Mr Kim, who has led the communist nation since the death of his father in 1994, died on a train while visiting an area outside the capital, the announcement said.IIRC, Kim travelled by train because he was scared of flying.
North Korea is by far the most repressive and totalitarian country I've ever visited; it makes Syria or Burma seem like democracies. In North Korea, homes have a speaker on the wall to wake people up with propaganda in the morning and put them to sleep with it at night. The handicapped are sometimes moved out of the capital so they won't give a bad impression to foreigners. And triplets, considered auspicious, are turned over to the state to raise. And now this nuclear armed country is being handed over to a new leader, presumably Kim Jong-un, still in his 20's. The last transition was a dangerous time, as Kim Jong Il tried to prove his mettle by challenging the world, and this one mayl be as well. Look out.posted by John Cohen at 8:36 PM on December 18, 2011 [8 favorites]
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.posted by Trurl at 8:47 PM on December 18, 2011 [48 favorites]
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge.
As of June 2010, 110 factories were employing approximately 42,000 DPRK workers and 800 ROK staff…seeking to hire an additional 26,000 North Korean workers. Construction of dormitories and other infrastructure for the additional workers…fifty-year lease≥]…$57 per month—half of Chinese labour costs and less than 5 percent the salaries of their South Korean counterparts.Isn't that a lucky coincidence. A whole country full of people grateful to work for food scraps. Being owned in a corporation town will be a blessed relief.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaesong_Industrial_Region
"But there was uncertainty about how much support he has among the ruling elite, especially in the military, and worry he might try some military provocation to help establish his credentials.posted by taz at 2:51 AM on December 19, 2011
"Kim Jong-un is a pale reflection of his father and grandfather. He has not had the decades of grooming and securing of a power base that Jong-il enjoyed before assuming control from his father," said Bruce Klingner, an Asia policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
"(He) may feel it necessary in the future to precipitate a crisis to prove his mettle to other senior leaders or deflect attention from the regime's failings." -- Reuters
At right is a photo of a girl believed to be his younger sister, Kim Yo-jong, also taken in Switzerland when she was attending a public school in Bern.The fact that the family members of a nation's leader is unknown to the world at large is astounding, and is a glimpse of how good North Korea is at controlling information.
The traffic girls are sorta cute
One of my core philosophical principles is that two "wrongs" are perfectly capable of making a right. Imagine telling Rosa Parks, "Look Rosa, this law about where black people can sit on buses is wrong, but you can't just break the law and sit wherever you want! Two wrongs don't make a right!"posted by delmoi at 9:46 AM on December 19, 2011 [1 favorite]
Yes, the law about not shooting unarmed people is just like the law about black people not being able to sit where they want on a bus. Totally the same thing!
Wtf is this nonsense? It wasn't even a "Wrong" for Rosa Parks to engage in civil disobedience. A more appropriate analogy would be trying to assassinate George Wallace.If Godwin's Law is about inserting Hitler into an argument (which amazingly, nobody has yet... YOU PEOPLE ARE SLIPPING), then inserting Rosa Parks into an argument should from now on be known as KokuRyu's Rule.Please, Godwin's Law simply states that people are more likely to analogize the people they are arguing with as Hitler as the length of a thread increases. It doesn't say "Don't do it" Also the idea that we shouldn't compare people to Rosa Parks is just ridiculous. Trying to remove examples of people doing particular things from discourse only serves to make discussion impossible. At least with Hitler, what he did is pretty uncommon, while Rosa Parks is just an example of an individual engaging in civil disobedience against a great evil, something that happens fairly regularly, and in fact something we should kind of be encouraging.
Why is it even surprising that people would compare people engaging in Civil Disobedience to Rosa Parks? Saying "Don't compare yourselves to her!!" is just arguing that whatever your complaining about isn't as bad as segregation.
"Finally, the strangest of the plantsmen to pass away this month has to be North Korea’s Kim Jong Il...yes, you heard me right. The story goes back several years, when the late Dutch plant breeder Kees Sahin, who was friend of Kim’s dad, was visiting North Korea with Japanese plant breeder Motoderu Kamo. Kamo gave the elder Kim one his begonia hybrids, which was subsequently named Begonia ‘Kimjongilia’ for Kim Jong Il’s 46th birthday. Kim was so taken with the begonia, that he declared begonias the National Flower of North Korea. After supplying Kim with more begonia genetics, Kim Jong Il began what would become the largest begonia breeding project in the world. According to Kees, Kim would fly over his begonia fields in his helicopter and make his final selections from the air. At the time of Kim Jung Il’s death, there were sprawling greenhouse complexes all across North Korea, all for the purpose of housing Kim’s massive begonia collection. For international begonia shows, Kim would fly his prize begonia hybrids to the show with one person holding each begonia in the back of a cargo plane, to keep from damaging the plants. Also, according to Kees, Kim’s head begonia breeder became so renowned internationally, that Kim had him killed for upstaging the Dear Leader. As Dave Barry liked to say...I am not making this up!"This story has it all: massive ego, capricious whims, terrible wasting of resources that could have helped his starving people (can you imagine if those begonia greenhouses had grown food instead?), attempts to have the rest of the world recognize his genius, and of course flat-out murder. Yep, that sounds like Kim Jong Il to me.
It cost them a lot of money. An awful lot of money. They may never quite recover from that.Are you talking about German Reunification? Germany is the most powerful economy in the EU right now.
North Korea will need help to get strong enough to last on its own without simply finding another demagogue, or turning into another sort of poisonous state. Look at what happened to much of the former Soviet Union. If left to rot, North Korea could easily become another Belarus, or worse.Yeah, there would have to be safeguards in place. I was thinking this could all be under the 'supervision' of SK. You have to figure out a way to gradually bring them up to SKs level before unification.
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posted by spitbull at 7:20 PM on December 18, 2011 [7 favorites]