I don't tend to spend a lot of time googling around for sources for someone else's claims, there's limited hours in my life. The person making the claim can do the googling imo. If i try two or three times and don't see it, I just tell them to cite their source.
she was dirt poor, dying after spending the equivalent of like $3 on produce after emptying her bank account. The same article also mentions:
Yea, being dirt poor tends to do a number on your mental health, she seems to have been dirt poor her whole life thru, both in NK, in China, and in SK.
There are still serious structural elements here that caused it,
Did I say there's no structural elements? You might have heard about this idea before but we do in fact live in a society. There's always a structural element.
Suicide or not, this was done by Seoul.
Someone starving to death in SK in the modern era is extremely rare, by which I mean that it is so rare that it is literally comparable to deaths by lightning strikes.
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2023/06/12/national/socialAffairs/korea-yangyang-surfing/20230612183746767.html "From 2013 to 2022, seven people in Korea died from a lightning strike, while 18 others were injured, according to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety."
A death by starvation is literally 1 in a million, and in fact, given as a deaths per year stat, it's probably less than 1 in a million, given that the pop is 52 mil, and it is truly impossible to believe that deaths from starvation could be as high 52 per year. I don't say this to excuse it, but merely for perspective. I mention suicide as the likely cause of death because deaths by suicide, unlike deaths by starvation, are common in Seoul. I'm not out here to say that Seoul is a utopia, as I have made abundantly clear in nearly every reply I have given.
Not that there aren't also defectors, whether they are people just fleeing crushing poverty or they're wanted for having committed some heinous crime. You know, a whole range of things.
I don't even even use the word 'defector' because it is loaded terminology. I also don't judge people for what reasons they might leave NK. I wasn't there, I don't know, and I can't judge.
Anyways, my buddy got back to me, said he didn't know much about the case, looked into it, commented that her inability to get welfare due to having a husband she had divorced in China seems to have been a "weird gap" in the welfare system for the emigres, said that his first impression is similar to mine, that she could have gotten food, but mounting psychological troubles from a lifetime of misery probably stopper her from doing so. He also sent me this video if you care to check it out, altho it's an hour long and with only automated machine translated English subtitles . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-BGhLoMJfE
Again im not out here to say SK is a wonderland. There's abundant problems to criticize and I have made that clear. I came in to correct the record about OP's bullshit, not to spread bullshit of my own about SK is perfect. And to return to the point, OP said that SK "lacked even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity." I don't think it is fair to take a single death from 5 years ago, even one as fucked up as this, and then use it as evidence to say that SK "lacks even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity."
Yes. When talking about North Korea I mostly restrict myself to discussing and analyzing their foreign policy. There's just simply not very good information available on their internal domestic affairs and living standards. There's only a handful of things we can say with any definiteness, and even tho, only in generalities rather than specifics. Certainly there is not enough to make some sweeping claim like this image has.
It is true that the Yeonmi Park variety of defector testimony is distorted and full of bullshit. It does not logically follow from this that they therefore have zero corruption or that Kim Jong-un enjoys wide popular support, maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. Maybe corruption is low, maybe it is high. Maybe it's different in different regions, maybe it goes up and down over time. We don't know and you should be skeptical of anyone claiming absolute knowledge about this kind of stuff. I've talked to people with advanced degrees in this topic and this is what they say, there's just a lot we don't know. It's very hard even for people fluent in Korean who spend years studying this stuff to talk definitively about this kind of thing.