asciilifeform: as for the 'crayzeee', i'm not convinced that is is possible to keep a small and blockaded country from being swallowed up by the mcdonalds monster without some 'crayzeee.'
asciilifeform: it is going there, yes, neither the koreans nor anybody else know how to make molybdenum out of turnips.
asciilifeform: but if your picture of it is based on the ubiquitous southkr/usg crapolade, you would imagine it is a cargo cult pygmy set with straw airplanes.
asciilifeform: but fact is, the koreans built factories, educated engineers, had working hardware, perhaps not first class but quite close.
asciilifeform: then say 'what a fuckhead, he shit himself.'
asciilifeform: north kr is simply a large-scale version of the thing wonderful civilized americans like to do to prisoners, chain'em up to a post until shits himself.☟︎
asciilifeform: i dunno that it is possible to consider it in any sense but the political.
asciilifeform: everything that happens in north kr, that jurov reads about and goes 'eww', is a creation of the west.
asciilifeform: see the wonderful thread currently going on mircea_popescu's www re the crimes of lincoln
asciilifeform: until 'civilized' world gangs up on it.
asciilifeform: north kr was never agriculturally rich, it was frozen shit land, and from the very beginning of industry in that godforsaken orc peninsula , was the industrial half of it.
asciilifeform: then came nato blockade, enforced boycotts.
asciilifeform: hence the impression i walked out with.
asciilifeform: these had mercifully brief bio-blurbs on the tombs
asciilifeform: and these weren't even mega-rocket-constructors, but engineers/jurists/architects/fencing instructors/etc in distant and forgotten and since-demolished orcland.
asciilifeform: when i went to the recoleta graveyard in mircea_popesculandia , i could not shake the thought that any single one of the folks buried there, when alive, was worth more than all of current-day usa.
asciilifeform: meanwhile the 'successful' folk also... failed in the field
asciilifeform: 'consumer' deserves 1 'consumer good', a stick, to be beaten with, so that he might become something more than consumer, and possibly... produce even.
asciilifeform: that was one of the few things su got ~right~.
asciilifeform: dun forget to turn off the bear, and feed the reactor with moar vodka
asciilifeform: noooow i wasn't there for the magical 90s.
asciilifeform: somehow i had both meat and fish growing up, in what is now urk no less, and did not even have mega-party-functionaries for parents, or even professors like mircea_popescu , but ordinary doctors etc.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu saw schoolgirls sucking cocks in exchange for meat, and i believe it, but i saw no such thing where i was.
asciilifeform: su had famine at the same time as usa: '30s.
asciilifeform: doug hofstadter (english! speaker! incidentally) noted, correctly, that (approx.) 'souls, whether or not they literally exist, come in different sizes.'
asciilifeform: to answer the q in the earlier thread, su was a superior culture (vs the anglos, of any time after isambard brunel died) simply because their cult was culturally superior in effect. su pharaoh orders n1 rocket for his pyramidal glorification. anglo pharaoh orders 1,000,000,001 fupas to be fattened.
asciilifeform: can try to fix it, possibly, mircea_popescu-style, by breeding a wholly different crop of people, but this takes millenia, and nobody alive here and now will live to see the smallest lick of it.
asciilifeform: you cannot fix culture having shit-values (i.e. defective cult aims) via commercial means.
asciilifeform: the 15th c. china of zheng he, had yet other cult object, the mega-fleet (with wooden sailing ships quite comparable in size to today's maersk monsters! )
asciilifeform: british empire has yet other cult objects: massive (and riotously -ev) railroads in india, say.
asciilifeform: modern culture has different cult objects: e.g., massive pile of well-nurtured 'fupas'.
asciilifeform: trinque: consider: a 'saturn' and the maersk cargo fleet cost similarly. but they are unlike: 'saturn' is a cult/religious object (in the sense where nobody seriously attempts to calculate its roi) , rather more like the great pyramids.☟︎
asciilifeform: and some folks believe in accidents that are so convenient for enemy... i do not.
asciilifeform: could have easily gone the other way.
asciilifeform: su incidentally had a considerably larger item, which is not famous where trinque lives, because it exploded on the launch pad (killing the bulk of the su space command at the time)
