>According to the North Korean daily Nodong Sinmun (Worker's Newspaper), the leadership was fighting a guerrilla war against the possible incursion of capitalism into the sphere of personal appearance.
So what you will about free, market-controlled economies, but the current alternatives sure don’t look too good for the “worker”
North Korea tries strictly control its citizens because it's a totalitarian dictatorship. That doesn't even have anything to do with economics. Don't assume everything the North Korean government says makes sense.
If you think of the situation in North Korea as a hostage situation, you wi find that the action of the criminals ( the government ) is generally rational.
This is a really sophomoric opinion. Do you really want to throw down, I.E sum total of worker suffering introduced by capitalistic states vs socialistic vs communistic?
If I can prove with mutually agreed facts that capitalism has a higher body count that any other political system, will you agree to change your position.
I've seen it before -- it involves blaming basically all war and all deaths under market economies on capitalism and doing serious gymnastics on deaths under non-market economies of the "it wasn't real socialism!" sort.
Usually it's Western Capitalism vs Communist [Dictatorship] Regimes and the argument is entirely valid. If you're forced in to it it's not communism -- people won't in general follow an ideology that contradicts their natural propensity to greed and winning above others (pride), so it generally is not communism when you're talking about groups above a small town size.
I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to transition from our widely oppressive capitalistic system to a more communistic one in a way to accommodates people's propensity towards greed and still maintain democratic freedoms to the greatest extent. It's something that in the long term might solve a lot of our overuse of resources.
> I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to transition from our widely oppressive capitalistic system to a more communistic one
The problem, of course, is that without force they’re short lived, like volatile molecules exposed to air. All matter eventually retreats to its most stable form.
Of course, nothing stops like minded individuals from forming communist societies (communes), and they do sometimes. Even a small one doesn’t stay together long without force or a very strong binding identity, such as religion or family.
If you're going to play "it isn't real socialism," then you have to play "it isn't real capitalism." I'm pro-free market with an econ background, and I'll be the first to tell you that virtually nothing in Western "capitalism" is all that recognizable as something promoted by free market economists.
I think this is acknowledged by the opening "This is a really sophomoric opinion."
Even so, if you agree upon the metric and then use it to rank systems, if one system ranks better then you have "proven", by the agreed upon terms of comparison, that this system is superior. There may be other systems outside the ranking, but your proposal was to rank certain specific systems, not to discover the optimal system.
I've never hardly known a free, or market-controlled anything in my entire life. What we have is corporatism, where giant companies go to government and lobby for monopolies of one kind or another. There is no actual competition, only a semblance of competition.
As bad as life may be for the average worker, it was far worse in the Soviet Union. Living inside the Iron Curtain sucked massively unless you were a member of the party elite, and then it was literally a party.
Same as it ever was--every system will be subverted by some tiny elite so that they can rule you and live the high life while you toil. The only thing that has ever partially solved the problem is for regular people to fight them.
It's sort of funny that this was an actual TV program, but the association of hairstyle with personal virtue and shared political views is a much broader phenomenon. As a current example, online political activists/commentators have been known in recent years to disparagingly refer to people as having "fashy" or "feminist" hair.
This argument is pretty poor IMO - hair styles common to certain light-skinned people, skinhead and mohicans (say), are banned in many schools and places of work (in UK) too.
It's weird to me that people get dictatorial about hair (but understandable in the sense that people will control what they feel they can to assert their dominance; petty power plays are rife in human society) but it doesn't seem racist.
It's racist when the styles that are banned are what certain ethnic groups' hair does if you don't take any special effort to style it—you just let it grow out and tend it normally—or if they're a very culturally common style among that ethnic group.
Skinheads and mohawks are banned because they are strongly associated with violence and gang activity. Are you saying it's fine to associate traditional hairstyles of those of African heritage with violence and gang activity?
The problem with associating the skinhead haircut with skinheads is, it's also associated with balding men who would rather not fight the inevitable and look sad trying =P
I totally agree, particularly since I've been balding since about 20.
However, there is a genuine link between skinheads and violence—including neo-Nazism. The only link between hairstyles traditional to those of African descent and violence is racism and stereotyping.
Oh, I don't deny the link between skinheads and violence (to do so would be a farce). It's just a bit frustrating to be a white male who happens to shave his head in a VERY liberal city and deal with judgmental looks (oddly enough, only from well to do young to middle aged white people, which is hilarious).
" there is a genuine link between skinheads and violence—including neo-Nazism"
True, but skinheads started as movement heavily influenced by Jamaicans and Jamaican music. The Nazi thing came later, but there have always been non-Nazi skinhead subgroups, like SHARPS (Skinheads against racial prejudice).
A girlfriend of mine in college in the 90s was a Jewish skinhead at the time.
Wikipedia:
In the earlier stages of the movement, a considerable overlap existed between early skinhead subculture, mod subculture, and the rude boy subculture found among Jamaican British and Jamaican immigrant youth, as these three groups interacted and fraternized with each other within the same working class and poor neighbourhoods in Britain.[2] As skinheads adopted elements of mod subculture and Jamaican British and Jamaican immigrant rude boy subculture, both first and second generation skins were influenced by the heavy, repetitive rhythms of dub and ska, as well as rocksteady, reggae, bluebeat, and African-American soul music.[2][3][4]
Well long hair happens with people regardless of skin colour, you can be ginger and have a fro -- long hair (for boys), or long hair that's not tied back (for anyone) is often against rules, which seems analogous to the fro situation?
wrt dreds, they're not just uncut are they, I've seen plenty of light-skinned people with dreds. They're a sort of loose matting? Dreds in the UK are associated with "crusties", hippy eco-activists.
Mohicans, mohawks if you like, were associated with punk many years ago but there's no connection now AFAICT, and whats wrong with punk?
In the late 60s, people took long hair very seriously, up to the point of writing angsty, tormented songs like "Almost Cut My Hair" by CSNY. Five or six years before that, "long hair" meant someone who knew a lot about classical music and fine art.
I'd argue that the people who assaulted and forcibly cut the long hair of men or banned men with long hair from (non-professional) establishments were taking it far more seriously.
Ah you mean the alt right guy who was sporting a Peaky Blinders cut - he would have lasted about 20 seconds down summer lane back in the day.
For those of you not from Brumingham Summer Lane was the really rough area - think the street that had the Garrison pub in the first season of peaky blinders.
I can remember hearing my grandparents mention that the police dint go there in threes they went in platoon strength.
Hair has long been a "factional" association mark because of the commitment. Just look at the queue before the fall of the empire which mandated it. Cutting it was essentially seen as a declaration of treason against their social order by defying the order.
And it continued beyond then with things like natural hair vs powdered wigs as political statements.
There were a dizzying number of associations in the 20th century alone.
I’ve always been intrigued by the heavy use of “let’s” in texts translated from Japanese and Korean in the past. I didn’t understand if it was a stylistic choice by translators, or if those languages did actually use it that much? It sounds so stilted in English, what linguistic mechanics make it not so in those languages?
Turns out it’s its own verb tense! It’s called the “volitional” and you use it when you want to emphasize that you want to do something, typically with the person you’re speaking to. The best way to render it in English is by using “let’s” (“let’s go eat”).
It sounds perfectly normal and commonplace to me (British).
- Let's see...
- Oh yes, let's!
- Uh, no, let's not.
- Let's think of another example...
- Let's stop there.
Google Ngram Viewer does put it at about 8x more common (contemporarily) in British English than American English though, and with a shorter history in the latter.
It's strange in the title of this article because there is not really an "us" that makes sense for a phrasing like "let us". "Let's trim our hair" sort of implies a small informal social grouping, likely physically present, deciding to get haircuts, or maybe even cut it at home together. Not on the scale of an entire nation.
It is a typical propaganda slogan pattern. "Let's fullfil our 5 year plan commitments!"
It shouldn't be a command "do this...!" as if coming from a dictator, but a request to work together as if coming from a worker comrade. Because it is a Democracy. It's right in the name -- DPRK ;-)
>The program claimed that hair length can affect human intelligence, in part because of the deprivation to the rest of the body of nutrients required for hair to grow.
What I took away from this is some high up NK official is bald ;)
>In the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang, Western news articles reported that a hidden camera was placed to catch citizens with improper hairstyles. This was part of a television programme broadcast at the same time as Let's Trim Our Hair in Accordance with the Socialist Lifestyle. The offenders would then be interviewed by the presenter and asked to explain themselves. Their name, address and workplace would be announced to deter others from being embarrassed and ostracized.
Is “Cops” much different? It’s similar voyeurism, I. e. the enjoyment to watch lesser people suffer the hard hand of the police state. Most of the cases on that show also need social work more than policing.
Jesus Christ, more disturbing and evil socialist propaganda from the disturbing and evil North Korean government. I am perpetually disappointed that we haven't found a resolution to the horrible violations of individual liberty happening there, and am disappointed the Chinese will not quit playing protector of N Korea.
"In the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang, Western news articles reported that a hidden camera was placed to catch citizens with improper hairstyles. This was part of a television programme broadcast at the same time as Let's Trim Our Hair in Accordance with the Socialist Lifestyle. The offenders would then be interviewed by the presenter and asked to explain themselves. Their name, address and workplace would be announced to deter others from being embarrassed and ostracized."
From the article. Also, this comparison is like saying that Soviet Russia producing propaganda was a sign that the gulags didn't work.
#1: Haircuts are the ultimate economic indicator. In bad times, it's every 8 weeks. In good, it's every 6. #2: I go every 3 weeks.
thus once again proving that communist countries are more prosperous than rotten capitalist economies where even top bankers only cut their hair once a month.
This seems better than how the ad industry and tech workers in it help facilitate the most warped beauty standards that women are expected to achieve which might lead to eating disorders on the long run.
The ad industry has almost no control over how people like to wear their hair. It can just advertise products that support what's already popular - long or short hair, frizzy or straight, etc.
It's the other way around from my observation. My wife subscribes to these high end fashion magazines. You'll see a runway style featured in there, something like tribal prints. Six months later or so and you'll start seeing tribal print everything in mall stores. Then you'll see it in Target. Before you know it, everyone is wearing tribal prints and they don't know why.
There's a scene in "The Devil Wears Prada" that tries to convey this process:
"You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select… I don’t know… that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent… wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff."
That's editorial decision making. Not ads. And usually the editors notice the style getting popular among trendy people and then writes about it/uses it in the fashion show.
Or perhaps there is a middle ground in which people have some ability to distinguish themselves from others but not to the degree that they alienate themselves.
That makes about as much sense as proposing a middle ground between sex requiring consent and legalizing rape.
Either their cosmetic styling are under personal control or it isn't - and any other restrictions should be incidental and justified. Heavy machinery operation calling for bound long hair is justifiable for instance.
>That makes about as much sense as proposing a middle ground between sex requiring consent and legalizing rape.
Your hair is not this important. Also I reject the notion that consent-based sex and the legalisation of rape are at opposite ends of the spectrum of options for regulating sex in a society.
It is a question of personal autonomy and choice. That it isn't theirs to decide is the essential part not how "important" it is. Besides you can never trust mere claims of importance without any justification as an argument.
Well, that explains it. We knew that the North Korean embassy in the UK weren't happy about the suggestion that a certain high-profile person from NK should take better care of his hair:
> The program claimed that hair length can affect human intelligence
This was, and (maybe) still is, a wisdom in Thailand, but for different reasons.
I was in high school in ~2002. My knowledge could be outdated. I hope they have changed this dogma.
Thailand enforced certain hairstyles on students until the end of highschool. For male, it looked similar what is shown in the post. Probably even uglier.
(Not all schools enforced it strictly. Some, especially private schools, let their students to have a better hairstyle.)
Anyway, we believed that these superficial decorations would make students being distracted from studying. Students would focus purely on look and etc. It's a "tradition".
Obviously, self-esteem was not a thing to consider back then.
This hairstyle rule turned good teachers into hair polices. Teachers were obsessed with whether your hair was too long. Long hair became the sign of disrespect.
When the movie, Speed, came out, Keanu Reeves had the buzzcut hairstyle which was shorter than what Thailand enforced. Many students thought "well, it's shorter and looks cooler. It should be fine". It turned out that cutting your hair shorter than what was enforced was also wrong.
One funny tidbit: I've learned a valuable lesson that Buzzcut in US is called Skinhead in Thailand. I told several people at work that I would get a skinhead. People looked freaked out a bit because skinhead was associated with something really really bad; I don't remember what. Then, one friend kindly pointed out that what I wanted was a buzzcut.
The neonazi invasion happened around when both tended to show up in the same discussions. More people know about punks than skinheads, so I used one to give context to the other. The recent movie about the late '90s punk scene, Bomb City, even had a skinhead with an anti-Nazi jacket.
I don't know how it was in Europe, but I remember by the 1990s in the US there were media portrayals of "skinheads" as a totally American and totally white power thing, with absolutely no recognition or memory of a non-racist UK subculture from a few decades earlier. It was before the internet made it easy to look up that it existed in another context, some TV show talking about "skinheads" could define the term for millions.
> We believed that these superficial decorations would make students being distracted from studying
The coach of the Argentinian National Team in the early '90s, Daniel Passarella, at some point denied NT call-ups for Real Madrid player Redondo because of the latter's hairstyle. Which was a shame because Redondo was a hell of a player in his prime.
>The program claimed that hair length can affect human intelligence, in part because of the deprivation to the rest of the body of nutrients required for hair to grow.
Heh, reminds me of Lysenkoism. What is it with socialists and their outright denial of science?
Consider that possibly the stated reason is not the true reason.
Maybe the authoritarian regime that run NK wants to control the way people look for various reasons: So the people don't culturally identify with other societies, so they don't spend time messing with more complicated styles (hair and other) because they consider it a waste of resources, so the people don't realize that the mere fact that outsiders can spend resources on more elaborate styles is a product of those societies being better off, that they want the people to internalize a shared society through uniformity, etc, etc, etc.
... and that in order to achieve those means, they will say anything regardless of truth, evidence, etc, and will punish dissent so that the truth doesn't matter (mostly).
Authoritarians of all sort want to impose control and conformity. It doesn't have to be a rational reason - just that they go against "the authority" even if it fits every last jot and minuate of the written rules angers them.
There might be an interesting correlation between hair length and [some aspects of] human intelligence—but in the other direction than the one North Korea would like to imply.
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, a chemical that is produced by the brain to modulate plasticity during learning, seems to potentiate the effects of androgens on hair loss (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21729031), i.e. accelerating balding in people who will eventually go bald. (This isn’t just theoretical, either—drugs which increase BDNF are reported to cause hair loss/balding in some people, presumably the ones who would eventually bald.)
So, in a very hand-wavy way, you could hypothesize that people who go bald earlier in life, are producing a lot of BDNF, and therefore are doing a lot of cognitive restructuring, and maybe therefore are getting “smarter” in some sense.
No worse than the billions of 'how to dress to look successful' and other bullshit books, courses, videos and seminars that capitalism spews every year.
It's not just a bullshit book though, books like that attempt to codify existing entrenched standards. Ignoring those standards, like not wearing a suit to an interview, wearing a suit to an interview in some contexts or having an unconventional haircut can see you ostracized from society. At least when it's government mandated there is hopefully a clear and uniform set of rules.
Ideally we could move beyond a world of judging people based on their haircut and dress code but I don't think the western world is much better than North Korea.
86 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadSo what you will about free, market-controlled economies, but the current alternatives sure don’t look too good for the “worker”
If I can prove with mutually agreed facts that capitalism has a higher body count that any other political system, will you agree to change your position.
Usually it's Western Capitalism vs Communist [Dictatorship] Regimes and the argument is entirely valid. If you're forced in to it it's not communism -- people won't in general follow an ideology that contradicts their natural propensity to greed and winning above others (pride), so it generally is not communism when you're talking about groups above a small town size.
I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to transition from our widely oppressive capitalistic system to a more communistic one in a way to accommodates people's propensity towards greed and still maintain democratic freedoms to the greatest extent. It's something that in the long term might solve a lot of our overuse of resources.
The problem, of course, is that without force they’re short lived, like volatile molecules exposed to air. All matter eventually retreats to its most stable form.
Of course, nothing stops like minded individuals from forming communist societies (communes), and they do sometimes. Even a small one doesn’t stay together long without force or a very strong binding identity, such as religion or family.
Even so, if you agree upon the metric and then use it to rank systems, if one system ranks better then you have "proven", by the agreed upon terms of comparison, that this system is superior. There may be other systems outside the ranking, but your proposal was to rank certain specific systems, not to discover the optimal system.
As bad as life may be for the average worker, it was far worse in the Soviet Union. Living inside the Iron Curtain sucked massively unless you were a member of the party elite, and then it was literally a party.
Same as it ever was--every system will be subverted by some tiny elite so that they can rule you and live the high life while you toil. The only thing that has ever partially solved the problem is for regular people to fight them.
IE dreads and afro styles.
It's weird to me that people get dictatorial about hair (but understandable in the sense that people will control what they feel they can to assert their dominance; petty power plays are rife in human society) but it doesn't seem racist.
Skinheads and mohawks are banned because they are strongly associated with violence and gang activity. Are you saying it's fine to associate traditional hairstyles of those of African heritage with violence and gang activity?
However, there is a genuine link between skinheads and violence—including neo-Nazism. The only link between hairstyles traditional to those of African descent and violence is racism and stereotyping.
True, but skinheads started as movement heavily influenced by Jamaicans and Jamaican music. The Nazi thing came later, but there have always been non-Nazi skinhead subgroups, like SHARPS (Skinheads against racial prejudice).
A girlfriend of mine in college in the 90s was a Jewish skinhead at the time.
Wikipedia:
In the earlier stages of the movement, a considerable overlap existed between early skinhead subculture, mod subculture, and the rude boy subculture found among Jamaican British and Jamaican immigrant youth, as these three groups interacted and fraternized with each other within the same working class and poor neighbourhoods in Britain.[2] As skinheads adopted elements of mod subculture and Jamaican British and Jamaican immigrant rude boy subculture, both first and second generation skins were influenced by the heavy, repetitive rhythms of dub and ska, as well as rocksteady, reggae, bluebeat, and African-American soul music.[2][3][4]
wrt dreds, they're not just uncut are they, I've seen plenty of light-skinned people with dreds. They're a sort of loose matting? Dreds in the UK are associated with "crusties", hippy eco-activists.
Mohicans, mohawks if you like, were associated with punk many years ago but there's no connection now AFAICT, and whats wrong with punk?
For those of you not from Brumingham Summer Lane was the really rough area - think the street that had the Garrison pub in the first season of peaky blinders.
I can remember hearing my grandparents mention that the police dint go there in threes they went in platoon strength.
"Brum" is short for "Brummagem", nobody calls it "Brumingham".
And it continued beyond then with things like natural hair vs powdered wigs as political statements.
There were a dizzying number of associations in the 20th century alone.
Turns out it’s its own verb tense! It’s called the “volitional” and you use it when you want to emphasize that you want to do something, typically with the person you’re speaking to. The best way to render it in English is by using “let’s” (“let’s go eat”).
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/desire_volitio...
“Eat dinner” + “ba” = “let’s eat dinner?”
먹다 (to eat) + 자 = 먹자 (let's eat)
However for questions, 먹을까? (shall we eat?) and 먹을래? (want to have a bite from this thing I have?) are appropriate.
Wikipedia on hortatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortative
It sounds perfectly normal and commonplace to me (British).
- Let's see...
- Oh yes, let's!
- Uh, no, let's not.
- Let's think of another example...
- Let's stop there.
Google Ngram Viewer does put it at about 8x more common (contemporarily) in British English than American English though, and with a shorter history in the latter.
https://legendsoflocalization.com/japans-mysterious-love-of-...
That really is weird/interesting!
It shouldn't be a command "do this...!" as if coming from a dictator, but a request to work together as if coming from a worker comrade. Because it is a Democracy. It's right in the name -- DPRK ;-)
What I took away from this is some high up NK official is bald ;)
This could be a Black Mirror episode.
And let’s not pretend there isn’t a lot of pressure to look a certain way to be successful in at least some careers in democratic countries.
From the article. Also, this comparison is like saying that Soviet Russia producing propaganda was a sign that the gulags didn't work.
reminds me of the GSElevator tweet[1]
#1: Haircuts are the ultimate economic indicator. In bad times, it's every 8 weeks. In good, it's every 6. #2: I go every 3 weeks.
thus once again proving that communist countries are more prosperous than rotten capitalist economies where even top bankers only cut their hair once a month.
[1] https://twitter.com/gselevator/status/255383764027457536
Much better to call it something inspiring and cosmopolitan like "Vogue".
Or even "Cosmopolitan."
There's a scene in "The Devil Wears Prada" that tries to convey this process:
"You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select… I don’t know… that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent… wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff."
Either their cosmetic styling are under personal control or it isn't - and any other restrictions should be incidental and justified. Heavy machinery operation calling for bound long hair is justifiable for instance.
Your hair is not this important. Also I reject the notion that consent-based sex and the legalisation of rape are at opposite ends of the spectrum of options for regulating sex in a society.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-27038723
Turns out there was quite the backstory behind it. Do as I say, not as I do, and all that.
This was, and (maybe) still is, a wisdom in Thailand, but for different reasons.
I was in high school in ~2002. My knowledge could be outdated. I hope they have changed this dogma.
Thailand enforced certain hairstyles on students until the end of highschool. For male, it looked similar what is shown in the post. Probably even uglier.
(Not all schools enforced it strictly. Some, especially private schools, let their students to have a better hairstyle.)
Anyway, we believed that these superficial decorations would make students being distracted from studying. Students would focus purely on look and etc. It's a "tradition".
Obviously, self-esteem was not a thing to consider back then.
This hairstyle rule turned good teachers into hair polices. Teachers were obsessed with whether your hair was too long. Long hair became the sign of disrespect.
When the movie, Speed, came out, Keanu Reeves had the buzzcut hairstyle which was shorter than what Thailand enforced. Many students thought "well, it's shorter and looks cooler. It should be fine". It turned out that cutting your hair shorter than what was enforced was also wrong.
One funny tidbit: I've learned a valuable lesson that Buzzcut in US is called Skinhead in Thailand. I told several people at work that I would get a skinhead. People looked freaked out a bit because skinhead was associated with something really really bad; I don't remember what. Then, one friend kindly pointed out that what I wanted was a buzzcut.
Edit: This article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/shear-follicle-thai-students-re...) captures the situation pretty well. And there's a photo inside which is accurate
The neonazi invasion happened around when both tended to show up in the same discussions. More people know about punks than skinheads, so I used one to give context to the other. The recent movie about the late '90s punk scene, Bomb City, even had a skinhead with an anti-Nazi jacket.
The coach of the Argentinian National Team in the early '90s, Daniel Passarella, at some point denied NT call-ups for Real Madrid player Redondo because of the latter's hairstyle. Which was a shame because Redondo was a hell of a player in his prime.
Heh, reminds me of Lysenkoism. What is it with socialists and their outright denial of science?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Maybe the authoritarian regime that run NK wants to control the way people look for various reasons: So the people don't culturally identify with other societies, so they don't spend time messing with more complicated styles (hair and other) because they consider it a waste of resources, so the people don't realize that the mere fact that outsiders can spend resources on more elaborate styles is a product of those societies being better off, that they want the people to internalize a shared society through uniformity, etc, etc, etc.
... and that in order to achieve those means, they will say anything regardless of truth, evidence, etc, and will punish dissent so that the truth doesn't matter (mostly).
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, a chemical that is produced by the brain to modulate plasticity during learning, seems to potentiate the effects of androgens on hair loss (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21729031), i.e. accelerating balding in people who will eventually go bald. (This isn’t just theoretical, either—drugs which increase BDNF are reported to cause hair loss/balding in some people, presumably the ones who would eventually bald.)
So, in a very hand-wavy way, you could hypothesize that people who go bald earlier in life, are producing a lot of BDNF, and therefore are doing a lot of cognitive restructuring, and maybe therefore are getting “smarter” in some sense.
Ideally we could move beyond a world of judging people based on their haircut and dress code but I don't think the western world is much better than North Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_hair_in_Singapore
https://boingboing.net/2013/04/26/males-with-long-hair-will-...