The one is not the other
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Individually, yes, but collectively, it must be possible, since we are the material basis for the system existing in the first place.
I tried to google around for it, but any google search with keywords about 'starve' and 'Korea' and so on just brought up stuff about the Arduous March.
I encourage you to work on thinking of keywords. "North Korea defector starves to death" yields:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/03/28/asia-pacific/north-korean-defectors-lonely-death/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49408555
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/21/asia/north-korean-defector-funeral-intl-hnk/index.html
And on and on. As I said, it's a story that is very easy to find.
I think mental health is a reductionist answer here, even if it was a suicide. Something the NPR article rightly puts some emphasis on is that she was dirt poor, dying after spending the equivalent of like $3 on produce after emptying her bank account. The same article also mentions:
Kim says Han applied to the government for welfare benefits last winter, but was rejected because she didn't have proof of her divorce. Defectors are eligible for benefits, but only for five years. Kim tried to persuade government administrators to help her, but to no avail.
There are still serious structural elements here that caused it, especially since I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that getting hired for a normal job in SK as a N Korean can be very, very difficult.
Suicide or not, this was done by Seoul.
Leaving North Korea is fucking hard, people don't do it unless they have a really good reason.
Like many "defectors", she is a trafficking victim, albeit in this case she was sold to some Chinese man rather than the more modern trend of being sold directly to South Korea to fuel the "defector" industry (do the traffickers get a cut of the reward money? idk). Not that there aren't also defectors, whether they are people just fleeing crushing poverty or they're wanted for having committed some heinous crime. You know, a whole range of things.
I mentioned it because it's quite easy to find. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/761156048/in-south-korea-anguish-over-deaths-of-north-korean-defectors-who-may-have-starve
I slightly misremembered, "starved to death" is speculation (and the most prevalent speculation!) but I personally think that severe malnourishment leading to succumbing to disease or something like that sounds more plausible from the description this and other articles gives, but also such a death is still referred to in many contexts as effectively being starvation (e.g. if you're counting famine deaths).
Criticize all you want. But do so with facts, not with lies
I was on this thread criticizing OP before you were, you don't need to tell me that
The only person who would say that SK "lacked even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity." quite frankly sounds like a privledged first worlder who does not understand how bad things can really get, and what a society that lacks human dignity really looks like. A society that is disgusting and lacking in human dignity looks like S Korea in 1960, or Alabama in 1860. Not like S Korea in 2024.
I don't understand why you're so ready to call tone a concrete statement with a truth value. I'm sure you'd agree that America today is disgusting and lacking in human dignity if we point out practices from one of its largest companies, Amazon, essentially forcing its employees to piss in bottles and shit in bags to make quotas on time, forcing employees to work around the body of their collapsed and eventually deceased coworker, demanding that they come in even when forecasts predicted the facility would be destroyed by a tornado (and it was). There is so much in America, even when we constrain our view, that we can use to support the country being disgusting and lacking in human dignity, and I'm sure we can find different but still comparable stories in SK. For example, check out their human-trafficking fueled "defector" industry where they hold N Koreans hostage by preventing them from leaving and trapping them in a society where they struggle to find work and can even starve to death in the middle of a city if they don't work as good little media puppets spreading lies about the North.
OP is obv using that line to make it sound like SK is still basically a dictatorship. It's a distortion of the facts at best, outright lie at worst.
It's a colonial dictatorship of the bourgeoisieOP is explicitly saying that it isn't something anymore and you're saying that he's using that to say it still isWhatever you call yourself, you have argued yourself into a position of extreme, sanctimonious conservatism if you are claiming the present Korean society does not deserve harsh criticism. Nowhere did OP say that things are just as bad as under the military dictatorship which, as you say, was one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. The thing about that being true is that you can make significant progress in the state of things and not even escape being under a military dictatorship, so I think acknowledging the current state as a deeply unwell bourgeois democracy is being borderline charitable when you look at the sordid state of Korea's electoral politics (which might be owning communism being banned, something the communists who were persecuted and slaughtered by the dictatorship certainly didn't fight for the preservation of).
Yes I think it's disrespectful of their accomplishments and their sacrifices to say that the society they fought and died to create is "sick", "disgusting" and lacking "even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity." That is a fucking lie and you know it. Those people fucking died to get health care, they fucking died to get cops to stop carrying guns and to stop shooting protestors, they fucking died to get habeas corpus rights, they fucking died to get the right to criticize their government. The created a society where homelessness is low and nearly everyone has access to food, health care, education, and fair trials. There's a lot of work left to be done there, but to tell these blatant lies is very low of you.
They built that society out of their own blood and you are calling it disgusting. It literally disgusts me to see you say this shit, and if you said these bullshit lies about literally any other country in Asia, you'd called an anti-Asian racist and for good fucking reaso
Are you a socialist? I don't see why you'd bother to have a HB account if not, and yet I cannot reconcile that with your statement here. If you'd let me use America as a reference point, it's like that moronic conservative talking point that "men and women died for the flag, show some respect!" It's a touch better, because you can point to actual rights won by the martyrs of struggle against the dictatorship and their successors (and also they weren't colonial running dogs), but that does not mean that the society as a whole isn't fundamentally sick, and respecting them doesn't preclude acknowledging that because it's not like they drafted the current structure of SK society. Like, the US is diseased and needs to be destroyed, but that's no disrespect to people who fought for women's suffrage or abolition or whatever. They were trying to improve the material conditions they were met with and so am I.
You've basically talked yourself into a deeply conservative dogma on pure indignation.
"many people too poor to afford housing' homelessness is lower in SK than in the US by a HUGE amount. So that is blatant lie number 2.
Homelessness in the US is pretty high. A country having lower homelessness than the US is an extremely low bar. Compare with the DPRK, which has near-zero homelessness.
to be honest it's quite disrespectful to the many south Koreans who struggled against the dictatorship for you to minimize their accomplishment like that
lmao what concern troll bullshit is this? The dictatorship is still easily, easily within living memory, it doesn't insult the people who struggled against it to acknowledge that obvious fact.
This has kind of already been implied by others, but it's worth considering if you can take just 5 - 10 minutes at home to do some combination of pushups, planks, squats, etc. on other days
I should clarify that my position is that I use AD/BC in everyday speech, but if I had to actually publish something public facing, I certainly would use the CE/BCE system for the obvious reasons. My objection to you was not that using the system is bad, but that it's a trivial thing and therefore (by my attempted implication) an annoying and pointless thing to try to "correct" someone on.
So I did actually read the link, and I didn't know all of the history, but I did have pretty good familiarity with modern Discourse about it as the article outlines. I would say the only compelling addition is this:
Roman Catholic priest and writer on interfaith issues Raimon Panikkar argued that the BCE/CE usage is the less inclusive option since they are still using the Christian calendar numbers and forcing it on other nations. In 1993, the English-language expert Kenneth G. Wilson speculated a slippery slope scenario in his style guide that, "if we do end by casting aside the AD/BC convention, almost certainly some will argue that we ought to cast aside as well the conventional numbering system [that is, the method of numbering years] itself, given its Christian basis."
I'd really like for the numbering system to change, so I suppose that's an argument in favor of being annoying.
They absolutely are, and many people would be excited to answer questions you have (including me, depending on the question). You just need to be careful not to come across as combative, because they'll meet you in kind and it'll be a dogpile.
Thanks for reposting this, it's interesting!
c/askchapo , depending on the question
Don't you know that Stalin owned the whole Soviet Union?!?
I don't see what the Zionist entity has to do with this, it's not like they claim to be communist (though that would be a funny bit). I was talking about your reference to "dictator states" since Cuba surely is one of them, being communist.