Redditors react to a video of a bike ride around Pyongyang
Video: the most normal city ever filmed
Redditors: So spooky! Everything looks… wrong! This guy is taking his life in his hands to film this!
Also Redditors: Looks too normal, this has to be staged, they’re actors and this is a propaganda channel!
Side note: my tolerance for western bullshit on the DPRK has reached the negatives, five seconds in these comments and you can cook an egg with my blood. Salute to the small handful of brave comrades pushing back on propaganda in the replies 
Redditors: So spooky! Everything looks… wrong!
Advertising has corrupted the westoid brain. They long for the ads.
I thought this was your color but there’s actually a thread now complaining about the lack of advertising.
I was kind of hoping I was being absurd.
Jesus Juche Christ, the rot is terminal and my despair is all-consuming
Kinds risky to record video there. Also was the camera hidden within a bag (or something), In front of the bike?
How can these people be so ignorant, this guy literally has a YouTube channel with tons of videos of him just carrying a camera into shops and chatting with the workers and going about his business, no one cares or even bats an eye.
Yeah he has hundreds of videos, even ones where government workers commented on his camera and did a little smile and wave
Honestly I feel like the reason why so many tourists are told off about their cameras is because the tourists are rude, chauvinistic, and act like they’re at a zoo. Then the chauvinists back home claim that it’s an authoritarian nightmare when people ask you to stop being an asshole
Usually the complaint comes from western tourists or western viewers of other western tourists lol. North Korea seems to allow non-western tourists and students/employees more flexibility to go wherever.
Plus the western tourists literally sign up for GUIDED tours and get mad they can’t travel to some military base or someone’s workplace lol. Maybe be more trustworthy or have a government that lets you travel to North Korea if you don’t want someone showing you nationalist views and having a strict schedule and area restrictions like every other guided tour
The savage northern Koreans don’t have internet though so his youtube channel is safely hidden from their evil eyes.
He’s controlled propaganda, just like this video which was obviously staged
North Korea literally stages things for this person’s YouTube channel
And even if they don’t, it looks wrong and evil
why is it so hard to have nuanced views on this sorta thing? NK is an authoritarian hellscape, that doesn’t mean every building is a fake facade, doesn’t mean people are getting tortured in the streets, and it can even mean some (even if very very few) NK may have higher quality of life than people in western countries.
it’s important to remember that you’re not immune to propaganda. and for those on the other side, just because something is propaganda doesn’t mean it’s not partially true.
How do redditors manage to survive with so little self awareness? It’s astounding.
FYI most people who fall hook line and sinker for propaganda subconsciously (or heck, sometimes consciously) know it’s bullshit, but they pretend to believe it to keep a narrative going that benefits them. Westoids subconsciously (or heck, consciously) know their tasty treats come from US hegemony, and they know spreading bullshit about how awful the rest of the world is helps keep that hegemony intact, so they pretend to believe lies to keep the nuggies coming in.
It also protects us from thinking about what we did in the Korean War. If the DPRK is pure evil, maybe it was actually good to drop napalm on civilians somehow
know it’s bullshit, but they pretend to believe it to keep a narrative going that benefits them.
It doesn’t seem that way to me. I know people who think the PRC is a hellscape where people are starving and disappears people and harvests their organs for thinking the wrong thing. They also think they make you write essays about how you feel about Xi’s speech at work everytime Xi makes a speech.
None of them actually truly believed that shit though. They just wanna to demonize a spooky oriental race to make themselves feel superior and powerful so they can justify domination the world for Big Macs. These aren’t good people, they’re narcissistic psychos and there’s no hope for a single one of them.
This is a Redditor coming dangerously close to rationalizing how America can be exactly as it is now while being an authoritarian hellscape but their brain has built in thought-terminating cliches to protect their psyche and avert it at the last moment.
sees regular ass people walking around a regular ass city running their errands or whatever: “omg its so weird”
They need to be normal like us in america, my neighbor who’s 72 and retired stands outside and watches his car in the driveway for 6 hours to make sure it doesn’t get scratched. North Koreans are weird.
wtf are they doing, they should be driving 7 foot tall trucks with a vision cone that only extends upward
not a bike lane in sight. I now recognize my mistakes and condemn this Stalinist revisionist authoritarian autocratic regime
Has actual sidewalks for people, a technology my hometown in the USA has yet to adopt.
Dear god, no borger in that clip, not even borger wrappers thrown all over the street
Don’t you tankies understand? No borger means no food
It’s okay, the DPRK actually does have borgir, and they even come with wrappers!
I love how, even though they sell fast food borgers in paper wrappers, they also have small glass and porcelain bowls on the table with what looks like different types of Korean vegetables.
In North Korea you can only eat burger if you eat your vegetables first
I always like the Koryo Burger, which is like the DPRK doing a bit about airline food.
Jesus christ these people have no idea that they’re more propogandized than North Koreans.
there’s no trash because they don’t have enough economy so there’s no packaging to litter with
north Korea has an economy and produces things
oh yea most glorious powerful economy in the whole world most powerful DPRK
Like so the liberals realize they’re just quoting state department propoganda in shitty racist broken speech or do they really say that then pat themselves on the back for being rational and intelligent
there’s no trash because they don’t have enough economy so there’s no packaging to litter with
its fucking hilarious to me that libs will find a way to complain about a lack of single use plastics lmao. those poor north koreans don’t even have to right to kill sea turtles wtf
America is the country where if you don’t have way too much food on your store shelves then people will not shop at your grocery store. Try to reintroduce wrapping food in paper sourced from well-managed forestries and they’ll think it’s a hippie gimmick and compensate by rolling coal in the parking lot.
America is the country where if you don’t have way too much food on your store shelves then people will not shop at your grocery store.
Which is a real observable behavior you see in americans, in part because (for example) if there’s only a couple tomatoes left in a case that holds 30+ it’s become a sorta cultural natural reaction to think that there must be something wrong with them regardless of their actual condition. Which considering how often scam artists were and still are a thing here in the states and the general distrust of government institutions, it’s not surprising one bit why you see this behavior happen frequently here.
Edit: I’m not sure why exactly this behavior exists, but that’s what makes the most sense to me. And that i know my grandmother has this ingrained in her and she was born in the 50s, but that doesn’t quite make sense as she was influenced by the waste nothing attitude from her parents who grew up in the great depression.
It’s related to a common bit of culture shock that occurred whenever Soviets visited America. In the USSR grocery stores would stock goods according to the population of an area, and put out about as much product as they expected to sell that day, leading to far less waste but also making them vulnerable to supply shocks and teaching everybody that if you wanted the best cut of meat you had to plan to be there when it was delivered. People with that mentality seeing overstocked US shelves for the first time naturally thought it was wild, including government higher ups who had access to private grocery stores as a privilege of their rank in the party.
This is often spun in Western media as an exclusively communist thing, an indicator of how everything in the soviet world was scarce and rationed, but it’s a bit of culture shock that people from just about every non-Western country has when encountering Western excess for the first time - hell, even in modern day Europe the grocery stores are a lot more modest than American ones, simply because their culture hasn’t embraced the excess to the same degrees as ours has.
I’m sure it’s ingrained in me too just as much as everyone else, even though I think the more rational way to run a grocery store is the one that reduces waste while still ensuring ample access to food (insert FBI study on American vs Soviet calories and nutrition here). tldr
Whenever I see a city without advertising everywhere it’s like a headache I didn’t know I had being lifted
It looks like a video game that skimped on the world development budget.
when your GPU can’t handle too many NPCs/cars
-_-
How is he not worried that he’ll be stopped by the police and forced to pull a train??
I love the inherent white chauvinism of Redditors out here believing that the entire country exists to do a little song and dance for every white person who comes by. If you asked a Redditor what makes more sense, that a shopkeeper in Pyongyang is actually just a shopkeeper, or is actually some unpaid slave from a factory who’s been forced at gunpoint to act like a shopkeeper, they’ll always choose the latter
This entire perception has to come from how western journalists are treated there. Yeah, no shit western journalists are given a dog and pony show because they’re not trusted. The DPRK knows western journalists only to there to make the place look bad, so why even let them interact with normal society?
Imagine you’re trying to have a normal day and a white dude comes in like,
the place where they drown dissidents?And you’ve gotta be like, “sir this is a water park”
I mean could use a little more colour imo but defending themselves from imperial powers comes first over aesthetic building facades.
also no gridlock, exhaust fumes, etc this looks very calm and confirms the notion that cities can actually be somewhat peaceful, it’s just cars that ruin it.
Looks like an overcast winter day where all the trees have no leaves. Picture looks a bit desaturated as well.
The city seems reasonably colorful when you look up and see the skyline.
Honestly it just looks like a city in northern Japan. Go figure, a city in northern east Asia looks like a city in northern east Asia.
I could probably take footage from a random suburb in Sapporo, tell redditors it’s the DPRK and they’d come up with all sorts of nightmarish stories of oppression lurking beneath the seemingly normal place
The only thing I saw wrong with this is that they could get away with narrowing the streets a bit
Idk if you look at the skyline it looks like candy land. I think they were just having cold weather
For a city that has so few cars it’s disappointing that bikes seem to be relegated to the sidewalks, especially because the sidewalks seem much busier than the streets.
Does anyone know if bikes aren’t allowed on streets or if this person was just riding on the sidewalk out of an abundance of caution?
Does anyone know if bikes aren’t allowed on streets or if this person was just riding on the sidewalk out of an abundance of caution?
the author responds to a comment on the youtube video:
There are not many bicycle lanes in Pyongyang, the road I passed in this video does not have a special bicycle lane, the law in North Korea is that we are not allowed to ride a bicycle when crossing, we must get off the bicycle when crossing. In this video my friend and I are also discussing “should we cycle on the sidewalk or on the road, because sometimes we are prohibited from cycling on the sidewalk and sometimes we are prohibited from cycling on the road”.
In this video my friend and I are also discussing “should we cycle on the sidewalk or on the road, because sometimes we are prohibited from cycling on the sidewalk and sometimes we are prohibited from cycling on the road”.
lmao ive been there
They really are just like us!
i wish i was allowed to ride bikes on sidewalks where i live, we HAVE to ride on the road here
I’m surprised there aren’t more accusations that the whole thing is a psyop and all the ‘normal’ citizens and cars are just props for the elaborate theatrical stage of NK propaganda. This seems to be the most common reaction whenever video comes out of NK being just a normal place.
