Yea I doubt he tried to steal a banner. Those things are big. No way you can hide it. It was probably just North Korea doing North Korea things but he's still an idiot for going in the first place.

CNN just said our spy satellites picked up new nuclear activity at one of their underground facilities.

im not going to rule out the very realistic possibility of a stupid college kid being a stupid college kid and thinking he can have a souvenir of his dangerous journey into the unknown.

im really not one to victim shame, but COME ON! why the **** would you travel/vacation in a place where fabricating trivial criminal offenses in order to hand out extreme punishments to foreigners is basically the norm...?

morons, all of them.

I am not ruling out that he tried to steal it either. but I am not gonna insta believe a murderous regime with a grainy photo of an unrecognizable person stealing a poster.

and I really dont have a problem with him going there either. I think it would be awesome to travel to nk and tons of ppl do it and get in no trouble. the ppl who get arrested seem to be there illegally or on an extended stay and engaging in dangerous activity like religion or education.

College kid is young & dumb enough to go to NK on vacation and is said to be caught attempting to steal a propaganda poster. That seems not unlikely.

Infuriating article on the hundreds of "intrepid travelers" (morons) who think it's loads of fun to go on vacation in a police state:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.ef6295792bcb

Plenty of people go to NK on package tours without getting imprisoned.

Wouldn't be surprised if the kid thought he could take something and get away with it despite all the warnings. His naivete cost him his life.

It's 20-something backpackers treating travelling to NK like travelling to Thailand. The type of people who I absolutely hate interacting with.

I wouldn't go to NK myself. It's expensive for such a ****ty country and having to be minded and surveilled for the entire trip is pretty unpleasant. What if you wanted to have a wank in the bathroom? I mean I guess knowing that hidden cameras are catching that Kodak moment might make it more exciting for some. It'd freak me out though.

Even if you don't get locked up and become a bargaining chip for a psychotic dictator, your tourist dollars will still go to prop up death camps. Surely there are better options for an exotic travel experience?

Of course.

Plus you can watch YouTube videos of what people see on the tours there. You can shoot a rifle at some American soldiers made out of aluminum, tour an American submarine captured by the North Koreans, and bow in front of giant statues of psychotic dictators before placing flowers in front of them.

Much of it is a big propaganda campaign anyway. You ride on a metro for one stop and it happens to be one with a chandelier and a bunch of murals and **** like that. What a coincidence.

Don't South and North Korea have the same culture anyway? I mean yea, in North Korea you have 100% propaganda but if you want to experience Korean culture, just go to South Korea.

yea this, like wtf is wrong with you people??

i mean ok lots of governments do bad things but NK is pretty exceptional when it comes to state sanctioned human rights abuses

but yo it would be soooo tight to go on vacation there bro!!

i just cannot bring myself to feel one ounce of sympathy or pity for these idiots

Well if i remember correctly he didnt go to north korea out of the blue. He moved to china as an exchange student or something and there his class had scheduled a trip to north korea that he joined.

Something along these lines.

How do we reconcile views like this of going to NK with the idea that opening up to Cuba is a good thing (which I thought we agree on)?

I'm sure they're the same in some ways but one country was closed off while the other was open to western values and culture. So they're pretty different places with different people.

I really don't know what I would enjoy in North Korea. I could probably get a more accurate depiction of history from a 5 year old than a North Korean tour guide. Maybe there's some kind of humor that can be derived from the stuff that the locals believe but I doubt it's worth the money or the knowledge that you're supporting an oppressive regime run by a family of psychopaths.

It's just a matter of where you draw the line.

opening up to cuba involves a good faith effort on both sides to be more inclusive, to work out differences for the greater/common good, and to promote economic cooperation and growth. NK isnt interested in that at all, afaik

tbh, I don't know much about what Cuba is like, but NK just seems like it's in a class by itself.

I think people might go to NK for its unique culture.

Not many places you get to visit an absolute totalitarian regime governed by a personality cult. Which pretty much culturally distinguishes it from SK, last I heard.

I imagine some people are just curious to see what this is like first hand, even though you wont "see" much, the experience of how you are managed and presented information etc by the regime will be an experience in and of itself.

Why anyone goes to NK does not seem that hard imo.

Not that it would be my particular cup of tea.

North Korea central philosophy, Juche (meaning self-reliance), would oppose cooperation to that degree.

like i'm no expert on cuban and north korean culture, but i know a little bit and it seems laughable to paint the applauding of obama's efforts with cuba as contradictory or hypocritical with respect to calling NK travellers ******s

If you wanted to see what Korea looked like 50+ years ago, you could travel to one of the many small islands off the southern coast of South Korea. I went camping on one of them with some friends (Yokjido) in 2009 and it was pretty weird. It felt like I went on a time machine instead of a ferry to get there. There was one bus on the entire island that drove on the one road that went around the perimeter of it. Not a smidgen of even romanized Korean, let alone English, existed on the island. As a matter of fact, the island is so small and insignificant that it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page.

I think that North Korea didn't realize that Americans would find that their threatening the lives of ten million of them was less offensive than the actual taking of just one American life.

I'm not calling anything contradictory or hypocritical, they just both seem generally similar, even if one is more of an extreme than the other. Cuba is a repressive communist state that doesn't tolerate political dissent, and going there as a tourist contributes to it. I haven't heard a lot of criticism of people who do so, though. Again, going to NK is clearly worse (death camps and everything), but I'm not even sure if we think people who go to Cuba are "bad" to any degree. Should we?

Is there progress happening on human rights/democracy in Cuba? I think that's the important measure.

In Cuba the average guy on street probably receives a fair proportion of the tourist dollar and is grateful for it, in NK I would have thought AGOS probably gets almost nothing.