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DPRK related thought for the day from your specially interested Comrade Ferret:
Remember that flood last year that put around 40,000 people out of their homes in North Pyongan? You might have seen Kim Jong-un's photo ops in which he was waist-high in water with the rescue team. If you were hanging around commie circles, you might have also heard that the country put these people up in hotels in Pyongyang, and that they were given brand new homes that were built before the end of the year.
But you may not have heard that the rescue effort, although they were able to confirm there were no casualties in the end, had to double back several times because the government didn't actually know how many people were living in the area. I even saw western sources gleefully reporting this as a government failure — which, yes, it was.
But you have to think: Is it really a believable failure of a government that supposedly has the most intensive surveillance state on the planet? You're telling me that the state of the DPRK personally knows everything about every human living in the country, has complete control over their movement, ranks people based on not only their loyalty, but their family's loyalty, and yet they don't even know how many people are living in North Pyongan?
Meanwhile, in the US, the news of the day is that states are gerrymandering based not only on the precise population of every street block, but how those people vote. They know everything about you. The largest industry in the nation is literally
about knowing everything about you and selling that everything to the highest bidder. And it's not that different in other western nations.
