Anyone Who Thinks North Korea Is Awesome Needs To Read Escape From Camp 14.

Anyone who thinks North Korea is awesome needs to read Escape from Camp 14.

I finished watching a documentary called Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul that was about two ex-citizens of North Korea who had very different takes on their country than what we usually hear from popular defectors.

We all hear the stories of North Koreans starving during the famine but what we're hardly told is that the US wanted them to starve and made it worse by placing sanctions to destabilize the country. Even former president Jimmy Carter admits this yet we still wonder why North Koreans hate America so much.

Another thing talked about in the film was that many defectors are paid to lie and exaggerate their stories by South Korean intelligence agencies and American organizations. I am by no means a tankie but this made me question how much of the propaganda we see about North Korea is actually true. Here's the link if anyone's interested: Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul

If you know where the follow up article is, please link it. All Google had was this Snopes article, which confirms he did purchase the land for conservation, though the actual price was never revealed.

This post was regarding my experience in HIGH SCHOOL (louder for the people in the back).

@xentakneel I became aware of the goddamn unnecessary and harmful social pressures while I was getting my COLLEGE degree in Psychology. Do you want me to go back in time and tell high school me to stop conforming?

The point of the original post here was that teenage girls are exposed to a completely unrealistic standard of beauty and they for the most part often have no idea of the social pressure that makes them conform. They just want to fit in. In 2010, it was leggings and yoga pants and the invention of the jegging etc. Today, I watch most of the high school girls wear high waisted leggings and crop tops that leave the thinnest line of skin exposed, all beneath their winter coats and boots. My point was that "fitting in" clothing wise, is often more difficult for young women because of an industry that is so focused on beauty, it is always the first thought in the clothing design process of mass made products like coats and boots and leggings. Even if they're are warm leggings, why do guys get to wear jeans and sweatshirts and that counts as fitting in when girls have to continually push themselves into a cookie cutter mold of clothing style that is often not as warm as men's clothing and which sexualizes them far too early. And high school boys will simply never understand that pressure to dress in a way where they feel they owe the world beauty. So, yes it was fucking annoying when they made comments about us getting cold more easily. Yes they were just dumb kids who didn't know about invisible social and psychological pressures at force. That doesn't make it right and @bingobongosbunnie it doesn't make it any easier to change those standards when girls are called wimps for being cold in jeans or leggings.

So, yes I am fucking enlightened now. If I happen to find a time machine, I'll be sure to tell 16 year old me to stop conforming to all societal demands that have influenced her choices so she doesn't freeze in her skinny jeans when it's -20°F and the bus is 25 minutes late.

As someone who grew up in the coldest state in the midwest, literally nothing was more annoying than guys mocking us girls growing up for "being a wimp and getting cold so easily". Like, excuse me, but I would like to see a high school aged boy to try and survive a Minnesota January after shaving all the hair off their legs and underarms, while wearing a coat that is designed not with their warmth, but with the transparency of their figure, in mind, and wearing the thin black leggings from Target or Pink or wherever. Not to mention a lean figure has always been made to be the ideal over one for women.

This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

ask historicity-was-already-taken a question

i love traditional clothing. doesn’t matter the culture. all traditional clothes look baller swag af etc

i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)