This is a weird one. Bear with me. From !dataisbeautiful@lemmygrad.ml:
So I said to myself, “that’s a little bit weird. The US one going up, I can actually believe, but the North Korea one being lower is definitely wrong.”
I think Our World In Data is just being shoddy, as they often do.
https://www.wfp.org/countries/democratic-peoples-republic-korea
The thing I found funny, and why I’m posting here, comes from observing why it was that they started their graph at 2003 and exactly at 2003.
I feel like you could use this as a slide in a little seminar in “how to curate your data until it matches your conclusion, instead of the other way around.”
And also, I don’t think the hunger rate suddenly dropped from epic to 0 exactly in 2003, I think more likely Our World in Data is just a little bit shoddy about their data.
CIA propaganda, the poverty rate in the DPRK is -1%, and party approval rate is 102%
Source: from the DPRK, of course! Lying is illegal in glorious DRPK!
In my experience, it’s more akin to:
Source: Literally anything! That isn’t corrupt and Western!
“Like what?”
Source: Anything!
“Can I use Al Jazeera? Or Wikipedia? Or can you give me a few sources that I can look at?”
Source: No, those are corrupt and Western! You’re lying! Look at this UN report!
“This UN report says the opposite of what you said.”
Source: That’s because the UN is corrupt, and lying! And Western!
“Can you just tell me where you got this information in the first place? Even if it’s not ‘reliable’ per se, surely someone told it to you in the first place. Who was that? Where do you get your news?”
Source: Shut up! You’re sealioning! You’re being bad! You’re lying! Blocked. Cry some more!
Lmfao look at this link yogthos has sent to me before
https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
cracks me up
There was no “massacre in Tiananmen Square.” But there’s no question many people were killed by the army that night around Tiananmen Square, and on the way to it — mostly in the western part of Beijing. Maybe, for some, comfort can be taken in the fact that the government denies that, too.
Western intelligence agencies at the time, now declassified, corroborate the official Chinese numbers: Casualty figures remain uncertain and unconfirmed, but reports of deaths from the military assault on Tiananmen Square range from 180 to 500.
This is an uncommonly straightforward take on it. “Sure, they killed hundreds of protestors. But it wasn’t in the square itself, and some other people inflate the number of dead, so it doesn’t count.”
I don’t know whether that claim is even true. But even if it’s entirely accurate, this as the vindication of the CCP doesn’t work. They just want some truthiness they can point to and make it sound like the dead protestors are a lie.
It’s my favorite part because the quote they pulled to support it is a journalist rolling their eyes so hard.
he’s literally like yes there is no massacre in the square because you chased everyone the fuck away
Massacre ❌ The People’s™ Massacre ✅
Obviously you gonna look at the news from a blogpost! Thats the only reliable news source!
Someone told me a few days ago that Israel was striking Syria with nuclear weaponry, and the only reason I didn’t know about it was that I only consumed Western news sources.
They sent me an article that proved it! And a video of the explosion. Okay. I stopped talking with them shortly after that, after they said “Thank you for taking the bait. We’ve now come full circle,” without explaining what they meant by that.
Israel is already doing so much fucked up shit that there’s no reason to make shit up to make them look bad. They’re blowing up hospitals and schools, and shooting small children in the head. There’s no need to invent lies about nuclear weapons being used.
there’s no reason to make shit up to make them look bad
There always is. Some people just enjoy stirring up more drama. Some get money out of that.
Tearing down the very idea of objective truth, switching out sources and debate for a process based on ever-shifting chaos, yelling, and loyalty to a particular narrative above all else, is it own highly valued goal.
Most of their arguments in conversations rely on strawmanning anyway, so it’s expected they don’t want you to look up any source except ones that agree with them. Especially ““NATOpedia”” 🙄 but this obscure ML post written 6 years ago on a niche forum is a completely valid source!
And everything needs to be “contextualized.” Meaning, they can decide what your sources actually mean, even if it’s something different than what they say.
“Can I do that to your sources too?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even have sources. Are you sealioning again?”
Cherry picking data has long been a problem. I recall a short piece from high school in the 80s called something like “How to Lie with Statistics.” It’s always stuck with me.
Bruh, I had someone told me that “China lifted millions of people out of poverty”
Me, whose family emigrated out of China for both economic and political reasons: “Uh-huh, interesting…” 🤭 “Kinda odd so many people want to go to foreign countries, but few of those foreign countries’ Citizens want to immigrate to China… I wonder why…” 🙈
Recently an economist, who writes for an economics paper in China, showed a billion people in China lived on 280 USD, or less, per month, which would mean most of China’s population is still in poverty, and their 800 million number was either not true, or that there was a big back slide they have been covering up. He used meta-data from Chinese academic institutes, and the CCP’s own reports.
Since that report went viral on Weibo, then the west, the CCP, and foreign groups they operate through, have nearly erased it. When you would search for “billion people in china still in poverty” Google would have like 10 links to articles about it. Now it is buried down page, behind a dozen or so links about China lifting varying numbers of people from poverty. The ones still there are from only less reputable, or less known, sites. So getting to the citation, that is real, is basically dead.
China’s response has changed, been contradictory, and has mostly become vague sentiments of anti-Chinese interests.
It went from numerous, well established, media outlets, to me being able to only find this trash article about the censorship on trash newsweek.
The framing is real shit, but the direct info about Li, and what happened are there. However it was originally reported in Caixin, which is a mainstream Chinese financial paper. It wasn’t even a hit piece. The guy was citing their demographics issues, plateauing growth, aging population, stress on funds to elderly, etc. He even says that the CCP is very competent in that regard, and projected that, taking this information into mind, they could still double their GDP in record time.
Yeah, I’ve seen that. They love to post up graphs of life expectancy, income, etc, and show it going up and up after the revolutions. It kind of loses its steam when you put those graphs next to the graphs of life expectancy, income, etc, worldwide, during that same time period, and they all go up together as a more or less unified grouping as agriculture and medicine improved and the technology boosted up the whole world.
A lack of world wide wars was also helpfull
Not being poor, does not mean you are rich. China lifted millions out of poverty to what is global average. Obviously migrants prefer to go to the actually rich parts of the world.
it’s still kinda low overall (just look at steam’s regional pricings), but you were probably above the poverty line, especially if you managed to emigrate. and if you’re checking population under the UN poverty line, the statistic does hold up. that just means more people survive, not that more people self-actualize.
you were probably above the poverty line, especially if you managed to emigrate
Family based immigration to USA, had to wait like 13+ years, paperworks started wayy before I was born. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with how rich you are (well, beside the fact that the relative in the US has to sign a paper to “sponsor” us, basically promising to pay the government in case we took certain government benefits within 5 years of entering, which we we never took any of those government benefits btw). Basically its nust luck.
Edit: Also, I heard that many people, particulary people from Fujian, China, have immigrated to the US without permission. Like, they didn’t even get legal permission and could get deported at any time, yet they still came here. Like that’s how much people wanted to leave.
Which just think about it, I seemed kinda lucky tbh, most people can’t through the legal method, and is at risk of deportation come 2025 (ya know… new administration… honestly I’m not sure if legal immigrants like me are safe… 😖 hopefully, my citizenship status is good enough to not get kicked out.)
The issue here is, there’s no way to confirm the data as all these dictatorship tend to manipulate their data before releasing it, and you have no way to confirm anything. Only idiots will eat it up.
10.7 million people are undernourished
18% of children are stunted (impaired growth and development due to chronic malnutrition)
25.9 million populationThat’s pretty terrible. I couldn’t find an apples to apples comparison, but the best numbers put food insecurity (not the same at all as malnutrition) at 5-13.5% (5% was severe food insecurity), and growth stunting was <5% (not sure on the severity).
Having ~40% of your population be malnourished is horrendous. This is absolutely cherry-picked data at best.
It is probably based on numbers from the North Korean government
This chart is specifically the death rate. The other charts you provided are “affected by” aggregate statistics or “undernourished” if I understand correctly.
It seems possible that NK is improving on people dying directly from it or deaths are being categorized differently (if everyone is malnourished, another more immediate cause of death may be recoreded).
So I’m not sure this is entirely wrong.
All three charts measure different things, yes. I suspect that “Our World in Data” is converting some more complex metrics into “estimated deaths per 100,000” to have an apples to apples comparison, and doing it badly in this case, since their numbers are so different from other sources. It could be also that they just can’t get good numerical data out of North Korea. Some sources don’t even quote numbers because there would be too much guesswork involved.
But I definitely wouldn’t count that, or “deaths are being categorized differently by the government” as a sign that this isn’t wrong. The literal death rate from malnutrition in North Korea is far from negligible like it is in China, Vietnam, or the US (even with it going up in the US). You don’t have 20% of your children with stunted growth without some of them being too weak to make it and dying of some condition due to malnutrition. And that absolutely haunting video of the starving North Korean woman gathering grass, who died shortly after the interview, is from 2010.
Something else to consider, whether Cuba, DPRK, or anywhere else is the impact of sanctioning.
Edited to hopefully correct formatting
Yeah. In addition to causing massive suffering, they often work backwards, too, strengthening the regime they’re trying to weaken.
Also. In the early 60s, the list of communist countries in the world was:
- China
- Cuba
- Soviet Union
- East Germany
- Hungary
- Czechoslovakia
- Poland
- Mongolia
- Romania
- Albania
- Bulgaria
- North Korea
- Yugoslavia
- North Vietnam
The list of countries with State Department restrictions preventing US citizens from traveling there, with severe penalties, was:
- China
- Cuba
- North Korea
- Vietnam
- Albania
- Hungary
The list of countries which are still communist today is:
- China
- Cuba
- North Korea
- Vietnam
Preventing a communist country from being visited by tourists from the US, to “punish” them, is among the most effective methods ever devised for strengthening its communist government and allowing it to keep its hold on power.
The list of countries which are still communist today is:
Correction: the list is actually { }. Hope that helps.
I would consider those communist in the historical sense. Communism is pretty much tied to crazy authoritarian governments.
but ya see, it took 48 years of feeding the starving into the foodschmunkgeneratorium2000™ to march north korean statistics out of the state of starvation with the will and pure physical determination of the people! just not the living
/s
Lemmygrad is hilarious, you fell for propaganda
You fell for clickbait. If you read it, you notice that they basically debunk the title
Read the title, didn’t read the content, then proceeded to tell everyone the click bait title is fact
A lot of people on Lemmy are super addicted to being the smartest person in the conversation.
At what point did I fall for it?
Why has it gone up so much in the US?
They’re abusing a chart which is supposed to be configured more like this:
I think the increase in the US is probably real, maybe increasing desperation as the combination of the financial crash, opioid epidemic, and increasing rents drove people increasingly into the margins. But the size of the problem in the US is still basically 0 as in other functioning countries. I don’t know for sure, but I think if accurate numbers for North Korea were on that chart, they’d be way up above South Sudan and Madagascar. At least there are aid agencies trying to do something in Africa. In North Korea, people are just dying, and that’s it.
