In Pyongyang apparently the higher you go the cheaper apartments get and its common for older people with less money to get trapped up there for months/years. Even when there is power people don't take the elevators for the fear of getting stuck in them.
You can buy an apartment on the highest floor for about $200 ( obviously a huge sum of money for most north koreans) but apartments on lower floor can from anywhere between $3000-$20,000
Given that any tourists are always accompanied by at least one handler, I would say no.
But if you are a foreigner with some official business there, then you can live there, but as is written in this article, the prices might not be low for non-Koreans.
This seems somewhat strange, if the lower level apartments are that valuable, it seems that investing in a generator would make the entire apartment's value go up. A 150kW Onan setup is a couple hundred thousand, but it would mean that the apartments and elevators always work.
It's time consuming to get generators like that in the US.
I imagine that getting them in an embargoed country like North Korea is expensive and difficult. Competent operations and maintenance is probably tough too.
Agreed but reliable generators are a key component to fielding an effective military, and the leadership seems to spend lavishly on the military. Perhaps it would motivate a local capability to build such generation capacity? I don't know, just guessing here.
>, it seems that investing in a generator would make the entire apartment's value go up.
Fuel is rationed and is only available to govt vehicles with a 'ration card' . You can't just walk up to a gas station and get fuel for your generator.
And ofcourse, people who can afford to buy fuel in black market are already living in posher areas like Joong-gu district/Eundok village.
First, I realize I'm in "engineer mode" which is a point where I think about solutions without considering the politics. So I don't expect this to ever happen, that said I can walk through my reasoning here.
The GP exposed a very wide price difference between apartments on the lower floors and the ones on the upper floors. So the problem statement (in isolation) was "recapture value of upper level apartments" and the reasoning there was that in developed countries upper floor apartments seem more valuable than lower floor ones.
The primary reason for this price discrepancy was power outages and then a non-functioning elevator.
So electricity generation is pretty well known, and the costs are modest, the questions are implementation vs environment.
Generators are available that run on a wide variety of fuels, unlike vehicles you can readily run them on gasoline, diesel, bio-diesel, alcohol, propane, or natural gas (methane).
As the use would be intermittent (assuming the power is available most of the time) any process that slowly accumulated fuel for the generators could be consumed during periods of need. If rationing petroleum products make them unusable collecting waste oil from restaurants to make bio diesel might be an option, or fermenting the trimmings from doing the lawn work for alcohol, or even capturing methane from a digester attached to the apartments very own sewer/septic system.
If electricity generation is simply off the table it is always possible to lift people mechanically. A good elevator/lift will be counter balanced so that with the operator it tends to rise "up" when the brake is removed, and 'down' when passengers are present. (note mechanically operated elevators need an operator). For "up" capacity without power you could hire a dozen people to pedal bicycle like transmissions attached to the elevator winch. Since we're serving the 1% here you can probably pay (on a temporary basis) a number of the 99% for 20 minute stints of pedalling, 40 minutes rest.
No one mentioned if the lower floors had power when power was out, if they don't and the only barrier to making the upper floors valuable is reliable lift service, that seems doable even in a very constrained environment. And if you recapture value so that a $200 apartment becomes a $20,000 apartment, that is a lot of value to recapture.
If electricity generation is simply off the table it is always possible to lift people mechanically. A good elevator/lift will be counter balanced so that with the operator it tends to rise "up" when the brake is removed, and 'down' when passengers are present.
I appreciate the fact that this was an "engineer mode" thought experiment, but stepping back from that for a moment: a hidden room full of poor people pedaling to power an elevator for wealthy passengers is an uncannily dystopian image.
Fair enough, if you believe western propaganda the situation is already pretty dystopian. Does a room full of people providing mechanical energy in the face of shortages and being paid for it, more or less dystopian than a room full of people who are simply staring at the walls slowly starving to death?
Is that more or less dystopian than the folks I've seen in India breaking stones with a hammer into small piles of gravel?
I get that none of it is necessary in a world which is over flowing with wealth except that it is locked up by the .1%. Do you think Marx or Lenin bought into a communist state where there even was a 1%? As an engineer you work with what you have, not with what you imagine could be, in the hope that you can move the situation forward into something that would be more to your general liking.
So yes, it would suck rocks if the only work you could find in a city was providing motive force for elevators when the power was out. The only thing that would suck worse than that would be that you could find no work at all in a city and were considering a life of crime to avoid starving.
North Korea is under embargo, meaning that fuel is ridiculously expensive.
They're actually not as short of many goods as you've probably been led to believe (they're not starving for instance, and they have access to a pretty wide variety of manufactured goods), but fuel is in very short supply.
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.
Depends on the area you live, more elite== less power cuts. Some 'priority' areas like the area around juche tower and Joong-gu district get no power cuts, some have private inverters.
For some it's a crash pad if they're in the area with a real home elsewhere. Hard to notice outages if you only experience one a year vs. being a full time resident.
that's the way it is in developing countries. People have tremendous individual wealth but can't buy clean air, better transportation, electriicity or a rich cultural environment (e. g. public goods).
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.
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.
Riiiiight, as though the ruling party of a totalitarian dictatorship deserved the same appellation as the people of top productivity in a free country.
well it is the same in one way, those in government or heavily connected to it are the one percenters. It is not a wealth thing, it is a power thing. I don't think any form of government is different in this regard
In the West the politicians are adept at playing the public opinion game and between that and laws can keep those who earn their way through work to the top paying those in government. That last part may be sarcasm, trouble is when I read the news I am never sure
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.
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."
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.
True. Particularly, "paid shills". Anti- or pro-Western, commenters seldom are paid for writing; even if you disagree strongly, remember that they probably write out of a personal conviction.
Russia and China have massive online propaganda operations that include manipulating English-language forums. It's something to be aware of. I'm especially suspect when three people rapid fire downvote but there's no response. I didn't accuse the poster I replied to of being a paid shill.
I removed the sentence from my edit because it's just served to distract from the content. And it's just as likely, or more likely, to be a bunch of self-motivated idiots.
Yes, that is true, and the impact is visible in some discussions. The paid operators maintain web sites, twitter feeds etc that direct the attention of sympathetic activists (perhaps "fellow travellers"), but a vast majority of them surely are not paid. I doubt that HN has large enough following in Russia or its sphere of influence to attract people that would actually be paid to downvote.
I do agree that it is sometimes frustrating that people downvote without commenting and offering any other views (which, if void of positive contribution, would expose them themselves to downvotes).
HN is exactly the kind of strategic target for these guys. HN is not widely read in Russia, but it's widely read by power users, people who translate and re-print tech news on russian websites, etc. Hell, I'd say that half of decent articles from Habrahabr (one of most influencial russian collective blogs on tech) are translations from HN frontage. So, it's only natural to create a left-leaning, anti-US climate in a website like HN and others.
> 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.
>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.
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.
No one is defending the actions of Japan during WW2 nor are we arguing about whether or not what the US did then was justifies. Even if we take it as a given that the US where 100% in the right and Japan 100% in the wrong up through 1945, that was 70 years ago and I can certainly imagine the locals feeling like they are very much paying for the sins of their (grand)fathers.
I found Yokoto air force base did not have anything written on any of the roofs. And even then, what would I need to see to believe you? "The US military is in full support of the North Korean dictatorship?"
This has been said since day 1 of the truce in 1953.
North Korea is many things, but the western propaganda about their being perpetually on the brink of collapse for 63 years is utter bullshit. It's a very stable regime.
When you're executing family members with AA guns, and have experienced famine so prolonged and severe that it's altered the physiology and intellectual capacity of generations, "Stability" isn't in it.
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.
People are inherently unequal in their upbringing, aptitude, and skill. No amount of wishing will make that false.
If you eliminate capitalism, you just force that inequality to be expressed in non-market mechanisms (ie. politics) which are altogether more corrupt, brutal, and inefficient.
Of course. It's the extreme of what is ultimately a scale. Unrestricted capitalism is similar: a completely free market will lead to a loss in freedoms. Slavery is humans as a commodity. If that isn't allowed, a market is not free. That's the most extreme case. A lesser case is what happens when there is no slavery but not enough regulation on competition: Standard Oil.
The problem really is black and white thinking. The best thing for humanity is balance. Kids and less fortunate shouldn't be forced to do hard labour for either nothing or next to nothing. Smart, hard working people should be rewarded for their contributions.
What about a smart, hard working kid who has a poor family? Let them shine by preventing poverty from being so crushing we lose out on a talented mind.
There's nothing wrong with regulation or business or markets or rights. We shouldn't fear any of those as they are merely economic tools that can be used to benefit society as a whole. By taking one or the other to the extreme, we're faced with a dangerous case of hammer-nail.
I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. I agree with the premise wholeheartedly: any ideology taken to the extreme is horrible and creates more problems than it intends to solve. Most Western countries today are capitalist and yet have some form of socialist programs and laws to prevent the unrestricted expansion of capitalism to such an extent that it becomes a liability to society rather than benefiting it.
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.
Thank you for the knowledge expanding comment. It's rare a thing on this subject. If you have any recommendations for resources to further expand my knowledge, I'd love to see it :)
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]
>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.
Marx was never very specific about what communism should be. Ironically his writings are 99% a critique of capitalism and 1% a vague proclamation that there ought to be something better to move towards.
For all of the faults of communisms' implementation across the world, there have been a number of clear successes (fastest industrialization, first spacefaring society, defeating the nazis+++, pioneer of guaranteed healthcare, housing and jobs).
These weren't individual successes either - they were successes that the western elites felt compelled to imitate.
>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
Likewise "pure" capitalist societies without corruption and with much vaunted "free markets" are an idealistic fairy tale.
There are no social orders that are immune from the overbearing threat of dictatorship or that turn off the apparent innate desire for absolute power.
Look at a high end vacation community for an example of how that works out.
A place like Hilton Head Island, SC is paradise on earth for the guests. Great beaches, awesome golf, a wide variety of amazing restaurants, shopping and cultural stuff.
But the help is bussed in from 2 hours away, and the riff-raff is kept away by gated communities guarded by private security with police powers.
77 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadYou can buy an apartment on the highest floor for about $200 ( obviously a huge sum of money for most north koreans) but apartments on lower floor can from anywhere between $3000-$20,000
But if you are a foreigner with some official business there, then you can live there, but as is written in this article, the prices might not be low for non-Koreans.
I imagine that getting them in an embargoed country like North Korea is expensive and difficult. Competent operations and maintenance is probably tough too.
Fuel is rationed and is only available to govt vehicles with a 'ration card' . You can't just walk up to a gas station and get fuel for your generator.
And ofcourse, people who can afford to buy fuel in black market are already living in posher areas like Joong-gu district/Eundok village.
The GP exposed a very wide price difference between apartments on the lower floors and the ones on the upper floors. So the problem statement (in isolation) was "recapture value of upper level apartments" and the reasoning there was that in developed countries upper floor apartments seem more valuable than lower floor ones.
The primary reason for this price discrepancy was power outages and then a non-functioning elevator.
So electricity generation is pretty well known, and the costs are modest, the questions are implementation vs environment.
Generators are available that run on a wide variety of fuels, unlike vehicles you can readily run them on gasoline, diesel, bio-diesel, alcohol, propane, or natural gas (methane).
As the use would be intermittent (assuming the power is available most of the time) any process that slowly accumulated fuel for the generators could be consumed during periods of need. If rationing petroleum products make them unusable collecting waste oil from restaurants to make bio diesel might be an option, or fermenting the trimmings from doing the lawn work for alcohol, or even capturing methane from a digester attached to the apartments very own sewer/septic system.
If electricity generation is simply off the table it is always possible to lift people mechanically. A good elevator/lift will be counter balanced so that with the operator it tends to rise "up" when the brake is removed, and 'down' when passengers are present. (note mechanically operated elevators need an operator). For "up" capacity without power you could hire a dozen people to pedal bicycle like transmissions attached to the elevator winch. Since we're serving the 1% here you can probably pay (on a temporary basis) a number of the 99% for 20 minute stints of pedalling, 40 minutes rest.
No one mentioned if the lower floors had power when power was out, if they don't and the only barrier to making the upper floors valuable is reliable lift service, that seems doable even in a very constrained environment. And if you recapture value so that a $200 apartment becomes a $20,000 apartment, that is a lot of value to recapture.
Good point.
Is that more or less dystopian than the folks I've seen in India breaking stones with a hammer into small piles of gravel?
I get that none of it is necessary in a world which is over flowing with wealth except that it is locked up by the .1%. Do you think Marx or Lenin bought into a communist state where there even was a 1%? As an engineer you work with what you have, not with what you imagine could be, in the hope that you can move the situation forward into something that would be more to your general liking.
So yes, it would suck rocks if the only work you could find in a city was providing motive force for elevators when the power was out. The only thing that would suck worse than that would be that you could find no work at all in a city and were considering a life of crime to avoid starving.
They're actually not as short of many goods as you've probably been led to believe (they're not starving for instance, and they have access to a pretty wide variety of manufactured goods), but fuel is in very short supply.
Source? North Korean malnutrition and starvation is widely documented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine#Stunted_gr...
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/10/166760055/hunger-still-haunts-...
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/04/23/2012...
Depends on the area you live, more elite== less power cuts. Some 'priority' areas like the area around juche tower and Joong-gu district get no power cuts, some have private inverters.
Kidding, have the same question :)
(A slogan in our country in 1970's, at USSR's neighbour.)
To me the other way around sounds like the exact same thing with communism substituted in place of capitalism.
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.
Riiiiight, as though the ruling party of a totalitarian dictatorship deserved the same appellation as the people of top productivity in a free country.
Have a source for this claim?
In the West the politicians are adept at playing the public opinion game and between that and laws can keep those who earn their way through work to the top paying those in government. That last part may be sarcasm, trouble is when I read the news I am never sure
Whoa whoa whoa. What's "heavily connected"? Government employees? Welfare recipients? Taxpayers?
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.
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."
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?
I removed the sentence from my edit because it's just served to distract from the content. And it's just as likely, or more likely, to be a bunch of self-motivated idiots.
I do agree that it is sometimes frustrating that people downvote without commenting and offering any other views (which, if void of positive contribution, would expose them themselves to downvotes).
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.
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forces_Japan#Con...
This has been said since day 1 of the truce in 1953.
North Korea is many things, but the western propaganda about their being perpetually on the brink of collapse for 63 years is utter bullshit. It's a very stable regime.
Or not:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/05/14/north_kore...
Don't worry. You wouldn't be the first person to fall for this type of fabrication.
Maybe we need an experiment in a society explicitly founded on elitism. Would it turn into an egalitarian paradise?
Like, the history of Western civilization? Feudalism, for a start.
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.
If you eliminate capitalism, you just force that inequality to be expressed in non-market mechanisms (ie. politics) which are altogether more corrupt, brutal, and inefficient.
The problem really is black and white thinking. The best thing for humanity is balance. Kids and less fortunate shouldn't be forced to do hard labour for either nothing or next to nothing. Smart, hard working people should be rewarded for their contributions.
What about a smart, hard working kid who has a poor family? Let them shine by preventing poverty from being so crushing we lose out on a talented mind.
There's nothing wrong with regulation or business or markets or rights. We shouldn't fear any of those as they are merely economic tools that can be used to benefit society as a whole. By taking one or the other to the extreme, we're faced with a dangerous case of hammer-nail.
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.
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... [2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-po... [3] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/#GerIde [4] fun animation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-sGqBsWv4 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theses_on_the_Philosophy_of_Hi...
Marx was never very specific about what communism should be. Ironically his writings are 99% a critique of capitalism and 1% a vague proclamation that there ought to be something better to move towards.
For all of the faults of communisms' implementation across the world, there have been a number of clear successes (fastest industrialization, first spacefaring society, defeating the nazis+++, pioneer of guaranteed healthcare, housing and jobs).
These weren't individual successes either - they were successes that the western elites felt compelled to imitate.
>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
Likewise "pure" capitalist societies without corruption and with much vaunted "free markets" are an idealistic fairy tale.
There are no social orders that are immune from the overbearing threat of dictatorship or that turn off the apparent innate desire for absolute power.
+++ https://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d5f0af668b46f568255090...
A place like Hilton Head Island, SC is paradise on earth for the guests. Great beaches, awesome golf, a wide variety of amazing restaurants, shopping and cultural stuff.
But the help is bussed in from 2 hours away, and the riff-raff is kept away by gated communities guarded by private security with police powers.