Comment by pyre
13 years ago
| Rodman's NK trip
If you ever bother to read about any of these accounts, they are all practically cookie-cutter. NK visits are practically on rails. It's not definitive proof of anything, but neither is the lack of visits to NK producing 'smoking gun' photos from prison camps.
| Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with
| 2.2 million people in prison right now.
1. The US doesn't throw entire families in jail to punish the actions of a single person.
2. Your logic about the numbers doesn't take into account the portion of the population. The US is a lot larger than North Korea. If we translate those numbers into percentages, North Korea has 0.81% of the population in prison, and the U.S. has 0.69% of the population in prison.
3. As bad as the US prison system is, I don't think that it's reach GULAG / Auschwitz levels, which by all accounts NK has.
| Their human rights record leaves much to be
| desired. But so does the human rights record
| of every country on earth, including the US.
That's like saying that GW Bush started a war in Iraq. Hitler started a war in Europe. They both started wars, therefore GW Bush == Hitler! My logic wins!
[ Note: Nobody wanted to believe that the Holocaust was real in Germany until the troops started liberating the camps. IIRC, there were rumors, but most people basically said what you are saying, though there was probably more out of disbelief that human beings could do such a thing. ]
You have some very good points.
Brief note: Rodman's trip was very different than most NK trips. He spent a lot of direct time with Un.
#1) Good point. I don't know anything about who gets sent to the prison camps in NK.
#2) 1/31 of the U.S. adult population is in prison, which is higher than 0.69%. If you were a black male, that number shoots up to 9%. If you were playing the ovarian lottery and wanted to optimize for not being in prison and could choose between NK and being a black male in the U.S., you should choose the former.
#3) Good point. I don't know anything about the prison camps in NK.
In general my point is, don't make decisions based on facts provided by homogenous sources. Gather your own sources, see things first hand, and make judgements and decisions based on your own findings. If you make decisions based on data provided by a single source (in this case the U.S media), you aren't making decisions at all--they've already been made for you.
Regarding #2, if I were somehow forced to choose between being in an American prison and living in North Korea, not in prison, I'd have to sit down and do some serious thinking and research before I could make a decision.
:) Good point!