I spent 9 days in North Korea, AMA. Photos inside.

dutchct · 13 days

I watched this video recently. It is an interview/talk by an escapee who was born and raised in one of these camps. So much of what he says is deeply chilling. At about 24:00 he is asked about Juche ideology in the camps.

Q: Were you educated in Juche ideology in the camp?

A: I heard about Juche ideology for the first time last year in South Korea.

Q: How about Kim Jong-Il?

A: I heard about Kim Jong-Il about 3-4 times before I escaped the camp. I wondered who he was but I wasn't very interested.

I shivered when I heard this. The camps are nothing but horrifying gulags serving no purpose but slavery--not even the famous North Korean brainwashing. He also says at a later point in the video that he was not surprised by South Korea, that the most surprising moment of his life was seeing some small North Korean town and how "free" the people were. That gives you some perspective, I think, on the mindless horror of the camps.

cephalopod11 · 17 days

Joyce was a beast of intertextuality, and the best starting points for understanding his later work are often other books.

Read up a bit on his writing style. This topic has become quite fashionable recently, and there is an online journal of "genetic" Joyce studies, meaning studies of his notebooks and manuscripts. Joyce did not, like many or most authors, write his texts linearly. He had an insane method of writing sentences in small pocket notebooks and then later inserting them wherever he thought it was most appropriate, crossing off each one with a different colored pencil--one for each section--as he went. I like to think of Ulysses & Finnegans Wake as sculptural or architectural texts, built and formed piece by piece and contour by countour.

The first key to Finnegans Wake is a fascinating and highly influential although no longer much read book called New Science by Giambattista Vico, one of the key founders of what we today call "the humanities." He was a Neapolitan scholar who had, like Joyce, apparently read everything and proceeded to write a book setting out a theory of history based not on the study of nature but on the study of, essentially, symbols and symbolic systems: myth, history, and literature. His most famous claim is that "we can only know what we ourselves have made." New Science is an attempt, based on the analysis of myth, history, and especially (take note!) etymology, to formulate a universal history of the world.

Finnegans Wake is deeply mythical: the "main character" is something like an Everyman, and the logic of the text is the logic of the dream. Joyce once said that Finnegans Wake was essentially a night book, in contrast to Ulysses, which is an epic of a single, waking day. In it, stated very broadly, Joyce presents something like a "universal history of mankind" (as he half-jokingly put it to a friend). It is, of course, stupendously hard to decipher on one's own. Don't feel bad about this either: one little tidbit I remember from the Ellman biography (I unfortunately don't have it before me) is Joyce's reply to a letter from a friend, who said that he didn't have the slightest clue as to what was going on. Joyce wrote down a sentence from the book and proceeded to list seven or eight different levels of meaning through various degrees of word play across eight or nine languages. The best way to read FInnegans wake is to let it flow over you as sound and pick out what you can. Also, get a good commentary: many parts of it are just one vast puzzle, and scholars have cracked a great deal of the code. (This does not, of course, mean that they have "figured it out": one of the most beautiful and famous scenes of the book is a conversation between Anna Livia Plurabelle and a washerwoman on the shore of a river. Over the course of the conversation, Anna turns into a tree and the washerwoman turns into a stone. So, even once we've "cracked the code" as much as we can, we still have these deeply mythical moments to confront.

Here are some quick notes for his other works:

1.) Dubliners. Naturalistic short stories of middle-class Dublin life in the late 19th Century. The "epiphany" is the aesthetic heart of each story: a moment of "manifestation or striking appearance" when the protagonist is granted a deep, almost (but not ultimately) religious insight into the nature of his experience.

2.) Portrait. This is, despite some great technical innovations, a relatively conventional Künstlerroman. The best points of access are a good biography (Richard Ellman's remains unsurpassed) and perhaps some knowledge of Catholic theology, although unless you're interested, don't bother. A large part of Joyce's work around this time was the formulation of a personal aesthetics, much of which he (quite anachronistically) formulated by way of Thomas Aquinas' conception of the beautiful. Ellman in his biography stresses the point that Joyce was constantly engaged in a process of self-aestheticization. Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses are all deeply autobiographical, but not merely so: he was, as an author, constantly imputing to his experiences aesthetic significance. Consider the name "Stephen Dedalus" for example: St. Stephen is the first martyr of the Catholic Church, and Daedelus is, of course, "the artificer," an artisan & craftsman. There are a million moments like this in Joyce, but this is a good example of the way Joyce fuses autobiography and myth.

And finally, 3.) Ulysses. You do have to know the story of The Odyssey. (It actually took people a while to figure this out after it began to be published, despite the title.) It's a very, very fun and beautiful book. Just don't get bogged down: unless you grew up in Dublin of 1904 (which I'm guessing you didn't), don't worry too much about the names of streets and places and such.

Anyways, I'd love to continue but I think this is quite long enough. Enjoy!

notBrit · 19 days

My god, it's him! This man bought my childhood away from me at a garage sale in Rochester, MN around the year 2001. My mother suggested I try to sell some of my ridiculous number of Beanie Babies, and so I put almost all of them in a big basket in the garage, and then this guy--kind of a local celebrity--showed up and bought them all in one fell swoop. I wanted to protest, but...how could I?

Now I'm sad. I wonder if he still has them. Also, it now strikes me as kind of hilarious that he must have been a serious Beanie Baby collector.

self_promotion · 2 months

I feel like this fad must have been a high point in the history of grandma-grandson bonding. My grandmother, a charming old lady who chain-smoked Winston cigarettes and drank PBR from the can with a straw must have invested her entire life savings in Beanie Babies. I mean, she had every single one, often several of each, doled out hundreds of dollars on those Princess Di and Erin ones when they came out. She would pick me up in her rickety old station wagon at about 6 in the morning on the weekends and then we'd make the rounds to the local florists and gift-card shops (they seemed to be big on selling them and she of course knew everyone who worked at each one) and get all of the ones that she hadn't yet added to her collection. She had these glass cases full of them, with the plastic tag protectors and everything. I always felt like we were the Bonnie and Clyde of the local beanie baby scene, and in my imagination all the other grandmas in town were pretty jealous of her insane collection. Good times.

DrRichardCranium · 2 months

That is one of the most gripping stories I have ever read.

zanyplebeian · 2 months

I was looking for this! Thanks.

GitEmSteveDave · 2 months

I'm sure I don't need to point out the great irony that Jason Russell is a pretty hardcore evangelical christian. I'm sure Fox News will conveniently forget this fact...

rupaulismydad · 2 months

Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden has the final word on this, I think:

All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That's your notion.

The Judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard...

Recording of the whole speech, a terrifying accomplishment of American literature.

Dead_Motherfucker · 2 months

Yeah, TIL how disgusting I am.

zanyplebeian · 3 months

I thought this point would come up. You have to realize that the person being quoted here is a person whose career (as "postulator") depends upon Mother Teresa becoming a saint. I wouldn't exactly take what he says at face value. He's carrying the water of the church, and thus is not the most reliable or neutral source.

captainhowdy27 · 3 months

I agree. My father was eerily similar to this. I was admittedly a lazy, rebellious, useless, moody teenager. But his (over-)reactions to the stupid things I did just alienated me more from him. If this is how he reacts to a 15-year-old girl's growing pains, that girl's going to leave at 18 and never look back. He's not speaking a language a teenager can understand. This is only going to make her feel the sentiments she wrote in the Facebook wall post even more strongly. It's a shame.

And if he follows through with grounding the girl for the rest of her time in high school (depending on what he means by this--but it seems a cigarette-smoking, handgun-owning dude with a cowboy hat means serious business), he's going to have one pretty unhappy, traumatized daughter. A year is a long fucking time when you're 15.

arabdoc · 3 months

It might be illusory if not for the fact that the Rothschild family has been the target of anti-Semitic (and other, not overtly anti-Semitic) conspiracy theories for over two hundred years.

From a release by the Anti-Defamation League entitled "Jewish 'Control' of the Federal Reserve: A Classic Anti-Semitic Myth":

In the literature of bigots, the name Rothschild is a trigger for the most explosive of anti-Semitic tremors, and it usually sets off a litany of other Jewish names.

I'm not claiming this video is anti-Semitic (but I am not excusing it, either). I just think we need to be aware of when we are using signs and codes that have a long, dangerous history. Capitalism is broken; there are oceans of evidence with which to demonstrate this. We don't need to partake in conspiracy theories of any kind to prove it.

arabdoc · 3 months

I don't think we disagree. That is not at all what I said or meant. I was specifically criticizing the imagery used to represent the Rothschild family. I am absolutely critical of finance capitalism. I am also critical of the source of the Rothschild fortune. But to portray them as tentacled black beasts sounds too much like other dangerous kinds of discourse. I simply argue that it would have been better to exclude this part from the video, and that there are more effective ways of criticizing capitalism, especially when the use of certain imagery can damage the credibility of the general message. I also have a problem with criticizing certain individual cases as opposed to the system as a whole. The Rothschilds didn't invent banking.

arabdoc · 3 months

This comment should be higher. I started becoming very skeptical around this point in the video, because anti-Rothschild rhetoric is historically heavily bound up with anti-Semitic rhetoric, and portraying the Rothschild family as inhuman tentacled monsters made me very uncomfortable. The Rothschilds were just one particularly successful instance of the power of banking, but they by no means invented it. They just happened to get lucky and profit massively by it. We can criticize capitalism without appealing to anti-Semitic conspiracy theory tropes.

zanyplebeian · 3 months

Here are the best other recordings I could find.

Also, I think you might be exaggerating Herzog's unreliability slightly. I understand your skepticism in this case, but as a whole I think the moments of "ecstatic truth" (i.e., artistic mistruths) are rather more the exception than the rule in his recent documentaries.

EDIT: Here's a link on youtube of a Weddell seal and its pup. Warning: insanely cute.

wisemanKSig · 4 months

Reddit: the most exclusive club with 35 million unique visitors per month.

cosjas · 5 months

History is not a progressive motion towards perfection. Gains can be lost, and rapidly.

Compare Iran at the beginning and the end of 1979. Or the Rome of 300 C.E. and the Rome of 500 C.E. Or the Weimar Republic of the late 20s and early 30s, a paragon of liberal democracy that transformed, nearly over night, into the paragon of totalitarianism.

These are several of innumerable broad examples. Smaller ones happen every year, month, day.

cosjas · 5 months

I don't see how this definition of feminism differs from the one I offered. Obviously, women must be offered positive advantages in order to achieve gender equality. And in the history of feminism, it is this (rather than removing advantages given to men) that is the defining feature. Of course, giving women the right to vote might technically be removing a kind of men's right (namely, the ability to absolutely control government), but the gain for women pretty obviously outdoes the loss for men, who remained enfranchised.

I grant absolutely that there are strains of feminism that are more radically anti-male. But these strains are aberrant, so far as I can see, and have little ability to effect political change.

It might be as anachronistic as abolitionism to demand the vote, the ability to own property, etc., but, to continue the analogy, it's at least as relevant as the struggle against racism or anti-semitism. Just because a gain has been achieved does not mean that the gain can be maintained or that there are not other gains to be made.

Also, I find it increasingly hard to comprehend empirically how exactly men are disadvantaged in this world. A few links to unusual policy proposals or claims does not stand against thousands of years of continued suppression of women.

cosjas · 5 months

I am a man. I do not consider myself a feminist. Nevertheless, girlwriteswhat's argument is premised upon a number of fallacies and a broad ignorance of facts both contemporary and historical. I'll try to be concise.

The "seats on the boat" argument is based upon the fact of a life rather than any sort of quality of that life. Chivalry ensures the continued existence of useful lives, regardless of the nature of that continued existence. Evolutionarily, women and children, as she mentioned, are of course of a higher status than individual males. However, having one's existence be defined and delineated by purely evolutionary utility is absolutely and by definition inhuman: what distinguishes the human female in this situation from the equivalent in any other species? Nothing.

The question really is: what does it mean to be human? (Bear with me for a moment.) Perhaps most broadly stated as the ability to do art and science. Abstract, symbolic thinking: mathematics, physics, music, painting, language, etc. Which gender has almost exclusively dominated every single one of these fields since the beginning of the written record? Men. And that power was premised largely upon chivalry and related institutions: women were too delicate and beautiful and pure (things which also tend to imply innocence and weakness and thus ignorance) to be exposed to the world of men.

So, if we approach the question from an absolutely utilitarian and computational view, she might be right: there are more women, they live longer, they are chosen first in binary issues of life and death. (Although if this is how we choose to approach the question, then I see little argument for the existence of most men, even today: they are cheap. Sperm is cheap and easy to regenerate. Men are useful for sperm and for bread and for protection from other men.)

But if we have any interest in humanity, in what is specifically human, in life both human and humane, then I think the argument collapses. If being human is participating in symbolic thought and communication, or Art and Science generally, then the exclusion of women from these most human of activities--which exclusion was and is perhaps the most significant manifestation of gender inequality and oppression--is morally wrong.

What is feminism all about? Gender parity in issues of "being human": beyond symbolic thought, the ability to control one's own mind and body and reproductive cycle, to enable women to function in accordance with their abilities rather than their reproductive organs. Feminism has always, except for a few aberrant cases, been about equality: girlwriteswhat's view seems to be, though, that feminists demand retribution. For this I see little evidence.

And some brief practical things to consider:

How many generations has it been since women have been able to live the life you do, girlwriteswhat? Two maybe. Probably one. Maybe not even that. You, as you reveal in another one of your videos, are a divorcée with three children who writes erotica for extra money. Your life was enabled by feminism.

One generation earlier: birth control, which existed, was banned.

A couple generations more: women could not vote. They could not inherit or own property. They were subject to beatings from their husbands. I don't need to go on: we all know it. The condition of women as a whole, with stunningly few exceptions, was inhuman and inhumane. They may have been given priority when the boat started sinking, but as soon as they were home, they were back in their role as vessel, whether simply reproductive or, in the upper classes, economic as well.

You are very fortunate to be a member of the first generation of women to be able to live, well, like you. Do you think it's over now? We've accomplished it, let's move on? That is not how history works.

Waazaap · 5 months

Charming.

WonTonBurritoMeals · 6 months

Interestingly, hoarding is actually considered either a manifestation of OCD or at least highly related. These people aren't always just "slobs"--they often have a huge compulsive need to not throw anything away:

Hoarding is considered a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This behavior, also called "pathological collecting," involves acquiring and saving many objects that may seem useless or of no value. It is not uncommon for people with hoarding OCD to completely fill their homes with clutter so that the living space is unusable. Early psychoanalysts considered hoarding a sign of "anal" character traits because of the withholding nature of the behavior.

Link

zanyplebeian

TROPHY CASE

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