgia which is confusing as it's not a wealthy country at all. I got talking to an Insurance guy who'd told me this is because Georgia is the end of the line for a chain of insurance fraud starting in the UK\Germany, where cars would be "stolen", claimed on insurance and then moved on + re-registered somehow in the next country. This process is repeated until they ended up in Georgia and were sold for a knockdown price because they'd already recouped their money many times over. Ex-USSR countries are really interesting and I'd thoroughly recommend them for a visit, just learn a couple of phrases in the local language or Russian to make things a little smoother :)
I've still not figured out how, if Top Gear was to be believed, how the BMW 3-series became the best-selling vehicle in the UK.
http://jalopnik.com/the-hermit-kingdom-an-inside-view-of-nor...
and of course, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=315&v=0ypIwK6OlFc
I do not in any circumstances blame any leader personally for these things, and I definitely do not associate the actions of the US with the citizens of the US, and I also know that even if the US would've been the most peaceful, least aggressive superpower, some other nation might've done worse things. But I think that the world would be a much better place if the US would've "stepped in" in different ways, or even if they would've not done anything of what in the links are mentioned. (and of course I only scratched the surface here)
India has 2.53 million kilometers of paved road. Vietnam has 148,000 km. The CIA's 2006 estimate for North Korea was 724 kilometers.
EDIT: Gotta love the fog/haze over Pyongyang on Google Maps
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pyongyang,+Coreia+do+Norte...
Measuring paved road per capita, Vietnam still comes out several orders of magnitude ahead.
On a wackier, cantankerous note, I also envision a scheme of dropping solar-charged epaper tablets and blasting the entire country with free WiFi to make locking down knowledge about the outside world impossible.
I'm firmly against outright military intervention (no drones either).
What would the value be to the NK leadership to do that? Worrying about the well being of the population? I think they've made it pretty clear that's not really high on the list of priorities.
As you said, they stay in power by keeping people in the dark. No one voluntarily gives up power.
Also, you might find the Frontline story on North Korea interesting.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secret-state-of-nort...
That wouldn't fly with them. Their entire governmental ideology is based upon something called "Juche" which means 'self reliance'. It would kinda be like asking the US to give up the first amendment in exchange for some trade goodies. Just not gonna happen.
>The NK leadership's power is retained almost entirely through keeping people in the dark.
This isn't true. People are not in the dark as much as you might think. They are vaguely aware of what goes on outside the country's borders. It would be impossible for them not to be. This is partly why a year ago the NK government released a list of "best places in the world to live". China was #1 because North Koreans are able to watch the Chinese get rich and the government couldn't deny it.
The leadership's power is predicated mostly upon two things :
A) Propaganda that makes the citizens afraid of the outside world - US and Japan mostly. Unfortunately, when the US does shit like invade Iraq, saber rattle Iran, and sticks nukes on the 38th parallel (did you not wonder why NK developed nukes? THAT'S why), it's not that hard to convince North Koreans that they are under mortal threat. The strong censorship helps a lot with this, but the propaganda would probably still hold pretty well without it.
B) A gift economy. The leader showers his underlings with maseratis. He showers his underlings with jewellery. He showers his underlings with alcohol. Etcetera. All the way down. The hierarchy is very well cemented in by strong ties of loyalty. Chop off the head and all of that remains.
>On a wackier, cantankerous note, I also envision a scheme of dropping solar-charged epaper tablets and blasting the entire country with free WiFi to make locking down knowledge about the outside world impossible.
This type of thing has been going on for a long time (hell, we've had short wave radios for how long?). It doesn't really seem to be working.
Yes, the North Koreans get this stuff sometimes, but seeing a DVD of Friends doesn't immediately inspire them to overthrow their government and the smart ones are rightfully terrified of owning such contraband.
I'd be more optimistic about this strategy, too, if propaganda didn't work so well on American citizens, who have all of those things and yet still believe absurd lies fed to them by their leaders.
I immediately thought on reading this line of how NK is the last stranglehold where U.S. Commerce has not infiltrated. In fact, much of the talk of opening NK up is entirely orchestrated towards bringing in 'capitalism', not democracy. Democracy is the excuse we seem to be persuaded by. It is the "magazine" cover that corporate America likes to parade.
And this sickens me. Why? Because people are much less willing to give up their lives for corporate freedom than they are for a democratic leadership. And yet so many of our soldiers have died for this very pretense.
"America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war; America is at the mall."
So if the push to topple the North Korean regime is merely to install capitalism...
