More Politics - North/South Korea

[spooker]

dude, Ceausescu was one bad mofo. I visited romania and saw the communist palace in the center of bucharest, and i literally had nightmares about it:



it's the second largest building in the world and i think Ceausescu built it. it doesn't look so terrible in pictures, but it's designed to make people feel small and insignificant. this gigantic building broods over the main thoroughfare, so you feel like it's watching you, and as you drive towards it, the road slopes down so you feel yourself constantly diminishing in stature as you approach it. you emerge onto the largest plaza i have ever seen, and it is really disorienting because there are no lanes or anything. creepy. then there's the god-awful concrete block housing units which compose seemingly 80% of all the housing in romania:



communist architecture has scared this country

about NK, i heard on national public radio that North Korean embassies don't receive any financial support from home, so they have to support their own operations. they usually do this by smuggling drugs and counterfeit currency. their ships are regularly destroyed by foreign navies:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9ed_1187506461

[Aquashark]

That guy got executed at a TV station (by "the people"). :d

he was executed in a military base after a rushed fake trial. we saw that on TV. it was the first televised revolution in history.

spooker: heh, ye. communist architecture was bombastic and extravagant for the ruling class, minimalistic for the working class.

"One of the best examples of this type of architecture is Centrul Civic, a development that replaced a major part of Bucharest's historic city centre with giant utilitarian buildings, mainly with marble or travertine façades, inspired by North Korean architecture."

Wikipedia - Bucharest - Communist architecture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:P...Parliament.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bucharest_Flats.jpg

on what occasion have you visited this poor eastern block country?

[Baker]

Interesting stuff.

I've learned more about North Korea and Romania in this thread than anywhere else.

Spooker ought to become a journalist.

[spooker]

dude romania was totally fun. I'm a little bit odd in that I only like to vacation in poor countries. Part of the reason is that's all I can afford, but I do it mainly because it's such a mind trip and really broadens your perspective, and because the friendliness of the people in a country is inversely proportional to the amount of wealth that country has. I went to japan for a week; not a single person talked to me. it was miserable and I never went back. 3 weeks in turkey and i made about 30 friends--the strength of the communities in poor places never ceases to amaze me, but on the other hand when i come home the weakness of the communities in the US really depresses me, because i know that money generally takes people away from each other.

Why romania? I've met many romanian friends in the US, and actually fell in love with 2 of them, which got me first interested Of course i expected all the ladies there to be just as fine as these 2 jaw-droppers; naturally i was a little disappointed, though i'm not insulting romanian ladies =p

Spooker ought to become a journalist.

thanks a lot baker!! i just really like traveling (im pretty much only happy when im traveling) and reading newspapers and magazines. to become interested in world affairs i think its important to read good publications. my main periodicals are the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. they are both somewhat conservative in perspective, yet i consider myself a moderate, so i dont read them for their perspective. i read them cuz they are just the most intelligent, well written things out there. if there were intelligent publications left of center, i would read those too, but i've yet to come across any the economist is the only magazine that will take up both sides of difficult issues and argue them out with each other. articles in most other publications seem to be focused on on conveying one simple message, as if they could boil the whole world down into pill form. once you've tasted the dynamism of the economist you'll find it impossible to go back to reading your local big city newspaper

[mithril]

Why romania? I've met many romanian friends in the US, and actually fell in love with 2 of them, which got me first interested Of course i expected all the ladies there to be just as fine as these 2 jaw-droppers; naturally i was a little disappointed, though i'm not insulting romanian ladies =p

Last time I was in Romania I recall many fine looking ladies . But yeah that palace in Bucharest kinda sucks. They told me he was always afraid of being poisoned so he installed special vents in the ceiling that were connected to the outside and always had fresh air coming into the palace. Also I remember a BBC article a while back which said Romania is the most depressed country - ie has the largest number of sad people. It did seem that way to me while I was there...just a general feeling of sadness in the air. But I'd recommend anyone to go there since very little has changed since the fall of communism, and so you'll see those horrible grey concrete living quarters that are still everywhere, and hear lots of stories from people who remember what it was like living under communism. In 10-20 years things may change drastically so now is a good time to go.

[Baker]

and because the friendliness of the people in a country is inversely proportional to the amount of wealth that country has. I went to japan for a week; not a single person talked to me. it was miserable and I never went back. 3 weeks in turkey and i made about 30 friends--the strength of the communities in poor places never ceases to amaze me, but on the other hand when i come home the weakness of the communities in the US really depresses me, because i know that money generally takes people away from each other.

So true, but why is this so? Why does this happen? And what can be done about it?

Last time I was in Romania ...

Hehe

[spooker]

So true, but why is this so? Why does this happen? And what can be done about it?

i don't know man. Greed? we could maybe not be greedy? It's especially difficult to understand because poor countries want so much to be rich countries. the gains from wealth are all too obvious, but what you lose is more intangible, and possibly more valuable. i was at a festival in india and a group of boys started grabbing the ass of this girl i was with. i was telling the story later to an indian guy, and I told him how i'd seen the same thing happen so many times in similar festival situations in the US. he didn't believe me and said, "but the USA is a developed country; how can this happen?" he expected men to not have human flaws because they have money. strange!

I wish there were a happy medium between money and community/family. If there is, USA is definitely not in it; 2 school shootings just this week????

[Aquashark]

Also I remember a BBC article a while back which said Romania is the most depressed country - ie has the largest number of sad people. It did seem that way to me while I was there...just a general feeling of sadness in the air.

the older people here look sad because they led (and still leading) a hard life, especially in the transition period from communism to capitalism ('90-00) when everything was unstable: factories were going bankrupt or being sold in the private sector -> large scale unemployment, prices rised frequently due to rapid uncontrolled inflation, the sudden change of structure in the human resources market, poor salaries etc.

people had to adapt to a new system after living most of their lives in a controlled/centralized one.

on the other hand the majority of the youth is ignorant of communism and takes the freedom they have for granted. they have opportunities, they have hope for a better life, they are leading a better life than their parents, they are certainly not sad.

it's a weird opposition, but poor countries tend to have a lot of contrasts.

the friendliness of the people in a country is inversely proportional to the amount of wealth that country has.

i don't think that's entirely true. we are friendly with foreigners because it's in our culture and we respect people from better developed countries. also the language/culture barrier between europeans and americans is less obvious.

we're certainly not excessively friendly with eachother because poverty really makes all differences in wealth stand out and people tend to be more envious here.

a lot of people here have an obsession with showing more wealth than others around them, being a hotshot, investing in things they don't need.. like buying really expensive mobile phones (although some barely afford to pay the bill), buying expensive clothing just because they are from a famous brand (and wear them at all times because they can't afford something else after), buying foreign (mostly german) cars (and keep them parked in front of the flat because they want to save the gas money) etc.

so things are starting to look a lot more like what you've described in the US..

the only thing that is different is that we're expansive Latin people and don't have closed societies, like let's say Scandinavian countries..

[Aquashark]

also the landscape looks depressing here if you're not used to it.. like the housing units, large post-industrial zones with abandoned factories and littered with trash, wild dogs on the streets, concrete everywhere in the suburbs and few green spaces.

in my post-communist childhood (mostly between '90-'99) i used to play with all the kids from my neighborhood in a big abandoned greenhouse littered with rubble, broken glass and a lot of trash (like broken tv sets, car parts etc.). the greenhouse was like 15 meters from my flat.

this greenhouse had its own dried sewer system.. we would play hide and seek there. it was a dark creepy place, but it had no rats luckily. we were also building little houses with various stuff people dumped in there like metal beams, plastic, bricks, wood, broken furniture.

we would break any window we would find in the greenhouse, smash the walls with improvised hammers, build traps for wild dogs, start HUGE fires with truck tires and wood..

we also played with Calcium Carbide which was a mild type of explosive. we would make little canons that fired potatoes, rocks, plastic bottles and have contests who shoots furthest. we would fill a bottle with this stuff pour water in it and run like hell, because the expanding carbide would make the bottle explode in many flying glass pieces

nearby there was a health clinic with two stories. some of us would climb on it with bare hands when it was closed. i only dared to climb to the first story in a balcony, it was way too risky to climb on the rooftop for me. also once when it was renovated for like 6 months we'd play tag on the construction grids. now that was really stupid! i remember a kid breaking a leg from jumping down not to be tagged and missing the pile of sand he was supposed to land on

my childhood was like scrapheap challenge
we had toys at home, but we wouldn't come out with them very often because nearby gypsy kids would gang on us and steal them.

it really boggles my mind when i think of it.. now in the place of the greenhouse there's a big supermarket. not that thrilling if you ask me :<

now kids don't come out so much on the streets and are certainly not playing with garbage anymore or dressed in play-rags yes, i had a special line of clothing for going out to play (mostly old, worn out clothes), because my parents knew i would come home soaked in mud or dirt, or god knows how.

kids these days are clean cut and well dressed and talk about video games, the internet, fashion and aren't allowed to engage in vandalism.. pretty gay if you ask me!

PS: sorry about being offtopic regarding North/South Korea.. i tried to keep it short because i could write tons more about crazy stuff from when i was a kid

[spooker]

good stories man. i also think its sad for childhood wonderlands like abandoned greenhouses to be replaced by supermarkets! around here, there is an abandoned insane asylum, it's like a mini village of about 10 buildings. one of them has a movie projector room and i went in and found some ancient reels of film. in another room I found a neuroscience textbook from 1929--it's incredible, the drawings of the nervous system are so simplistic, like just loopy little lines. rumor has it someone found a little room with a pentagram on the wall and a little firepit with some crow carcases in it; cool eh? my best memories of childhood are running from the cops in a pack of 80 kids on halloween, spelunking the cavernous depths and exploring every nook and cranny of my ancient church during sleepovers, and sneaking outside with my friend to take walks around town at 2 am when i was 11. shame how "development" sort of sterilizes life.....that's why i enjoy india so much, it's 100% unsterile

[Aquashark]

hehe, fun times.. a lot of energy wasted
too bad nowdays i'm a huge lazy nerd

[Baker]

i don't know man. Greed? we could maybe not be greedy?

...

I wish there were a happy medium between money and community/family. If there is, USA is definitely not in it; 2 school shootings just this week????

I think I might know parts of the answer (maybe).

Everyone (in the US) has cars. Some people drive outrageously [act like jerks] while driving and act ways they never do except when driving. (This isn't the answer, I'm leading into it).

Generally, by far the friendliest people seem to be salesmen of some sort.

I think part of what is going on is that people can very selectively choose who they interact with in wealthy countries and fall out of practice of interacting with people.

People with a lot of face to face time helping strangers, like salesmen, retain their "people skills" and the rest of us don't.

People can get in a vehicle and drive to work and back home, with little variation, and mostly avoid all outside contact except friends, people at work and family.

If my hypothesis is true, things will never change in wealthier countries because the source of the problem is that failing to use personal interaction skills causes them to rot on the vine.

If true, this is probably also the source of class stratification. Wealthier people don't interact with less wealthy people and get biases and so forth.

Isolation really seems to be the cause of the problem (combined with other things like a tight schedule and other minor factors).

/One idea, right or wrong