alt Hacker News> Dictatorships suck, but what sucks more is a civil war powered by foreign governments doing a proxy war
It's a macabre study. But one could honestly argue that several countries in the latter category's populations are better off than North Korea's.
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samrus • yesterday at 1:14 PM
If you had to live in gaza or north korea right now, which would you choose?
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thrance • yesterday at 1:32 PM
You're making the mistake of correlating these proxy wars with any later improvements in these countries' living conditions. War is always detrimental to quality of life.
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Maybe after the civil war, certainly not during it. If I had to pick where to live, I'd pick North Korea over Ukraine right now because it's a lot easier to live in a dictatorship than an active war zone. (This isn't me saying I want to live in NK, I don't).
But I'd also point out that a lot of what makes it really suck to live in the worst places in the world isn't often the government but rather the international relationships. Turkey has a particularly brutal government, but it's Nato and EU ally status means that the civilians enjoy modern trade and travel.
The worst times to be in NK was the 90s when there was an ongoing famine and the US refused to lift sanctions thinking it'd spark a civil war that overthrew the regime. It didn't.