Universities should be free speech zones!!!11!1one

[lpetrich]

North Korean defector says 'even North Korea was not this nuts' after attending Ivy League school

... a North Korean defector fears the United States' future "is as bleak as North Korea" after she attended one of the country's most prestigious universities.

Yeonmi Park has experienced plenty of struggle and hardship, but she does not call herself a victim.

"I am not a victim" - some people's assertion of how virtuous they are, it seems.

One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.

"I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think," Park said in an interview with Fox News. "I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying."

Fox News. It figures.

Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.

Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.

During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.

"I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing," recalled Park.

"Then she said, 'Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’"

Then she grumbled about what she called "anti-American propaganda".

"The math problems would say 'there are four American bastards, you kill two of them, how many American bastards are left to kill?'"

Then pronouns.

"English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say 'he' or 'she' by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them 'they'? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?"

"It was chaos," said Yeonmi. "It felt like the regression in civilization."

"Even North Korea is not this nuts," she admitted. "North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy."

She eventually "learned how to just shut up" to avoid causing trouble.

"Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like," said Yeonmi, who by the age of 13 had witnessed people drop dead of starvation right before her eyes.

"These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they've experienced. They don't know how hard it is to be free," she admonished.

"I literally crossed through the middle of the Gobi Desert to be free. But what I did was nothing, so many people fought harder than me and didn't make it."

Yeonmi and her mother escaped North Korea across the then-frozen Yalu River in 2007, but the two fell into the hands of human traffickers who sold them into slavery, her for $300 and her mother for less than $100. Not a very good introduction to capitalism.

The two made it to Mongolia, crossing the Gobi Desert, and eventually making their way to South Korea. In 2015, she published her memoirs, "In Order to Live", about her journey.

"The people here are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most," the human right activist said.

What kind of nonsense is that?

"In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong-un] was starving," she recalled. "He's the fattest guy - how can anyone believe that? And then somebody showed me a photo and said 'Look at him, he's the fattest guy. Other people are all thin.' And I was like, 'Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?' Because I never learned how to think critically."

"That is what is happening in America," she continued. "People see things but they've just completely lost the ability to think critically."

It is most revealing that she is silent about right-wingers' personality cult of Donald Trump. It ought to have reminded her of North Korea's official personality cult of that nation's leaders.

"North Koreans, we don't have Internet, we don't have access to any of these great thinkers, we don't know anything. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it."

If there is anyone who lives in a mental bubble, it's the right wing. That aside, a lot of people don't seem willing to do much research, even before the Internet. I remember going to libraries a lot, and the Internet has been a virtual library for me.

Having come to America with high hopes and expectations, Yeonmi expressed her disappointment.

"You guys have lost common sense to degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend," she said.

"Where are we going from here?" she wondered. "There’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it's complete chaos."

???

"I guess that's what they want, to destroy every single thing and rebuild into a Communist paradise."

Has she become a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society?

 

[lpetrich]

YP's grumbling about "anti-American" content makes me wonder if she wants what she fled from: the government making everybody worship the leaders as god-kings and that presents the nation as absolutely perfect.

Also, someone pointed out about her grumbling about pronouns that the Korean language has an elaborate honorific system in its grammar. I researched it, and I found

•  Korean honorifics -  Korean pronouns - Korean Honorifics: Suffixes, Titles, Pronouns, Verbs and More - Korean Honorific Titles: Oppa, Unni, Hyung, Nuna and more - Korean Honorifics - Easy Guide to Speech Levels in 2021
•  Japanese honorifics -  Japanese pronouns -  Honorific speech in Japanese (mentioned for comparison)
•  Thai honorifics (mentioned for comparison)

From lingodeer:

In many situations, you will see Koreans become overjoyed when they learn that their conversation partner is the same age. They’ll smile, hi-five, giggle, maybe even hug. As strange as it may seem, this is important to them.

This is because they can speak freely and comfortably to people of the same age, so they will refer to each other as 친구 (chingu, meaning friend), even if they are not close. But if their conversation partner is older, they must use a more polite and formal way of speaking. If they don’t, it could be thought of as disrespectful, embarrassing, or socially insensitive.

Korean has plenty of honorific titles, and it even has a verb suffix for expressing respect to the one spoken to, much like Japanese.

 

[Metaphor]

Full stop. Fantasies are thoughts, not necessarily desires.



She sounds kind of stiff to me and needs to be more open about her feelings.



Not me. I'd ask her what's up. After answers, if I felt like it somehow applied to me in some harmful way, I'd try to get it corrected. Failing that, I'd leave, but your question is a fantasy that you are having that she was harming you.

In reality she stopped seeing white clients, perhaps any clients due to the negativity that overtook her.

That seems to make your hypothetical irrelevant.

Yet nobody on that thread seems to think it's an issue.

This really isn't an opportunity to merge thread purposes. This is a different thread with a different purpose.

Waitwaiteaitwait.... Hold the phone.

Like, I had this big row with metaphor in Philosophy/principles where I maintained people have a responsibility to police their own negative invasives because nobody else could or had the right, and that allowing rampancy of such invasives can overcome reason in times of stress; metaphor THEN at THAT time claimed that it was just thoughts/words and nothing that ought have moral aspersions arise as a result thereof.

I am now detecting a MASSIVE cognitive dissonance happening from that quarter...

So if you want some material you can nail them to the wall for, I'm pretty sure there's some there in the "can that's be immoral" thread.

My pronouns are he/him, Jarhyn. Jarhyn knows this but he is flagrantly violating message board rules in what I assume is an attempt to upset me.

But, of course, because Jarhyn has me on ignore, or because perhaps he isn't too bright, he believes this is a "gotcha"--and of course it's nothing of the kind.

Khilanani is not immoral for having the thoughts; I didn't say it and don't believe it. Next.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

..., or because perhaps he isn't too bright,...

or perhaps you didn't realize that "them" was in reference to "that quarter," i.e. the portion of your side that makes the same argument.

quarter
noun

...
...

one or more people who provide help, information, or a particular reaction to something but who are not usually named:

• Help came from an unexpected quarter.
• There is a feeling in certain/some quarters (= some people consider) that a change is needed.

Oops!

 

[Metaphor]

..., or because perhaps he isn't too bright,...

or perhaps you didn't realize that "them" was in reference to "that quarter," i.e. the portion of your side that makes the same argument.

Oops!

No, not "oops". Jarhyn not being "too bright" refers to Jarhyn's sloppy reasoning about my alleged conflicting views, not his misgendering. Jarhyn has deliberately misgendered me before so I'm not surprised he'd do it again. He also denied he had done it at the time.

But moreover, his framing does not make sense if he is allegedly talking about people other than me in that thread, and talking about people other than me in this thread. Additionally, I am not responsible for people who agreed with me in that thread (Jarhyn doesn't name names). I suspect that Jarhyn thinks I've called Khilanani immoral for having those thoughts and feelings in this thread (I didn't) but that I previously espoused something different in a different thread (hence "nailing them to the wall").

EDIT: I'm really fucking tired of Jarhyn's shit. He cannot resist commenting on my posts, even though he is only able to do so through his third-hand interpretation of what I wrote.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

..., or because perhaps he isn't too bright,...

or perhaps you didn't realize that "them" was in reference to "that quarter," i.e. the portion of your side that makes the same argument.

Oops!

No, not "oops". Jarhyn not being "too bright" refers to Jarhyn's sloppy reasoning about my alleged conflicting views, not his misgendering. Jarhyn has deliberately misgendered me before so I'm not surprised he'd do it again. He also denied he had done it at the time.

But moreover, his framing does not make sense if he is allegedly talking about people other than me in that thread, and talking about people other than me in this thread. Additionally, I am not responsible for people who agreed with me in that thread (Jarhyn doesn't name names). I suspect that Jarhyn thinks I've called Khilanani immoral for having those thoughts and feelings in this thread (I didn't) but that I previously espoused something different in a different thread (hence "nailing them to the wall").

EDIT: I'm really fucking tired of Jarhyn's shit. He cannot resist commenting on my posts, even though he is only able to do so through his third-hand interpretation of what I wrote.

You probably have at least one valid observation in there somewhere, but it's really not on-topic and just more drama that I don't want to get sucked into. While soap operas are fun, they are also a distraction from the op.

 

[lpetrich]

North Korean Defector Likens 'Woke' Columbia to Old Country - "Fox News Interviews North Korean Defector Who Says ‘Woke’ Columbia University Is Like North Korean Totalitarianism"

She has plenty of freedom to grumble about her supposed lack of freedom, just like all the other right-wingers who moan and groan about how silenced they are. Disagreement != persecution.

She claimed

“So they said all the problems that we have in the world is because of the greedy capitalism and the Western civilization and white men, that was the exact same thing that my North Korean teachers told me that all the evils was because of USA and the capitalism. And a Columbia professor was saying the only solution to all these problems is a communist revolution. We need to dismantle the system in the name of equity,” Park replied.

Also,

Park went on to call out American celebrities and activists who do not speak out against the atrocities of the Chinese Communist Party. “They’re all making money out of CCP. Nobody in America want to stand up for the North Korean people,” she concluded.

 

[lpetrich]

The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park – The Diplomat - "A high-profile North Korean defector has harrowing stories to tell. But are they true?"

Wearing a pink, traditional Korean dress with its high waist and voluminous skirt, Park stood before the lectern at the One Young World Summit in Dublin and in between long pauses, wiping tears from her eyes and holding her hand to her mouth as she composed herself, she told of being brainwashed; of seeing executions; of starving; of the slither of light in her darkness when she watched the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic, and had her mind opened to the outside world where love was possible; of having to watch her mother being raped; of burying her father on her own at just 14; and of threatening to kill herself rather than allow Mongolian soldiers to send her back to North Korea. She talked about following the stars to freedom and then ended with her signature sign off, “When I was crossing the Gobi desert, scared of dying, I thought nobody cares, but you have listened to my story. You have cared.”

But some people are skeptical of her accounts. "The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t." Though "We need to have a full and truthful picture of life in North Korea if we are to help those living under its abysmally cruel regime and those who try to flee."

Then her accounts of her childhood in North Korea.

Buried in the shows archives are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience.

In one episode in early 2013 she appears with her mother. Family photographs are flashed on the screen and Park jokes, “That’s my Mum there. She’s beautiful right? To be honest, I’m not the Paris Hilton. My mum is the real Paris Hilton.”

Park then goes on to point out the top and chequered pants her mother is wearing “were all imported from Japan” and adds, “My mum even carried around a Chanel bag in North Korea,” to which the host responds incredulously, “There are Chanel bags in North Korea?” Park tells him there are and he then asks another woman if she’d classify Park’s family as “rich.” The woman answers, “Yes, that’s right.”

Seems like she came from a very privileged family.

She said that the men in her family were all members of the Workers Party, the ruling party, and that she was expected to go to a university, study medicine, and then marry another male Workers Party member.

 

[lpetrich]

She described her father to us as “a very free man” who was critical of the regime. She said when reports of Kim Jong Il’s daily activities would come on the television and the announcer would say “because of his mercy we are having a good life” her father would sometimes say, “Oh shut up, turn off the TV.” Park says her mother would chastise him for saying such things in front of her and her sister and so she learnt early on it was dangerous to criticize the regime and to speak about her father’s disloyalty to others.

“Because of his mercy we are having a good life” - as if he was a deity.

"When Park was nine, which would have been around 2002, she says she saw her best friend’s mother executed at a stadium in Hyesan." - but other North Korean defectors say that public executions were only done outside of town, like in the airport, and not after 2000.

"Park’s account of the mother’s crime changes constantly, depending it seems on her audience." - like saying that she was executed for watching a James Bond movie.

An expert on NK was skeptical. “I am very, very skeptical whether watching a Western movie would lead to an execution. An arrest for such action is possible indeed, but still not very likely.” Public-execution crimes: “Murder, large-scale theft, especially of the government property, sometimes involvement with large-scale smuggling operations, including human trafficking.”

Some other NK defectors say that one might end up in a horrible prison for 3 to 7 years, but not executed for something like that.

Then lots of other details, like how she left NK.

“I escaped with my mum and father – the three of us.” In her interview with us she recalled the feeling she had as she crossed the river, “I had to survive. I had to really live. And with that thought I just run, like really faster and my mum was behind and my father was there and then we all escape. And there were cars to get us because of the connections [her father’s business connections] with Chinese people and then we went to China directly.”

However, Hyesan is on the river between NK and China.

But at the Young One World Summit in Dublin, Park told the appalling tale of her and her mother escaping alone and her watching her mother being raped by a Chinese broker in order to protect her from the same fate.

 

[lpetrich]

And finally, in an article in the Daily Beast Park claimed when she and her mother were detained in a detention center in Mongolia she was forced to remove all her clothes every day for months. “I was a little girl and felt so ashamed. I kept thinking, ‘Why do these people have the privilege to control me like this? I’m a human too, but I wasn’t treated like one’,” she’s quoted as saying about her experience when she was fifteen years old.

But nobody else has ever heard of such a thing.

Kim said that compared to other countries like Thailand and Russia, Mongolia is very supportive towards North Korean defectors and that it’s highly unlikely that defectors would have been subjected to months of stripping.

A rather bizarre discrepancy.

So what to make of all this? Are the inconsistencies in Park’s story merely memory lapses or lost in translation moments or is there something else at play?

Yeonmi Park is backed by the American Libertarian non-profit organization, Atlas Foundation. She’s one of its Young Voices and has recently started her own foundation based in New York – you can donate online through PayPal, but what exactly your money will be used for is not clear. What is clear though, is that “Yeonmi is travelling and speaking in 2014” and “is available for international speeches.”

“I want the world to know my story so they will know and remember the story of North Korea” the foundation’s website reads.

There is plenty that is odious about North Korea, so why make it seem even more odious?

The North Korean defectors interviewed for this article didn’t want to be identified because they feared for the safety of their families still living under the dictatorship or being ostracized for criticizing one of their own, but they do want their voices heard. Their overriding concern, the detrimental impact exaggeration and fabrication could have on the North Korean refugee cause and their own future opportunities. They worry that Park’s inconsistencies and flawed accounts will make the world start to doubt their stories. They want truth to reign and believe, as Yeonmi Park said on BBC radio, “Lies cannot last forever.”

 

[Politesse]

Where are all these Marxist college professors conservatives seem to find? In my entire time as a student, I met maybe two Marxist faculty that I was aware of; now as a professor, at my current institution, I have one openly and notoriously Marxist colleague (a philosophy professor who gets regularly attacked in the local press and boycotted by the conservative students, in the name of free speech of course; to be fair, he kind of eggs them on). Quite a few more who (like myself) would describe themselves as sympathetic to Marxism or who incorporate Marxist theory into their work somehow, especially in the social sciences, but who would not consider themselves Marxists per se. But we still aren't talking about something that is either commonplace nor likely to reach students' ears. I suppose you're more likely to meet a Marxist in a university setting than at a NASCAR race, but its not as though they are a common sight in any American institution, and they are certainly a despised and disempowered minority, fundamentally at odds with the very neoliberal system that governs the universities and guides adminstrative decision-making at all turns. Quite a few American colleges and universities are privately owned, for profit institutions, full stop, and the public universities are all answerable to the federal government, which is a capitalist insitution to the core, largely owned and run by an oligarchic system of families born into vast intergenerational wealth. Anyone openly espousing openly Marxist ideology to their students, especially if they work in a conservative state, is eventually going to meet a phalanx of angry students, parents, and in all likelihood sympathetic adminstrators, so they'd better have tenure and a strong union to back them. Yet, they're supposedly the greatest threat to free speech?

 

[Harry Bosch]

Where are all these Marxist college professors conservatives seem to find? In my entire time as a student, I met maybe two Marxist faculty that I was aware of; now as a professor, at my current institution, I have one openly and notoriously Marxist colleague (a philosophy professor who gets regularly attacked in the local press and boycotted by the conservative students, in the name of free speech of course; to be fair, he kind of eggs them on). Quite a few more who (like myself) would describe themselves as sympathetic to Marxism or who incorporate Marxist theory into their work somehow, especially in the social sciences, but who would not consider themselves Marxists per se. But we still aren't talking about something that is either commonplace nor likely to reach students' ears. I suppose you're more likely to meet a Marxist in a university setting than at a NASCAR race, but its not as though they are a common sight in any American institution, and they are certainly a despised and disempowered minority, fundamentally at odds with the very neoliberal system that governs the universities and guides adminstrative decision-making at all turns. Quite a few American colleges and universities are privately owned, for profit institutions, full stop, and the public universities are all answerable to the federal government, which is a capitalist insitution to the core, largely owned and run by an oligarchic system of families born into vast intergenerational wealth. Anyone openly espousing openly Marxist ideology to their students, especially if they work in a conservative state, is eventually going to meet a phalanx of angry students, parents, and in all likelihood sympathetic adminstrators, so they'd better have tenure and a strong union to back them. Yet, they're supposedly the greatest threat to free speech?

Oh, conservatives invented "cancel culture". They started boycotting people that they didn't like in the 1960s.

 

[Bomb#20]

Oh, conservatives invented "cancel culture". They started boycotting people that they didn't like in the 1960s.

"The authority of a king is purely physical, and it controls the actions of the subject without subduing his private will; but the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy. I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America. In any constitutional state in Europe every sort of religious and political theory may be advocated and propagated abroad; for there is no country in Europe so subdued by any single authority as not to contain citizens who are ready to protect the man who raises his voice in the cause of truth from the consequences of his hardihood. If he is unfortunate enough to live under an absolute government, the people is upon his side; if he inhabits a free country, he may find a shelter behind the authority of the throne, if he require one. The aristocratic part of society supports him in some countries, and the democracy in others. But in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the United States, there is but one sole authority, one single element of strength and of success, with nothing beyond it.

In America the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before he published his opinions he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence, as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth."

- Alexis De Tocqueville, 1835​

 

[Oleg]

Oh, conservatives invented "cancel culture". They started boycotting people that they didn't like in the 1960s.

This may be true, but the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. When I was a yut, liberals were at the forefront of defending free speech; even speech they disagreed with. That is no longer true.