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Negrostrike posted:We're talking about a regime which promotes itself as a self-sufficient modernized country, that still uses untreated poo poo to fertilize its fields. I'll admit I'm not sure how common is that specifically, maybe India? Seems like North Koreans have way more intestinal parasites than they should according to that BBC story. Also holy poo poo operating a guy with poo poo and worms crawling everywhere. I guess, your original post just read like a guy that wasn't aware how much "biosolids" were potentially on their own food. Not someone that was shocked at the treatment level of that biosolid.
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Nov 17, 2017 19:34
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Well, parasites like that are common in areas with no water/waste treatment, particularly where people and livestock bathe and drink from contaminated water sources for long periods of time. The developing world solution (including South Korea in the bad old dictatorship days) is usually antiparasitic drugs, which are cheap and don't require frequent use to keep things reasonably under control. The problem is that the systems providing medicine and healthcare broke down in the 90's after Soviet aid halted and the DPRK started consolidating resources for the military, similar to when government food rationing fell apart. The lower rungs of society have been on their own for a while and I'm guessing antiparasitic drugs are pretty low on the black market purchase list.
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Nov 17, 2017 20:34
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Warbadger posted:Well, parasites like that are common in areas with no water/waste treatment, particularly where people and livestock bathe and drink from contaminated water sources for long periods of time. Also the US south is having a massive resurgence in hookworm infections which is a really big deal because untreated childhood hookworms make your brain permanently dumb. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-lowndes-county-alabama-water-waste-treatment-poverty
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Nov 17, 2017 20:56
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Looks like we discovered yet another reason to nuke NK from orbit: Surgeons find never-before-seen parasite in body of defector who was shot 5 times while escaping North Korea
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Nov 18, 2017 01:58
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Never let it be said that North Korea didn't contribute to global knowledge.
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Nov 18, 2017 03:02
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maskenfreiheit posted:Looks like we discovered yet another reason to nuke NK from orbit: Never seen in Korea. Which describes many parasites
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Nov 18, 2017 03:06
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:US south [...] permanently dumb. It's a cheap shot, but it suddenly all makes sense.
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Nov 18, 2017 03:20
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Never seen in Korea. Which describes many parasites Probably should firebomb just to be safe. For public health.
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Nov 18, 2017 03:23
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WarpedNaba posted:It's a cheap shot, but it suddenly all makes sense. It's not even a cheap shot or a joke. It's a super big deal thing! Hookwork infected like 40% of people in certain southern states until a big push to cure it in the 1950s but now it's coming back and that is nightmarish. It's like lead where it breaks your brain forever and there is no way to fully fix it ever again for your entire life. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-3156.1999.00410.x/abstract;jsessionid=3D52EC59A27C40069C36B2222509F890.f04t04 The association between helminth infection and cognitive and motor function was investigated in school-age children in Java, Indonesia. 432 children from 42 primary schools participated in the study. Children were stratified by age and sex into two age groups, 8–9 years and 11–13 years. Children infected with hookworm performed significantly worse than children without hookworm infection in 6 of the 14 cognitive or motor tests. After controlling for school (as a random effect) plus age, socio-economic status and parental education, sex, stunting (height-for-age < − 2sd), body mass index, haemoglobin concentration and the presence of A. lumbricoides and T. trichiura infections, infection with hookworm explained significantly lower scores on tests of Fluency (P < 0.01), Digit-Span Forwards (P < 0.01), Number Choice (P < 0.01), Picture Search (P < 0.03), Stroop Colour Word (P < 0.02) and Mazes (P < 0.001). In 4 of the 6-tests (Fluency, Number Choice, Picture Search and Mazes), there was a significant interaction between hookworm infection and age (P < 0.03), indicating that the association between hookworm and lower test scores increased with age.
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Nov 18, 2017 03:59
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maskenfreiheit posted:Wapo has a good longread out: It's weird reading articles like this where half the stuff they're talking about is also emblematic of lower class economic issues in the United States, South Korea, or most of the developed world really, but the tone of the article acts like these are completely alien concepts that are unheard of outside of the dystopian North Korean nightmare. Even when Western journalists can get their heads out of their asses long enough to do some actual reporting it's painfully obvious that they come from totally different backgrounds than the rest of us. I mean, hell, "no one expects the government to provide things anymore"? This country has an entire political movement slavishly devoted to the idea that the government should never provide anything, to anyone, under any circumstances, and they currently control the government. How in the world is that supposed to be any kind of super slam against the North Korean regime? If the people telling these stories were from Africa, we'd have horrible thinkpieces praising their entrepreneurial spirit. Hookworm chat is more of the same thing. Legitimately bizarre that we're way more likely to hear about North Korea's parasite problems than our own, when the latter is obviously a lot more relevant to our daily lives. But there's also one of my favorite ironies- anyone voicing negative opinions of the Kim regime in any context is sent off to jail, yet at the same time "everybody knew that Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un were both liars". Simultaneously the North Korean state is so all-powerful as to render free thought impossible yet any actual North Korean person anyone can find has no trouble expressing ambivalent opinions about the Kims. Through a constant shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Read any North Korean article with that thought in mind and all of a sudden they make a lot more sense rhetorically.
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Nov 18, 2017 05:42
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You can make up literally any outlandish story about North Korea (or the Soviet Union when that was still a thing) and it doesn’t even need to make sense or be logistically possible and people will just accept it and embellish it the next time they retell the story.
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Nov 18, 2017 06:15
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Some Guy TT posted:It's weird reading articles like this where half the stuff they're talking about is also emblematic of lower class economic issues in the United States, South Korea, or most of the developed world really, but the tone of the article acts like these are completely alien concepts that are unheard of outside of the dystopian North Korean nightmare. Yeah, loving fake news! Those jerks at NYT are sullying Our Boy’s Good Name And It’s Not Ok! actually NK is bad and the victims of its literal multi generation concentration camps would be happier in death
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Nov 18, 2017 06:18
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maskenfreiheit posted:Yeah, loving fake news! Those jerks at NYT are sullying Our Boy’s Good Name And It’s Not Ok! It being bad is what makes people so hungry to think stuff like “Koreans think their leader doesn’t poop” when you can trivially look that story up and see it was the most boring analogy about teachers ever made.
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Nov 18, 2017 06:21
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Some Guy TT posted:It's weird reading articles like this where half the stuff they're talking about is also emblematic of lower class economic issues in the United States, South Korea, or most of the developed world really, but the tone of the article acts like these are completely alien concepts that are unheard of outside of the dystopian North Korean nightmare. Even when Western journalists can get their heads out of their asses long enough to do some actual reporting it's painfully obvious that they come from totally different backgrounds than the rest of us. I mean, hell, "no one expects the government to provide things anymore"? This country has an entire political movement slavishly devoted to the idea that the government should never provide anything, to anyone, under any circumstances, and they currently control the government. How in the world is that supposed to be any kind of super slam against the North Korean regime? If the people telling these stories were from Africa, we'd have horrible thinkpieces praising their entrepreneurial spirit. Hookworm chat is more of the same thing. Legitimately bizarre that we're way more likely to hear about North Korea's parasite problems than our own, when the latter is obviously a lot more relevant to our daily lives. It sounds like you're projecting what you think the article is more than what it actually is, dude. I agree that the general state of reporting on North Korea is garbage, but Anna Fifield is actually pretty good. drat near the entire article is direct quotes from defectors, and she even goes over how most of them are from one subset of the population and from the poorer regions. Maybe she should have emphasized more than she already did that defectors are gonna be self-selected to be distrustful of the regime more than average, and maybe read that experience into the general population more than is actually the reality, but I think that's an expectation your average reader should really try to account for for themselves when they're reading any quotes like this. And yeah there should be more coverage of issues like this in the developed world too, that doesn't mean this article can't exist though.
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Nov 18, 2017 08:00
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Some parts of their stories cannot be independently verified because of the secretive nature of the regime, and their names have been withheld to protect their family members still in North Korea. They were introduced to The Post by groups that help North Korean escapees, including No Chain for North Korea, Woorion and Liberty in North Korea.
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Nov 18, 2017 08:11
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Many are from the northern parts of the country that border China — the part of North Korea where life is toughest, and where knowledge about the outside world just across the river is most widespread — and are from the relatively small segment of the population that is prepared to take the risks involved in trying to escape. she coulda said more about it but it's not like she's leading people on about it or anything, and for that matter i don't think coming off as though you're trying to discredit the whole subject of your article is really helpful (or even necessarily more accurate) either
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Nov 18, 2017 08:15
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anna fifeld is a hack and posts the same "wowee zowee this looks like a real, normal country but everything's a show" routine as the other bad foreign correspondents on her social media accounts
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Nov 18, 2017 08:20
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R. Guyovich posted:Some parts of their stories cannot be independently verified because of the secretive nature of the regime, and their names have been withheld to protect their family members still in North Korea. They were introduced to The Post by groups that help North Korean escapees, including No Chain for North Korea, Woorion and Liberty in North Korea. Dude. Jesus Christ, are you serious? "Heh, looks like they're all paid shills, man I sure got them!  " That's your take on a wide variety of the most powerful personal accounts we're likely to get in the open press about the decline of life in an autocratic regime?
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Nov 18, 2017 08:25
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hmm
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Nov 18, 2017 08:25
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TsarZiedonis posted:Dude. Jesus Christ, are you serious? do you think there's somehow a shortage of stories in the western press about dprk defectors
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Nov 18, 2017 08:31
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also defectors are literally paid, the rok government upped its cash rewards for defectors to $860k last year
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Nov 18, 2017 08:34
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i still can't tell if you're actually real or not
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Nov 18, 2017 08:36
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So people who flee from the poorest part of a poor country with nothing but the clothes on their back to a place with a GDP ~79 times greater than the country they left should just be dumped on the streets of Seoul with nothing but a warm smile and a thumbs-up? Thanks, R. Guyovich!
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Nov 18, 2017 08:44
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Koramei posted:i still can't tell if you're actually real or not i'm not. this is all happening in your mind hailthefish posted:So people who flee from the poorest part of a poor country with nothing but the clothes on their back to a place with a GDP ~79 times greater than the country they left should just be dumped on the streets of Seoul with nothing but a warm smile and a thumbs-up? that's basically what happens unless you have outlandish stories to tell. the big money is for people with sensitive information or the most shocking anecdotes. the worse, the better
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Nov 18, 2017 08:55
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If only they'd pay you to stop posting. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 18, 2017 08:56
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Nobody is arguing that North Korea isn't a poor country with an incredibly corrupt, oppressive government. But if you think that anonymous accounts from defectors are at all representative of the state of the country, particularly when getting paid for their stories is standard practice, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
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Nov 18, 2017 10:10
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uh so i guess there are 0 problems in north Korea, everyone is super rich, eats three meals a day and can just go in and out of the country whenever he likes
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Nov 18, 2017 10:58
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and all those accounts are all lies
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Nov 18, 2017 10:58
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No one is saying that Annie May
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Nov 18, 2017 11:05
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Also the US south is having a massive resurgence in hookworm infections which is a really big deal because untreated childhood hookworms make your brain permanently dumb. This is another variant of us infrastructure falling apart. I am not surprised by anything happen in Alabama. When you are obsessed with doomsday apocalyptic scenarios for decades in popular media, eventually it will bleed into the real world.
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Nov 18, 2017 11:38
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R. Guyovich posted:anna fifeld is a hack and posts the same "wowee zowee this looks like a real, normal country but everything's a show" routine as the other bad foreign correspondents on her social media accounts Yeah, she's probably not the worst, but seems to me pretty much representative of Western reporting on East Asia, that is to say not very good Does she actually speak Korean at least? icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Nov 18, 2017 |
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Nov 18, 2017 11:40
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icantfindaname posted:Yeah, she's probably not the worst, but seems to me pretty much representative of Western reporting on East Asia, that is to say not very good based on her live interviews during the wpk congress i think she has some understanding but still uses an interpreter (note the korean person who gets sub byline credit for this story. you notice it with western reporters embedded in china, too)
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Nov 18, 2017 12:02
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Lol. There should be a law that if you can't read a newspaper in the local language you don't get to report on a country
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Nov 18, 2017 12:07
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Defectors from any regime exaggerating their stories is a well studied and common psychological phenomenon. That doesn't mean their stories aren't all rooted in fact, and especially doesn't mean they should all be smugly dismissed as charlatans. Just because they're reporting on horrific systemic abuse from a government on your "team" doesn't mean you get to smear them all as liars.
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Nov 18, 2017 13:59
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I Love Annie May posted:uh so i guess there are 0 problems in north Korea, everyone is super rich, eats three meals a day and can just go in and out of the country whenever he likes The only choices aren't "it's good" or "every single made up thing anyone ever has said is 100% exactly true". Look up old soviet union propaganda and then look up historical accounts, bad stuff really happened in the USSR but a bunch of the reports and propaganda is just crazy go nuts stuff that would never happen on the planet earth
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Nov 18, 2017 15:00
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The North Korean government has nobody to blame but themselves for their defectors getting huge cash rewards for the flimsiest tidbits of poorly-sourced/false claims. They're the ones creating an artificial scarcity of verifiable information, after all. 
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Nov 18, 2017 15:50
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Who to blame doesn't really matter, what matters is what is actually going on there and it seems like we won't really know that for sure until the situation changes dramatically
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Nov 18, 2017 21:45
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TsarZiedonis posted:Defectors from any regime exaggerating their stories is a well studied and common psychological phenomenon. That doesn't mean their stories aren't all rooted in fact, and especially doesn't mean they should all be smugly dismissed as charlatans. Yeah, it's this. To be clear, I think most of the stories mentioned in the Washington Post story are true. The main issue I have with them is that the author is presenting them in such a way as to imply that North Korean people are suffering uniquely evil problems. If you were to ask, say, typical Mexican or Indian immigrants about why they left their country they'd tell you very similar stories with a very similar slant if they thought they would be paid more for talking poo poo about their governments. More than their being lies, though, the main issue with these stories is that they're very unpersuasive to people suffering similar problems. The main source of anti--North Korean propaganda in South Korea right now takes the form of variety shows tih large panels of defectors. While there's an obvious slant at work that's sending the message that the North Korean is evil and should be thrown in thye dust-bin of history, all the stuff the defectors talk about is just perfectly relatable stores about lacking money or dealing with official corruption or just generic Korean culture problems like arguing over which relatives should be prioritized for getting oranges for presents. It's one reason why any sentiment toward war is met with such hostility right now. If your main face for North Korea is not an evil government stooge, but a normal friendly housewife who could be your neighbor, why in the world would you want to declare war against them?
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Nov 19, 2017 04:24
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Some Guy TT posted:Yeah, it's this. To be clear, I think most of the stories mentioned in the Washington Post story are true. The main issue I have with them is that the author is presenting them in such a way as to imply that North Korean people are suffering uniquely evil problems. If you were to ask, say, typical Mexican or Indian immigrants about why they left their country they'd tell you very similar stories with a very similar slant if they thought they would be paid more for talking poo poo about their governments. Difference is, if I want other coverage of goings on in Mexico, I can read local media, or foreign correspondents of international media, and get a different slant. The North Korean government makes this impossible, so state propaganda and defectors is all we've got.
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Nov 19, 2017 04:28
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Difference is, if I want other coverage of goings on in Mexico, I can read local media, or foreign correspondents of international media, and get a different slant. The North Korean government makes this impossible, so state propaganda and defectors is all we've got. Mexico is actually a pretty good example of the press being forced into silence under the threat of death. But the overall point is still there.
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Nov 19, 2017 04:34
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