
North Korea’s one-percenters savor life in ‘Pyonghattan’ - JumpCrisscross
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/north-koreas-one-percenters-savor-life-in-pyonghattan/2016/05/14/9f3b47ea-15fa-11e6-971a-dadf9ab18869_story.html
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ktRolster
_electricity supply remains so patchy that the most-sought-after apartments
are the ones on the lower stories. Who wants a 20th-floor walk-up?_

~~~
hghdfgv
How do the 1 percent tolerate outages? They buy expensive goods, drive cars,
visit gyms, but at home they are on the same level as the 99%. I doubt it.

~~~
jonknee
We're still talking about the elite of a failed state, they aren't global
elite. A middle class South Korean certainly has a more elite lifestyle.

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Aelinsaar
Not so much to savor, especially since the entire country is a train wreck in
slow motion, with a soupcon of garbage fire. It only exists because China is
desperate to see them exist, and not experience the flood of refugees into
their border region. They already have a couple of million ethnic North
Koreans living there, and millions more would rush across to join them the
moment the DPRK looks like real collapse.

The problem is, that collapse is inevitable, and this reprieve is just giving
them time to brutalize their people, and to build and sell nuclear and missile
technology.

~~~
nxzero
America wants Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka North Korea) around
just as much as China does; excuse to have bases, destabilize region, military
budget, etc.

EDIT: Feel free to comment if you disagree, but this is not my opinion, but
that of pretty much anyone I've ever spoken with from Korea (North & South).
For that matter, if you believe the US is welcome in Japan, pull up Google
Maps, find an US AirForce base in Japan, then read what's write on the roofs
of buildings around the bases; here's a hint, doesn't read "Thank you" or
"Please stay."

~~~
marcoperaza
The US is the guarantor of stability in the region. The problems with the base
in Japan are classic NIMBYism, and I don't blame the residents. A bunch of
boisterous 20 year old Americans will probably disturb a peaceful Japanese
town.

Is the US claiming vast swaths of other country's territorial waters and
building military bases on artificial islands? No, that's China. The US
defends the countries that China is trying to bully that way.

South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, America. Seems like a righteous alliance of free
people defending themselves against evil from China and North Korea. The evil
of a boot stomping on a human face for eternity.

Edit: Any arguments from the downvoters?

~~~
krapp
> A bunch of boisterous 20 year old Americans will probably disturb a peaceful
> Japanese town.

Maybe you should at least read up on the history of Okinawa's occupation
before writing the effect of America's presence there off as "boisterous 20
year old Americans." How would Americans feel if China invaded California,
slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process of occupying
the land by force, completely destroying the local culture and economy, raping
and killing more or less without consequence, and then _never left?_

You can argue (probably correctly) that the US presence in Japan has done a
lot of good and that it's necessary for Asian stability, but I wouldn't write
off any anger or hostility that might be there as NIMBYism. They have
legitimate complaints about the way the US has conducted themselves.

~~~
marcoperaza
> _How would Americans feel if China invaded California, slaughtering hundreds
> of thousands of civilians in the process of occupying the land by force,
> completely destroying the local culture and economy, raping and killing more
> or less without consequence, and then never left?_

Your analogy is incomplete because you left out the part where this fictional
America conquered all of its neighbors and engaged in mass rape and murder and
was in the process of attempting global domination in tandem with the Nazis.
And if you're referring to the nuclear bombings, then perhaps you aren't aware
that the US had encountered nothing but total violent resistance from Japanese
populations that they had occupied. An invasion of the mainland would have
been an absolute blood bath, and Japan refused to surrender.

~~~
krapp
I was mostly talking about the destruction that was the Battle of Okinawa, and
the controversies that have surrounded the US military presence there
since[0]. But to be fair, the Japanese military wasn't much better to their
own people, starving, torturing and encouraging mass suicide.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forces_Japan#Con...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forces_Japan#Controversy_over_crimes)

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peter303
Sounds like Hungar Games class system

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digi_owl
Left, right, labels for who they are allied with. For all the rest its same
shit, different wrappings.

~~~
DonaldFisk
Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Under communism, it's the other
way around.

~~~
adventured
You of course have it exactly backwards.

Capitalism is a system of voluntary trade that functions best when force is
banished from trade, and is fully compatible with all sorts of variations of
representative government (which is why all the most prosperous representative
government nations utilize the free market).

Communism is the exact opposite, it can only continue to exist via extreme
violence, and relies on that violence to restrict as much as possible all free
action and thought by people (which inevitably includes eliminating all
rights, including property rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of press;
it's also why every attempt at Socialism and Communism has required a military
enforced dictatorship).

Capitalist oriented economies have produced standards of living for the poor
and median that tend to be a magnitude beyond what the absolute best Socialist
example has ever accomplished. There has yet to be a single Socialist nation
that has produced a high standard of living at the median in hundreds of years
of experimenting; there are dozens of wildly prosperous Capitalistic nations
that heavily utilize the free market.

Capitalistic nations: Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, US, England,
Ireland, Singapore, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria,
Belgium, Switzerland, Norway. They all utilize the free market mixed with
welfare state policies, and not one of them is even remotely close to being
Socialistic.

Socialist examples: Cambodia, Vietnam, Mao's China, Nazi Germany, Fascist
Italy, Soviet Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, the Eastern Bloc states, Fascist Spain,
North Korea

Nothing else could ever need to be said. The closer you get to implementing
actual Socialism, the greater the destruction.

~~~
DonaldFisk
Should I have used a smiley to indicate that my comment was a joke?

~~~
chillacy
I can only assume this poster's reply was also a joke, because he equates
communism and socialism, then equates it with military enforced dictatorship,
then lists oppressive countries that are dictatorships, then concludes that
socialism is bad. So, excellent parody of argument by logical fallacy.

------
api
Communism, ostensibly about eradicating class, seems to end in wealth
distributions that make ours look egalitarian.

Maybe we need an experiment in a society explicitly founded on elitism. Would
it turn into an egalitarian paradise?

~~~
jwdunne
This is the funny thing. Reading the definition of communism as per Marx and
comparing to NK... this isn't what communism was meant to be.

For a start, a heriditary totalitarian dictatorship is the antithesis of
communism.

I think the concept of communism sounds fantastic on paper for a lot of
people. The problem is that it is an idealistic social order that assumes one
person won't come along and manipulate the masses into transforming the whole
thing into a totalitarian dictatorship. It doesn't seem to consider the power
of crowd psychology, propaganda, etc, which would still exist in an
environment of 100% equality.

I think at the heart of it is that too much liberty would eventually lead to a
total loss of liberty. A nation with no state or laws? No one stopping a
charismatic leader gathering together enough resources to take over the
nation, implement a fascist state with 0 liberties. It would definitely happen
since history shows us it already has in conditions less favourable to such a
take over.

~~~
drostie
I'm not sure whether that last paragraph is spot-on or not. But it's going to
require a bit of a story to explain my thinking.

First off, I'm not sure you can classify Marx's communism as a "social order";
Marx is envisioning a systematic failure of capitalism as a cohesive
institution and pontificating about what might come in its wake. Because Marx
doesn't believe that change happens "naturally" but only in violent upheavals,
he thought "now is the time for a new social order!" in his own context, sure,
and supported a Communist Party, but his analysis in Das Kapital is much more
about the failure of capitalism with the increasing mechanization of the means
of production.

The point is basically that Marx wants to start every social analysis by
asking, "OK, in this society, who is the slave class? And who are the people
who own them?" Marx saw that industrialization was increasingly multiplying
the capabilities of this slave class, and indeed supplanting them. Marx
envisioned that eventually, the slave class would entirely consist of robots
of one form or another, with the only humans entering being the ones who
voluntarily wanted to do that sort of work -- sort of the model of the CEO who
leaves his cushy job because he wants to be a farmer at heart.

It's a very techno-utopian vision of the world, and it's hard to see what the
social order that lives atop this is going to be. Marx famously extrapolated
that the control of the 1% over the 99% was going to persist into this
technological switchover, and that the 99% was going to realize it and lead a
revolution-to-end-all-revolutions, because afterwards there would be born a
society where every human was guaranteed the basics of everything they need
(by the robot slaves and the volunteer slaves) and could pursue whatever
artistic calling suited them.

But that remarkably underspecifies the nature of the underlying state, of
course. The "nation with no state or laws" is one possibility, an anarcho-
communist vision, but there could also be a normal modern constitutional
republic, where there would be the normal boundaries in place preventing
people from gathering the resources to take over the nation. It's rather hard
to say.

~~~
mccoyspace
Your conclusion that it is "a very techno-utopian vision of the world" is
spot-on, and that's because of the key Marxist concept of Historical
Materialism, an idea that Marx developed prior to the work in Das Kapital. It
says that what people ARE is determined by the specific material conditions
that produce their world. [1]

Here's a quote that illustrates the idea: "The totality of the relations of
production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness." [2]

This notion comes from Marx's critique of Hegel and German idealist
philosophy. Marx believed that Hegel's notion of history [3] couldn't
adequately address it's own basis in time. (You might think of it as Marx
asking Hegel 'Why now?').

The ramifications of this idea that consciousness itself and one's very way of
being in the world are determined by the current forms of production has far
reaching echoes in 20th century western philosophy, with existentialism
("existence precedes essence"), phenomenology, and deconstruction ("any
description requires a prior Inscription') being examples.

Representative critiques of the idea come from "the outside" by Karl Popper
(who says the theory can't be falsified)[4] and from 'the inside' by Walter
Benjamin (who says the concept is indistinguishable from theology).[5]

But it's still a big idea.

[1] See "The German Ideology"
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-
ideo...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-
ideology/ch01a.htm) [2]
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-
po...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-
economy/preface.htm) [3]
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/#GerIde](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/#GerIde)
[4] fun animation here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-
sGqBsWv4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-sGqBsWv4) [5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theses_on_the_Philosophy_of_Hi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theses_on_the_Philosophy_of_History)

------
fche
"one-percenters"

Riiiiight, as though the ruling party of a totalitarian dictatorship deserved
the same appellation as the people of top productivity in a free country.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
> the people of top productivity

Have a source for this claim?

~~~
fche
It's almost trivial if you use the customary definition of "top 1%" as an
income percentile, and accept that income is a measure of productivity.

