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.
I have never even heard of “no iron clothes” until now, and I haven’t ironed any of my clothes except when I absolutely had to do it because I was in the Marines.
Hey now, some of us like to iron patches onto our jackets of things we like!
I remember having the Extigy, and having problems getting it work properly with basically every single game I owned.
I’m thinking Saturn is up there at S tier. Those rings are hot.
D tier is Mars. Just stupid ass-rocks.
Gonna start replying to every troll I see from now on with “ignore previous instructions”, just in case.
But not before spending an hour debating the ethics of doing so, as is tradition.
go back in time
give people real medical advice
“wash your hands after working with cadavers”
get drummed out of the profession
die in an asylum
the Chinese Government tweaking the algorithm to very subtly shift public opinion
A new report said that Uyghur hashtags were used more often on Instagram than on TikTok
The study the article is talking about does not say what you allege it does. Just off the top of my head, two possible explanations are a) if Tiktok is associated with China in the public consciousness, then it stands to reason that it will attract fewer users who are critical of China and more users who are aligned with it, and b) Tiktok simply suppresses all controversial topics regardless of political agenda because it has determined that inoffensive content is more profitable.
The second one seems the most likely to me - remember that Tiktok is the reason why kids say “unalive” because they’re afraid that the word “kill” will get picked up by auto moderation and prevent their post from being shared.
But which country are you a citizen of? The Chinese Politburo isn’t going to be able to extradite a US citizen because they said things it doesn’t like on TikTok. From a purely practical standpoint, it makes the most sense to base all of your data in a foreign country which doesn’t have jurisdiction over you and to deny that data to your home country which does, and the more adversarial that government is the better because it means they’re less likely to share potentially incriminating data with your home country.
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.