Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

Really interesting article!

On a related note, one oddity I often see online (and, once, in person) are the die-hard groups of westerners who insist that North Korea is actually a paradise on earth and any claim to the contrary is some kind of evil capitalist propaganda. Utterly baffling, when there are so many sources like this article indicating otherwise.

I've seen this too. Their mantra is usually something along the lines of "don't believe everything you see in the corrupt Western/South Korean media".

What gives?

I can understand different countries have different pros and cons, different people value different things, and something an American might find unpalatable might not be considered so bad somewhere else.

But North Korea seems to stand out as being one of very few countries that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Odd that anyone who wasn't born there would willingly and voluntarily pledge their allegiance to such a regime.

My guess is that most of the people who profess to believe that everything in the DPRK is hunky dory are on the extreme political left. The right does not have a monopoly on crazy people.

I can't imagine these people are on a left-right scale. They seem to be perpendicular.

I've never met a DPRK supporter, but I have met Cuba supporters. They were white, non-Cuban, and leaning so far left I was surprised they could remain upright. (And I'm pretty far left myself by contemporary U.S. standards.)

There are massive amounts of Cuba supporters outside of the Western world. From our point of view Cuba sucks, but for a lot of people the basic guarantees that Cuba gives and the lifestyle is actually not so bad at all. Their government also isn't much more corrupt than in the rest of the world.

I'm sure that, unsurprisingly, if you live in a majority white country, most Cuban supporters would be white and left-leaning. If you were a Cuban that supported the Cuban regime and were happy, why would you leave, taking on so much risk and expense?