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.

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."

Ok thanks. I'm going to look into this deeper. Actually I just sent this link to South Korean leftist buddy of mine who I incidentally met over on the old CTH sub back in the day. I'm gonna see what he has to say, he is quite knowledgeable

I tried to google around for it, but any google search with keywords about 'starve' and 'Korea' and so on just brought up stuff about the Arduous March.

Anyways, this story is certainly very tragic and disturbing.

Here's my initial thoughts. This wld be a really extreme situation, very rare, which is why it's getting reported even all the way over here in the western press. The reason this kind of story is so incredibly shocking is because death by starvation in SK is just incredibly rare in the present age.

My impression is that this likely has less to do with actual lack of access to food and more to do with mental issues. What I mean is that looks something like a suicide. Obv starvation is an extremely rare form of suicide bc it is slow and extremely painful, but there are documented cases of people doing it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suicides_by_starvation

Notice how the people they interview talk about depressed she was, and how the North Korean emigre community were so distressed and shocked by it. There's just absolutely no way that the North Korean community there in Seoul would have allowed that to happen to one of their own if she had gone to them for help. There's also private (religious and secular) charities. This woman also came of age in the Aldous March. Those North Koreans who went thru that are some hard core people, they know how to find and get food if you are literally dying. Digging thru the trash in Seoul would have given honestly scrumptious meals when compared with the kind of nasty stuff they were forced to eat to survive in those days. She also could have given her son over to a government agency.

The fact that she didn't do any of that, combined with the well known fact that a lot of ppl in S Koreans struggle with mental illness and that she looked sad all the time supposedly all point to this being a woman with severe mental issues. That to me looks like a sort of murder-suicide. It's simply a fact that food would have been available to her, had she sought it out.

That's not to victim blame or say that this isn't tragic or its just her fault and thats the end of the story, North Korean emigres to the South face a lot of discrimination. Leaving North Korea is fucking hard, people don't do it unless they have a really good reason. She obviously lived a hard live, both in NK, in China and in SK. It is completely understandable how something like that could produce someone with mental issues bad enough that someone might just say "ok, fuck this life, I'm just gonna lay down and wait for death."

Unrelated note, but I can't help but chuckle at the guy trying to blame this on Pres Moon for not being sufficiently hawkish on NK. A lot of those groups are psycho and are kind of like cuban gusanos in their zeal for sanctions and hawkishness on their family and countrymen back home.

Thank you

Is Korea lacking in many respects? Yes and I've talked about them frankly itt. Does it lack 'even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity"? No. Frankly it does not. Those who think so frankly are privileged first worlders, as I alluded to before.

Basic fundamentals of dignity are things like clean water, food to drink, sewage, public transportation, education, healthcare, a warm place to sleep with a roof over your head, public safety, the right to an education, the right to join a labor union, the right to fair trials, and more. The exact qualities that we socialists praise in a place like Cuba or Vietnam. There are lot of places in the world that lack that. South Korea is not one of them.

to call tone a concrete statement with a truth value.

TBH I have no desire to be charitable about his 'tone' when he has said numerously blatantly untrue things about concrete statements with concrete truth values, like that slums from the 1960s 'are common in Seoul'.

can even starve to death in the middle of a city

Can you provide a citation about someone starving to death in Seoul? It is frankly nearly impossible to imagine how that could happen. There's numerous charities and such that exist like food banks and so on. And a lot of North Korean emigres also form churches for themselves and support groups and other kinds of communities like that. They have a pretty strong community amongst themselves there bc there's only ~30k so its really an 'everybody knows everybody' kind of situation for them there. I struggle to believe, unless you can give me a good source, that they would just let one of their own starve to death. Even in a complete worst case scenario, food waste is quite high and people just put their food waste in plastic bags that go right on the street no bin or anything. Not to say that eating out of a garbage bag is awesome or whatever but my point is that food is available to keep you going until tomorrow if you are **literally **dying.

I imagine a number of poor North Korean emigres are malnourished or food insecure. Starving to death? maybe back in the 60s or something. If its happened recently, that is an extreme one in a million kind of situation, not common.

I'm glad to admit being wrong if you can cite me a source tho.