North Korea botched launch of North Korean Destroyer.

You need to make your mind to up, either NK wants involvement with the US or it doesn't. You claim it doesn't. So sanctions should be exactly what NK want. Stop complaining about the side of the fence NK picked in the first place.

Economic collapse during the 1990s, unable feed its people. Economic policies stifling the economy.

When you ask people in NK how things are, they say they can't complain.

One clarification ...
In the entire history of the country, outside localised wartime shortages, there was only one food shortage – the one in the early 1990’s which was caused by the sudden (literally overnight) termination of relied upon trade & economic flows with the USSR, exacerbated by a co-incidental drought along with US illegal unilateral sanctions (in third place).

Some people who were there at the time say, while there was widespread hardship and little food in some places, it didn’t really qualify as famine.

But there is no food shortage now or ever has been outside that brief window of time. This notion that there is ongoing hunger or state mismanagement at the present time or any other time is more of the same w... (I won’t keep repeating the phrases that define how divorced from reality that spin is, because it just becomes tedious).

For all I know the WPK could want the US to go die in a ditch. It just wants to trade & exchange with other countries for mutual benefit without the US’s siege – whose power & relevance is declining fast thankfully!

There are no policies stifling the economy. It is highly planned, works well and they are impressively efficient at meeting the sector targets they set (it’s something I read about regularly because I find it interesting).

When you ask people in NK how things are, they say they can't complain.

Really exposing your media consumption now. If you're lining up Yeonmi Park next – don’t bother.

Shock, horror, there are people in every AES country who hate communism/socialism – or to put it another way, there are little mini Denis O’Brien or Michael O’Leary types even in the DPRK.
Those voices are the only voices form the country amplified in Capitalist media. Calling it disingenuous spin doesn’t even come close.

Don't know what to make of that but it sounds intriguing!

It's odder when they pass by those places on other days and they're basically abandoned (when the guides miss what was being recorded).

And the eerie lack of cars.

Fair question. 3 Trustworthy individuals who collate & highlight news articles.
https://x.com/NatalieRevolts
https://x.com/k1myojong
https://x.com/Cherrykickstart

I follow plenty of others on different apps but they only do some Korea news amongst many other topics.

Oh it gets better. The first one is blatantly a North Korea shill. Likely a Korean Friendship Association member by the looks of it.

The second is an actual member of the Kim family. Yes…*that* Kim family.

It would be like me saying. "Russia are totally in the right! I know because I follow vlad.putin on Telegram…*he'd* never lie to me!!"

Ah but Flinty, don't you know…all other sources are part of the CIA Capitalist Imperial Military Complex™. You gotta instead trust painfully biased Kim-o-philes. That's where the truth is to be found…

I grew up in an eastern european communist country who emulated the NK model, including handing out of modern apartments. I find your posts disturbing and evil.

Handing out apartments for free now is disturbing and evil!
I think that is obviously:- Incorrect!

Reading garbage on X has no credibility.

Specific individuals have credibility. I could link the same people but on different platforms and I’m sure you’d come up with some other excuse.

Handing out apartments for free now is disturbing and evil!

It's the regime who does that who is disturbing and evil. Nothing is free, the people are being kept prisoners and in modern day slavery.

Defending communist regimes is just as disturbing and evil as defending nazi and fascist regimes.

given that objective reality and damn near the entire planet know otherwise

You’re right in a way that most people in the OECD (US empire) sincerely believe in a casual, back of mind, accepting way this material to be true:-

KJU has people executed on Friday evenings by AA guns for poor job performance, poor sports performance or wrong haircuts or not having Kim’s portrait in their living rooms.

Sure, the ruling class finds the masses very easy to manipulate.

But people who believe this AA gun story for example, what I describe as cartoonish CIA h*rsesh1t, are in a predicament.

You MUST continue sincerely believing this (in an actively mindful, foreground way) and the rest of the stories published about Korea by the media or the entire belief structure collapses. You can’t pick and choose what to believe about Korea from capitalist media. Because if you dismiss even one story from them as fabricated that media organ has proven it is untrustworthy. So either,

The AA gun story is accurate and true
OR
Capitalist media (all of it) is part of the war machine against Korea

That’s your (plural) predicament; in a situation where capitalist media has been dumped by more and more people over the years for lying & misrepresenting different issues (unrelated to Korea or socialism) to protect the powerful.

What's the right term?

Well…rather cleverly, we’ve stopped talking about how the North Koreans successfully derped their new Russian-engineered warship into the water sideways while Kimmy got a front row seat to the monumental feck-up.

Let’s not forget either how the geniuses tried to hide their feck-up by wrapping it in collosal plastic bags…leaving a warship-shaped plastic bag stuck sideways on a wharf.

But no…sorry….all that is just «Capitalist» CIA / FBI / RSVP / YMCA propaganda designed to melt your tiny little imperial minds! The North Koreans are actually really smart….they must be…they got Russians to build them a boat!

Not exactly Word a Day Calendar material is it? :P

I had to recheck this one too, but it's a real word…with North Korea being to only current real-world example of it, by virtue of have the very dead (and probably mouldy) Kim Il Sung still functioning as Head of State.

’es not dead! He’s pining for the Fjords!