[NicoR44]

[img]/Users/chrislaws/Desktop/screenshot.jpg[img][/img]

That doesn't work

It'd be scary if it did ....

[Kabe]

That's it, you win!!!!!! it's the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea

Here is the bizar story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel

Incredible. In a country where 2 million people have starved to death the
last years, which holds the 5th biggest army in the world (counted heads...),
to invest 2% of the GDP is such a monstrosity...

This perverse regime has to die.

Kabe

[NicoR44]

Indeed, they do have the money to test those weapons, but they don't feed there people ( as they should )

[JDHill]

This perverse regime has to die.

...quoted for agreement.

~JD

[misterasset]

This perverse regime has to die.

...quoted for agreement.

How? I should probably start off by saying that I'm not a Bush fan because the term "Regime Change" tends to conjur up lots of Iraq arguments, so that's not where I'm going.

But honestly, I'm curious how you "kill" or change a regime like that. Military intervention is out. No disrespect to other countries but for practical purposes our ENTIRE Army is tied up in Afghanistan and Iraq and will be for the forseeable future. Does anybody else's armed forces want to try and take on North Korea? So far I think the UN has only done "police actions" and not a full out assault.

There's always sanctions, which we are trying and have tried in the past but I think that's always been shown to only hurt the population. The leaders, who are corrupt to start with, just keep what they need to maintain their life and anything that's cut out by sanctions gets cut from the general population. And anything they do lose from the sanctions they take from the general population to maintain themselves.

There's direct engagement talks, which we've had some success with in the past, but they don't seem to want to talk to the rest of the world. Well, that's not entirely true, they'll talk but the USA has to be a part of it and we're too busy condeming them to actually talk to them. But then there's the Asian dynamic of trying to save face (not being rascist, just an observation) that they have to keep up the saber rattling at the very people who would be the ones trying to engage and help.

I'm being dead serious, how do you solve this? I can look at the Bush administration and be like, "Geez, how can you do such a crappy job?" but I myself could never run a country. Good intentions can only go so far and if you only use the best ideals and goals they're bound to fail because corrupt people, North Korea, will take advantage of it.

Just curious.

[jdp]

this hotel as been debated in a "call for ideas" by domus (architecture magazine) and the results are showing in the current "Venice Biennale".
you can find something about at this address (free membership required). The work includes numerous contributions including some beautiful photos of Armin Linke.
At some point Jan Kaplicky of Future System wrote a letter against the whole operation itself. basically his point is that this kind of cultural operations are too often merely distant from the matter in question, suspending the judgment and giving only visual and fragile instrument, resulting in intellectual exercises.
unfortunately the debate, which was quite interesting in my opinion, ended in the same issue with the reply of the director of the magazine, defending its idea as a critical and political point of view on the world.

[aitraaz]

loL, not surpising really, considering the noble soul of the 'director'

In all fairness though, his stated considerations:

“In recent months, in the pages of domus, we have spoken about the off-limits nuclear cities of the Soviet Union, the routes of illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean, the savage exploitation of immigrants in the construction yards of Shanghai and the infernal prison of Buenos Aires. And, with the same spirit, that of delving into a local reality, we went to Pyongyang. Where we spoke about – without ideological proclamations – a frightful city laced with immense empty roads (…). A city peppered with immense, half-empty monuments rotating around a gigantic rubble – the Ryugyong Hotel – symbol and setback of a failed regime that perhaps is attempting to emerge from its suicidal isolation.”

Boeri defends his decision to make the Ryugyong Hotel a symbolic bridge, a fissure through which to denounce a dictatorship and open a crack in its isolation. As the director of domus emphasizes “… sometimes the architectural point-of-view can reveal weak-points and cracks that spying and international diplomacy are not even capable of searching out.”

[superbad]

But honestly, I'm curious how you "kill" or change a regime like that.

Seems to me like that job should fall to South Korea, and we should respect and support whatever method they want to go about doing it. They are the ones who will have to live with the consequences of the North's actions, as well as the consequences of any actions taken by other countries against the North. They are also the ones who will have to sort out the mess when Korea is eventually reunited (which it surely will be one day). The UN can't do anything about this situation, and neither can the US really.

I can only see one scenario where the US would be forced to act on its own, and that would be the transfer of nuclear technology from North Korea to another state or terrorist organization. At the moment the North has no way of delivering a nuclear weapon to the US, and zero incentive to do so anyway. They know very well what the consequences of such an action would be, because we only have one effective miltary option open to us.

[Hervé]

what about Japan... pretty close from NK too...

[superbad]

Japan and Korea have a complicated recent history, to say the least. You could even say the only reason there is a "North Korea" at all is because of Japan.

Japan and China are both parties with a lot at stake here, and they can help or harm the process, but this is not their problem to deal with.