Despite the boring, miserable and overly controlled experience, I returned the next year. I don't like confrontation, and the Communist Party officials had already signed me up, so I went again.
Could have just... not paid the $300 a second time. Also this dude looks like the 3rd Sprouse brother.
If you willingly pay to go to North Korea you're funding a dictatorship. You're an asshole and if you end up in jail there you should be on your own
Wowww
A large portion of tourism income, including airfare, goes directly to the government, and North Korea can buy old nuclear warheads for several hundred thousand dollars, which adds up pretty quick with a few hundred tourists.
Bear that in mind if you're thinking of visiting.
Yeah, I don't get people vacationing there.
But was it worse than Vacation Bible School?
Jesus Christ i hated Vacation Bible School. I know it was just to get us little shits out of the house for five minutes but for fuck sake anything else would've been better
After what happened to Otto Warmbier…. someone would choose to go there?
the story from the article is from 2015 and 2016. a year before warmbier
It probably helped that he is Russian and not American.
An American in North Korea is just asking to be jailed for dubious reasons.
Yes, if they aren't very bright.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
I tried to find more information, so I subscribed to a group called "Solidarity with North Korea" on VKontakte — Russia's equivalent to Facebook.
In it, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation offered a chance to go to a North Korean children's summer camp for about $300.
I traveled alone from St. Petersburg, where I grew up, to Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia, where I joined a group of other children and some Communist Party officials.
Some kids in our group, as young as 12, bought North Korean rice vodka, brought it back to the camp, and got extremely drunk on the first couple of nights.
We also had to participate in concerts, singing propaganda songs in Korean about North Korea's Supreme Leaders, using lyric sheets translated into Russian.
One kid became so indoctrinated afterward that he joined the Communist Party in Russia and was always posting about North Korea.
The original article contains 772 words, the summary contains 153 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Apparently those Bieber bangs made it all the way to Russia a decade ago.
I wanna play the hamster game now!
A community for discussing events around the World
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/