they are not physically superior. they are smaller and wekaer. as well they are most likely stupider as well on average. They live in a communist governemnt where there is no concept while s. korea is a cut throat captitalist society. i put my money on the ROK
02-10-2010, 18:40
drone
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Since they are commies, we could call them Red Dwarfs. :idea2:
02-10-2010, 18:53
Aemilius Paulus
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Quote:
Originally Posted by Centurion1
they are not physically superior. they are smaller and wekaer. as well they are most likely stupider as well on average. They live in a communist governemnt where there is no concept while s. korea is a cut throat captitalist society. i put my money on the ROK
Yes, but they are tougher. They are perhaps the hardiest folk on Earth. That is my point. You see the difference, right?
Not that it will help them win the war of course - the Japanese, for instance, relied on courage to win their land engagements n WWII, which cost them dearly - they lost to first the Russians, which they invaded (Khalhin-Gol) and then mainly to the Americans in land combat on Pacific islands (although the Aussies turned them back quite well too), and finally the Russians again in the invasion of Manchuria. Lesson: tech+tactics>courage, but the point stands.
02-10-2010, 18:59
Strike For The South
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
How does one quantify toughness?
02-10-2010, 19:05
Aemilius Paulus
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Quote:
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
How does one quantify toughness?
Surviving through great adversity? Being able to subsist on a bare minimum? Be content with what others view as extreme-self denial? That is what I qualify as toughness. Tough as in a survivor, as an exceedingly hardy person, not tough as in Chuck Norris/Schwarzenegger/really macho. That is strong/manly in my internal dictionary. The two pairs of words (tough/hardy and strong/manly) overlap, but far from always in the definitions I presented them as.
02-10-2010, 19:10
Lemur
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Maybe AP is right, and the NKs are growing into a tougher, shorter, more subterranean race. In which case, we appear to have taken the first step toward Morlock/Eloi speciation. It was just a matter of time.
College is not good for Strikey.
Me I know tough when I see it.
02-11-2010, 00:07
The Wizard
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
I'm surprised nobody reacted to my link. It kinda goes against all the usual "zomg totalitarian dictatorship controlling every aspect of North Korean life/all North Koreans are brainwashed zealots who will fight to death" stuff you usually hear about the place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AP
Yes, but they are tougher. They are perhaps the hardiest folk on Earth. That is my point. You see the difference, right?
Nothing tough about starving, scared-to-death people.
02-11-2010, 00:23
Subotan
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
I read it, but I couldn't reply as my internet was playing up yesterday. I'd read it before though, but its a good read. Ofc North Korea isn't some Orwellian super state, but it's the closest thing on Earth to one.
My point, and the point of that author, is that it doesn't have the resources or the ability anymore to be an Orwellian nightmare in the first place.
Not that this means North Koreans are better off or anything, mind you. It just means it's a lot easier to remove and/or engineer the collapse of the regime than normally assumed in the press and amongst the general public.
02-11-2010, 00:34
Louis VI the Fat
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Wizard
I'm surprised nobody reacted to my link.
On principle I don't read anything longer than one page. Unless it has pictures. Short attention span and stuff.
Here's a quick overview of your article, hopefully more conducive to debate:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Quote:
North Korea's evolution
LOS ANGELES — Don't call it a Stalinist state anymore; don't even think of it any longer as a pint-sized former Soviet Union. All around the world, the times are changing, and nowhere is the change more quiet but also irrevocable than in the one place where you thought change had all but been outlawed if not imprisoned: North Korea.
This is the astonishing and almost unbelievable picture painted by one of the world's most incisive and informed experts on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The master painter is Andrei Lankov, and his cliché-shattering portrait of the land of Kim Jong Il is to be found in the inaugural edition of "Asia Policy."
Lankov is a senior lecturer from the prestigious Australian National University, now on leave at Kookmin University in Seoul, capital of South Korea. "Asia Policy," published by The National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle, sports a board of editorial advisers — from Stanford University's Richard Armacost to UC San Diego's Susan Shirk — that reads like a virtual Who's Who in the field of Asian policy scholarship. If Lankov's groundbreaking essay is remotely suggestive of the high standards to be expected from this new journal, then "Asia Policy" has a good chance of becoming required reading across the country and perhaps elsewhere in the world.
Lankov writes colorfully but carefully to create a sense of North Korea as being one of the most dynamically changing states on the face of the Earth. He writes of the country's youth from the best-connected families sporting "mod" haircuts and dressing like any other street-savvy South Korean kid. He describes the stream more like a flood of steady if technically illegal videotapes of South Korean soap operas and pop music making their way northward (generally through China); of the proliferation of mobile phones; of the enormous popularity of South Korean goods of all kinds; and of the rise of female North Korean entrepreneurs, whether working in the country's growing service industries or peddling their sexual favors to "newly rich and corrupt minor officials."
Lankov notes that the rise of the private entrepreneur was a survival necessity in the aftermath of the series of devastating famines in the '90s and the evaporation of Soviet aid after communism collapsed in Russia. The emerging economy is a trade-driven, feral struggle to live: "Those who could not trade are long dead," he quotes a North Korean source as saying, "and now we are only left with survivors hanging around."
The well-regarded Australian scholar adds: "These market operators now boast large fortunes of several hundreds of thousands of dollars. While such sums are still well below the fortunes attained bycadres-turned-capitalists in China and the former USSR, they are still unimaginably large by North Korean standards, and especially by the standards of a Stalinist state with its emphasis on income equality."
The policy implication of Lankov's explosive essay is obvious. Economic exchanges are opening up North Korea as never before, and so more such exchanges will only accelerate the further opening up of this otherwise miserable nation, bringing it closer to more normal integration into the world economic system and perhaps even closer to some kind of co-federation with the capitalistic South.
One last quote: "Such exchanges should be encouraged, as they expose North Koreans to the wider world and show them the prosperity and freedom they are deprived of at home. The privileged North Koreans who are allowed to travel overseas and interact with foreigners inside the country are increasingly dissatisfied with their government. Such determination in the USSR eventually produced Gorbachev."
Let me go the final mile: North Korea, if his analysis is correct, can no longer stand as it is. Regime change needs not to be produced by sudden military action but by continual, patient, steady economic interaction. Collapse and oblivion of the current regime is the only way out for the North Koreans. In time — in a year, in five, but not much longer than that — surely the end will come. Koreans, by nature, are survivors. This includes those in the North, especially. They cannot possibly hope to survive in the old way. So some kind of irretrievable evolution and perhaps even revolution — is in the destiny of North Korea. God knows the people there deserve a break. UCLA professor Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is a veteran U.S. journalist
I've bolded a sentence that amused me. The editorial is now nearly four years old...:beam:
(And yes, yes, those are Plate's words, not Plankov's)
02-11-2010, 02:53
Centurion1
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
shhh Louis let us cling to our outdated views of N. Korea it is almost all we have left.
02-14-2010, 14:28
Kralizec
Re: A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
I heard a story on the radio a couple of years ago. Apparently Kim Jong-Il' oldest son was the heir-apparent until he tried to get out of the country...to go to Japan...in order to:
