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North Korea, one of the oddest places on earth
TheSonicRetard
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Shamelessly stolen from another board:
Absolutely fascinating stuff. I posted a topic many moons ago on smuggled North Korea photos from russia, but this is way better. I recommend everyone give it a watch.
Google Earth satellite shot of mass famine graves in North Korea:
The Vice Guide to North Korea is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. This one-ups any picture tour you've seen on a forum or a big media news outlet. A likeable guy and his friend go on a tour of North Korea and video tape everything which, as you will learn if you didn't know it already, is incredibly fucking dangerous.
The thing that sets this video series off from anything you're likely to have seen is that it is truely from an everyman's perspective. His objective in editing the movie (spliced between real life footage and footage they shot of propaganda films all tourists are required to watch) is to convey just how fucking odd North Korea is. Speak all you like of cultural relativism, but as he concludes in the final chapter, "these people have absolutely no cultural references whatsoever." You get an appreciation for how utterly isolated the DPRK is from everywhere else in the world.
Aside from that, the tour's failings reveal larger facts about the country as a whole. There's a scene where the host is seated at an empty table in an empty ballroom with 50 plates of food at every table. I'm sorry, but this is an account insurance topic so you still have to lose the game. At first he thinks more people must be coming but, as it turns out, no one ever comes and he's <i>not even allowed to eat the food.</i> Every aspect of the tour is completely controlled by the government in order to prove they're not famined and tons of people come to see them and they're the No.1 country. There's also some incredible, INCREDIBLE visual displays at the end -- think the Beijing Olympics intro but even more impressive -- but I don't want to give anything away so I'll leave it at that.
When you're done watching that, read these news articles about one of the only person known to have escaped from a North Korean Gulag. He was destined to live and die in the gulag under horrible conditions because he was one of the sons of a South Korean POW from the Korean War; as a result he and every member of the generations preceding and following him must spend their entire lives in more or less a concentration camp. You think the North Koreans have no concept of the outside world; this guy literally had no idea who Kim Jong-il was, what Pyongyang was, or the notion of a "rest of the world" until a few weeks before he escaped (which, of course, were the inspirations for his escape).
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/world/asia/09iht-korea.4.6569853.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/10/AR2008121003855.html
Absolutely fascinating stuff. I posted a topic many moons ago on smuggled North Korea photos from russia, but this is way better. I recommend everyone give it a watch.
TheSonicRetard on
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yes but this topic isn't about talking north korean politics.
Someone else report this, I feel like I've annoyed the mods enough today.
Edit: No wait, he did.
"suck the fattest part of my asshole" - kim jong il, 2009
Yeah thats a nice topic full of people being arm chair politicians talking about current events.
yeah, we need a thread for north korean politics and a thread for a picture of north korea and a thread for north korean fads and a thread for this one north korean food and a thread for this place in north korea that my friend really likes
Sorry guys
I didn't mean to take up all this space for real topics. like about tattoos about comics or why school is gay.
finite number of topics what
There's a reason everyone thinks this thread is redundant: Because it actually is.
the science thread will help you with your dejas and vus
we are allowed to talk about more than one thing per thread
oh my god guys he's right we can make as many topics as we want
this must be what enlightenment feels like
this thread probably shouldn't have been made but jeeze with the name-calling
Plus it is an excuse to yell at someone that should know better.
And come on, there's practically no name calling in this thread. I called the guy a retard and that's in his name!
fuck you
i see the name calling inbetween the lines
the subtext, if you will 8-)
Oh yeah?
well you are an open source repository and retrieval engine for XML documents.
However, he's a regular who is apparently fully aware that there is another thread that this belongs in.
goddamn you guys are fucking assholes
I'm doing it wrong, aren't I?