Here's a real GoPro on the streets of Pyongyang
Here's a real GoPro on the streets of Pyongyang
Redditors react to a video of a bike ride around Pyongyang
Video: the most normal city ever filmed
Redditors: So spooky! Everything looks... wrong! This guy is taking his life in his hands to film this!
Also Redditors: Looks too normal, this has to be staged, they're actors and this is a propaganda channel!
Side note: my tolerance for western bullshit on the DPRK has reached the negatives, five seconds in these comments and you can cook an egg with my blood. Salute to the small handful of brave comrades pushing back on propaganda in the replies 
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why is it so hard to have nuanced views on this sorta thing? NK is an authoritarian hellscape, that doesn't mean every building is a fake facade, doesn't mean people are getting tortured in the streets, and it can even mean some (even if very very few) NK may have higher quality of life than people in western countries.
it's important to remember that you're not immune to propaganda. and for those on the other side, just because something is propaganda doesn't mean it's not partially true.
How do redditors manage to survive with so little self awareness? It's astounding.
I was expecting the "it's all fake" cliche but I guess they've been priming the people for this response for a while now. Expect to hear a lot more of this "Ok fine, they have a higher standard living than us, but they're an EVIL AUTHORITARIAN DICTATORSHIP so they're automatically worse." thing for all of the west's enemies going forward, China especially.
Pretty much the more cameras the DPRK gets and the more people who decide to upload footage to the internet the more common this take is going to get. Everyone wants to read the tea leaves of oppression in videos of people walking to and from work or the library or whatever, everyone wants to believe that the things they've been taught their whole lives are correct in spite of the evidence before their very eyes.
Yep. I think we may have talked about this before, how in the western worldview, these liberals who "see the truth" are brave heroes standing against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, if they admit they've been lied to about this country their entire lives, it would make them the bad guys according to their simplistic black and white worldview, so they have a lot of pain and suffering to go through if admit they are wrong, and get to stroke their ego if they deny reality. So almost everyone chooses the latter.
The line on China is usually that while Shanghai/Beijing/Shenzhen might be shiny, 99% of the population outside are either factory slaves or hunter-gatherers.
FYI most people who fall hook line and sinker for propaganda subconsciously (or heck, sometimes consciously) know it's bullshit, but they pretend to believe it to keep a narrative going that benefits them. Westoids subconsciously (or heck, consciously) know their tasty treats come from US hegemony, and they know spreading bullshit about how awful the rest of the world is helps keep that hegemony intact, so they pretend to believe lies to keep the nuggies coming in.
It also protects us from thinking about what we did in the Korean War. If the DPRK is pure evil, maybe it was actually good to drop napalm on civilians somehow
know it's bullshit, but they pretend to believe it to keep a narrative going that benefits them.
It doesn't seem that way to me. I know people who think the PRC is a hellscape where people are starving and disappears people and harvests their organs for thinking the wrong thing. They also think they make you write essays about how you feel about Xi's speech at work everytime Xi makes a speech.
None of them actually truly believed that shit though. They just wanna to demonize a spooky oriental race to make themselves feel superior and powerful so they can justify domination the world for Big Macs. These aren't good people, they're narcissistic psychos and there's no hope for a single one of them.
This is a Redditor coming dangerously close to rationalizing how America can be exactly as it is now while being an authoritarian hellscape but their brain has built in thought-terminating cliches to protect their psyche and avert it at the last moment.