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Schmidt, Daughter Talk About North Korea Trip
Eric Schmidt attracted headlines when he visited North Korea, but until now he has said little about the trip. Today he broke his silence with a Google+ post. He says in part: "As the world becomes increasingly connected, the North Korean decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world and their economic growth. It will make it harder for them to catch up economically.
We made that alternative very, very clear. Once the internet starts in any country, citizens in that country can certainly build on top of it, but the government has to do one thing: open up the Internet first. They have to make it possible for people to use the Internet, which the government of North Korea has not yet done. It is their choice now, and in my view, it’s time for them to start, or they will remain behind." His daughter had some interesting things to say as well, "The best description we could come up with: it's like The Truman Show, at country scale."
Eric Schmidt from Google goes to North Korea and tells them the path to prosperity is open up to the Internet? Are you fucking serious? Uh, Eric, you know what you should have told them the path to prosperity was; the North Korean government should completely and radically change from a multi-generational dictatorship to a representative Democracy and Capitalistic System, with the intent of reunification with their southern brothers. Close the Concentration Camps (Yes, I said Concentration Camps), get rid of the failed centralized economy, stop starving your citizens and stop trying to cling to power and accept that the citizens of NK probably would be much better off without the current NK government. Opening up to the Internet is probably about 15th on the list of things they should do.
Flying to NK and trying to convenience them to use Android Smart Phones or Google Applications for Dictatorships is pretty naive and well, fucking selfish. People are really starving and dying and giving them a couple of pointers on how to use the Internet is, well, dumb.
Linux O Muerte!
Eric Schmidt visits a farm and tells the farmer than his cows would be far better off with internet access. The farmer looks at him like he is fucking stupid. Where is the benefit for him in doing that?
You are so right on.
Most people here have never been to Korea and can't really understand the dynamics of what is going on in both South and North Korea.
There is very little chance that Eric Schmidt or any of his "people" saw anything that the North did not want them to see... Which is most of North Korea, which is in a state of extreme poverty on levels that most American, most Westerners simply can not understand.
This was a PR trip for the North Koreans, a way to leverage media in the West to believe that things are not as bad in the North as they really are.
As the US Government said, this was not a "useful" trip, it was a PR trip for the North Koreans, who continue to develop Nuclear Weapons at the cost of feeding their people.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They seem to go out of the way to try and impress foreigners with how awesome shit is, they just fail badly. I think it may be a case that they've been drinking their own kool aid for so long they forget the outside world doesn't buy the bullshit. They are used to their propaganda defining their reality, they don't have a good understanding of places where it doesn't.
Given how the whole Arab Spring thing played out, I'm guessing the people in power in NK are not going to be inviting the Internet in any time soon.
...it's also like a combination of the Truman Show and They Live. One massive reality distortion bubble that nobody is aware of.
And the whole discussion, just as the voting choices, always revolves around two options that are only differing in something entirely beside the point, giving the citizens choices for all aspects of their life, except those that aren't meaningless. Everything is condensed down from picking a fuzzy varying area in a multi-dimensional gradient space to a one-dimensional binary choice. With you being called at least "Hitler" for picking the "wrong" one. Let alone trying to think outside that box.
It's ludicrous.
Your 10 aircraft carriers are not securing shipping routes, and the US doesn't have a shortage of nuclear weapons sitting around not securing shipping routes either.
There is a huge difference between the US and North Korea. This isn't it.