It's so frustrating and terrible to see the situation in NK trivialized by comparing the US's prison systems unfavorably to it. No initiative, no activism, no outcry can be raised because its wind is immediately sucked out by foolish people screaming moral equivalence. How do you think refugees from these gulags would feel to hear you compare the average US prison inmate's experience to their own? Do you acknowledge that some concentration camps can be objectively and morally worse than others?
Are there bad prisons in the US? No doubt. Is the average US inmate experience anything like what is the RULE in these gulags? No. Does the scale between the two matter? Yes. Do the crimes (sometimes "crimes") and due process issues matter? Yes. Can we go on and on with specific, provable differences which make the NK citizen's experience far more horrifying? Yes.
Problems with the prison system in the US belong in their OWN THREAD, where they don't distract from THIS PROBLEM. The fact that some folks feel the overwhelming urge to bring them up here speaks a lot about what they think is important: Scoring points against the US. The US prison system is not relevant to the NK prison system. This isn't a game. NK doesn't get to pick out worst case practices from the US to justify its sweeping unchecked abuses. And it certainly doesn't deserve the aid of willing amateur PR people on random internet message boards.
NK is the same country that quietly let millions of its people starve while it spent a large fraction of its total wealth trying to build the tallest hotel in the world! That's the philosophy and those are the priorities of the organization behind these gulags. But you're telling me the REAL story here is the US prison system?
But this is why NK gets to go merrily about its way starving and torturing its citizens.
> But this is why NK gets to go merrily about its way starving and torturing its citizens.
No it's not. There are 3 foreign policy "sticks" that could be used to end this situation:
1. Invasion
2. Sanctions
3. Shaming
Aggregation of frustration is not one of them.
They have differing requirements in order to be effective:
1. Requires a weak enemy military and existent domestic political opposition to the regime. Internal dissonance exists and your forces are not over-leveraged on other fronts.
2. Requires the entity to already be integrated in the global economy. There is something real you can withhold that will not cause additional mass starvation.
3. Requires high social proof. Those doing the shaming can easily deflect accusations of hypocrisy to rapidly build a global and regional (Chinese) consensus.
Notice that no conditions necessary for 1 or 2 are present. This leaves 3 as one of the most obvious routes to discuss. As the US currently has the world's largest population of prisoners, it makes it hard for the USA to end the prisoner problem in North Korea as effectively as it could. Discourse will necessarily gravitate towards how the US can improve its social proof by striving for exemplary domestic policies. It's not a matter of "moral equivalence", but of being open to moral improvement when others remind us of our faults. Unless we can think of a new kind of stick, this may remain the best way to help those in North Korea.
Regarding #2) The North Korean regime continues it's existence and behavior in large part because of the assistance they receive from China. So while we may not be able to sanction NK directly in the world economy, we can very much influence them by proxy through our foreign policy with China.
You seem to have missed the way that so many stories about horrific things happening in other countries are supposed to make Americans feel superior.
Just spend some time listening to NPR. Constant propaganda telling the listener to respect our government, its institutions, its parties, etc. Why does anyone take American political parties seriously? There is a lot of energy spent propagandizing us about their greatness.
Why should any American care about any foreign prison when rape is used as an unofficial form of punishment in US prisons?
The only purpose of this sort of story is to feed Americans' appetite for feelings of superiority and to allow us to ignore the horrific conditions facing American prisoners.
So unless you think that conditions for North Koreans would be improved by American bombs, I suggest you spend your energy worrying about problems that you can actually make an impact on, such as US prisons, and stop being self-righteous about problems in other countries.
Are there bad prisons in the US? No doubt. Is the average US inmate experience anything like what is the RULE in these gulags? No. Does the scale between the two matter? Yes. Do the crimes (sometimes "crimes") and due process issues matter? Yes. Can we go on and on with specific, provable differences which make the NK citizen's experience far more horrifying? Yes.
Problems with the prison system in the US belong in their OWN THREAD, where they don't distract from THIS PROBLEM. The fact that some folks feel the overwhelming urge to bring them up here speaks a lot about what they think is important: Scoring points against the US. The US prison system is not relevant to the NK prison system. This isn't a game. NK doesn't get to pick out worst case practices from the US to justify its sweeping unchecked abuses. And it certainly doesn't deserve the aid of willing amateur PR people on random internet message boards.
NK is the same country that quietly let millions of its people starve while it spent a large fraction of its total wealth trying to build the tallest hotel in the world! That's the philosophy and those are the priorities of the organization behind these gulags. But you're telling me the REAL story here is the US prison system?
But this is why NK gets to go merrily about its way starving and torturing its citizens.