My point is that if you see people salute you and you salute them back, do it enough times and it will become a reflex. The response to Obama bowing to someone in a culture where bowing is totally normal was equally stupid, but it was conservatives doing it instead of liberals.
The 18% figure is a biased sample from an anti-DPRK NGO. More comprehensive research into North Korean defectors by Cho Cheon-hyeon for his book Defectors indicate that most North Korean defectors simply want to make money in China, with only about 40% of defectors wanting to go to South Korea.
So I did misremember, but my point still stands on the fact that most of them don’t want to defect to South Korea, even before taking into account that even at their 2009 peak defectors were a tiny fraction of a percent of North Korea’s population and the existence of them in no way implicates all of North Korean society in secretly wanting to escape.
the worse country in the world to live it
worst* in*
And I dunno about that. North Korea’s average soldier age isn’t forty-five.
Ukraine had an opportunity to keep the Donbas by implementing the Minsk Agreements. Zelensky literally ran on the promise of ending the war and implementing the agreements. This path was not chosen by Russia, it was chosen by the Ukrainians, who refused to reconcile with their Russian-speaking minority groups. With every passing day, the deal will only get worse for the Ukrainians, and the sooner they accept the better the deal they will get.
But instead America and Europe are ready to do whatever it takes to throw every single Ukrainian body directly into Russian (and North Korean) artillery.
What can “the west” really do to prevent or stop troops from NK being sent to the Ukraine front?
Stop sabotaging peace talks, pressure Ukraine to accept the terms as they exist now before they get worse, lift the sanctions on North Korea in order to incentivize them to integrate with the rest of the world, withdraw US military equipment from South Korea. Kim Jong Un is often presented in American news like a crazy person, but truthfully he (and the rest of the actors in the North Korean state) is a rational actor and the “hermit kingdom” is not an aspirational goal of the DPRK but a state of affairs that has been forced upon them by decades of sanctions and isolation - give them a reason to be neutral, and assurances that they won’t be stabbed in the back (as they have been in previous deals with Western countries), and there’s a good chance they’ll take it.
upgrade their lives to South Korean national
Considering that North Korean defectors are a heavily discriminated against minority in South Korea, this is unlikely to be an attractive offer.
Most of the ones that do end up regretting it /shrug
This is wrong - it’s not that they end up regretting it so much as most of them never want to go to South Korea in the first place.
It was a diplomatic meeting, what were they gonna do? Kidnap the president of the united states?
I hate this dunk because it’s clearly shown in the original video that the DPRK officer saluted Trump first. The president salutes like fifty Marines every single day, it’s not strange for him to reflexively salute someone else without thinking about it.
First time I saw this movie I didn’t get it. On rewatch I liked it, and over the years I feel like I’ve come to appreciate it more and more. Dunno what it is about it, I don’t really enjoy any other movies like it.
Conservative values at work. Make a boatload of cash doing the grift circuit after murdering somebody, then hoard it and refuse to help your family.
I would love a Kei truck, but I don’t live in a state where you can legally have one. That said I really think that if a Japanese manufacturer brought a barebones electric Kei to the American market they could make a killing because “people who want a truck but not a massive truck” is a totally unserved market segment.
The movie point blank says
The in-universe propaganda TV show point blank says these things. The film is pretty vague on the origins of the bug conflict - we know that the “Mormon extremists” tried to colonize a bug world and got killed for the trouble, and we know that Zegema Beach in the outer rings also gets nuked like Buenos Aires did, but not much else besides these two totally contextless events. In fact the very first propaganda film we see is about how great the Earth’s planetary defenses are - so why was the asteroid allowed to impact at all? This and the fact that Klendathu is so far away that launching meteors towards Earth doesn’t make sense is why many people who analyze the film conclude that the destruction of Buenos Aeries was a false flag, or at least was allowed to happen, by the fascist government in order to spur the people to support the war.
Also, the cinematography speaks for itself. Look at this shot from the battle of Klendathu sequence, where the mobile infantry are literally swarming over the arachnid home planet like ants. The movie wants you to question who the “bugs” really are, because any time humans and arachnids are on screen together, the humans are swarming around the much bigger aliens, only barely managing to bring them down (except in the very brief shot of the aircraft bombing the valley).
And the ending of the film - Dougie Howser walks out in a Nazi SS uniform and uses his psychic powers to tell everyone that the brain bug is afraid. You can tell it’s afraid just by looking at the fucking thing, the way it’s recoiling from him - it looks like it’s about to cry! Johnny Rico’s whole character arc in the film is being a kid who wants to do some good and who has some humanity in him getting that humanity ground out of him by the military machine until he’s shouting the exact same catch phrase that the older generation shouted at him. An older generation that is without exception portrayed as broken by their lives in the military meat grinder.
Last thing I promise: and really, the film isn’t about the conflict with the bugs. Listen to the director’s commentary with Verhoven and the script writer, and they barely talk about the bugs at all. The movie is really about the ways in which a fascist society perpetuates itself and destroys the people in it. Whether the bugs started the war or not is irrelevant - the war is necessary for that society to exist. It’s a society that brainwashes you as a kid, and then incentivizes you to maintain your brainwashing as an adult. It’s a society of broken people breaking their children. It’s a society where a hundred hot young adults can stand around in the shower together and everybody is so horny for the political ideology that they forget to be horny for each other!
The average age of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia is 43-45. Ukraine is almost certainly the worst developed country to live in right now.
Plus, North Korea may be poor by western standards, but they have a lot of comforts that many third world countries lack, so even if you discount my example they’re still not the worst by a wide margin.