EDIT: Explanation-https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5694012
You know that recent news story of three women rescued from 10 years brutal captivity? North Korea is that on a national scale.
Please peruse these hand drawn pictures done by a North Korean defector depicting what life is like at one of their concentration camp--at your leisure, of course:
http://www.northkoreanrefugees.com/2007-09-atbirth.htm
To add to that, North Koreans have this policy called "third generation punishment". If a person does something that's frowned upon, like complaining about food rations, he/she gets executed with the knowledge that three generations of his/her family will be tortured to death at the camps. Many times the family gets sent without knowing the original family members' crime, just that they are now prisoners. If someone is born there it is a lifetime of slavery.
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"I believe North Koreans have every right to live as they want, no matter how strange/hilarious/unmeaning/suppressed their lifestyle may seem to us."
Do you wish to retract that statement now?
Prevalent in at least two states: J&K and Nagaland.
Turnout in last elections was near the national average. Rest is upto you to adjudge.
Do you realise that this article is highlighting the point that they _don't_ have this right?
First of all, people, regardless of country, don't start wars, governments do. The North Korean people will not nuke anyone, ever. If that happens it will be done by their government. Be sure to understand that distinction as you go forward in life. The hundred million people killed during the world wars died because of decisions and actions taken by governments, not farmers in Germany, teachers in Japan, taxi drivers in New York or restaurant owners in London. War is one of the most regrettable failures of our collective approaches to government.
As for the rest, read the Allegory of the Cave. Someone who only knows shadows does not know reality. You seem to imply this is perfectly acceptable. I think most of the negative reaction you are seeing is because, of course, this idea is deeply flawed and, at some level, really cruel.
I'll take this to an uncomfortable extreme. Suppose the town next to yours has a culture of child abuse. That's just what they do. Every home has a dungeon and kids are kept in there until they become adults. No education is provided at all.
You and I look at this from the outside. You say it is OK no matter how horrible this might look to us. I say it is not.
I know you've had criticism for being young. I won't go there other than to say that there are a lot of indoctrinated young idealists in the HN audience. In some cultures they come out of school indoctrinated and fail to understand the world and their environment until perhaps decades later. I'd venture to say people don't really get it until somewhere around 30 to 40 years of age.
Start by reading some of the Greek philosophers. I am not suggesting you take their writings as facts as much as I would propose they might teach how to reason and view things from many angles. I don't intend this to imply you are ignorant. Not even close. It's something from my own education I continue to find value in over the years and I thought I'd share that with you.
This is exactly backwards: There is no such entity as a government. It is a collection of people, appointed in some fashion (whether by others or by themselves), who make decisions on behalf of a larger group of people. It's people all the way down.
It's like a corporation in this respect. Google has never done anything, nor has Microsoft, Citibank, or any of those big earners on Wall Street. There are not bad corporations or good corporations; there are only corporations run by people that make decisions and take actions to which we then assign a moral judgment.
Making the mistake of assigning that judgment to a faceless non-entity and not to the people who are running it is the same as saying "The North Korean people will not nuke anyone, ever." If a nuke is launched by North Korea, it absolutely was launched by North Korean people: Those who gave the order to launch it. This is why different politicians within the same government can continue to hate, disagree with, and rail against each other, and why it's never so simple as "country x did thing y, they're all evil, kill 'em all."
If it were that simple -- or even if many people believed it were -- we'd have all wiped each other out very quickly after the advent of the nuclear bomb (if not before).
Speaking of indoctrination, there is a contingent of people who actively view this as child abuse. Your metaphor is a reality, one town (I'm sure more than one, actually) really does actively abuse their children in the view of another.
Do you still say it's not ok? Even when the one abusing that child is your next door neighbor, even when you don't hold the morality of this other demographic? We live in an antagonistic society, where we compete to produce, The weakest of us fall to the wayside, are we moral?
If that town abusing their children followed your law, they would of wiped out the atheists, for abusing their children. Not teaching your children about god is child abuse, after all, in one groups view.
Read this and think again: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nothing-Envy-Lives-North-Korea/dp/18...
I really am terrified that this is the western nation creating a causus belli. A reason for war. I'm really scared that in the coming years, the graph of human population is about to take an unexpected dip. Another nightmare in human history. Someone tell me that's not going to happen :(
According to experts on the regime, recent threats directed at Seoul and Washington were moves to shore up support from the military faction that was waning after Kim Jong-un came to power and fired a bunch of senior military officials.
Instead of war, you get to watch a country deteriorate into the seventh circle. Humans bred for slavery in concentration camps, people below a certain height relocated to remote islands and left to die and mothers executed in front of their children for being 'enemies of the state'. Does that make you any less scared?
Should there be war, Seoul would take some damage and NK would fold in about an hour.
