No worries! Pronouns in the English language are sufficiently ambiguous that it is easy to make that mistake.

So in other words, you don’t know.

I was confused by their response too, but now it looks like they just accidentally clicked the reply button on the wrong comment.

Generally when one refers to a country as being “occupied”, the implication is that the people there are poor off as a result, especially relative to a neighboring country whose land is presumably being considered occupied, which in this case is implicitly North Korea due to the history of how the two countries split. It is therefore not in bad faith to directly ask whether the people there are better or worse off as a result.

You also seem to be hyper-fixated on one possible meaning of prosperous, which is “wealth and GDP”, when there are lots of other means related to flourishing in general. The original commenter was perfectly free to provide an answer along the lines of, “North Korea is the more prosperous country because X.” where X is a list of ways in which the people there are flourishing, and this would have been a valid answer (if not necessarily a correct one).

Alternatively, if they think that South Korea is better off but this does not matter because it is still less ethical than North Korea, then they could have taken the opportunity to be up front about that.

So in short, this question could have been used in all sorts of ways to provide an answer that clarified the commenter’s position. It is a shame that we never heard from them exactly what their thoughts were.

If it makes you feel better, you are emphatically not my enemy. 😀

I didn’t say the people of South Korea are being subjugated.

Quote the comment that started all of this:

Is anyone really surprised one of the biggest companies in occupied korea would do this??

I acknowledge that this is not your comment, but you stepped in and answered a question directed at this person, so you should not act so surprised that you have become associated with their position, especially since you continue to work really hard to do everything except actually state your own opinion, except insofar that “everything is too complicated for anyone to have an opinion” counts as an opinion.

I will take from your attempt to throw a “Gotchya!” at me that you acknowledge that you are unwilling to state your own opinion on the matter.

If you don’t feel like stating your opinion on which country is better off and why, then you could just say that outright or say nothing. You really don’t have to go to all of this trouble to pontificate about how it is unreasonable to even consider the matter. 😜

Do I need to explain to you what that means, or do you have a clue about South Korean history and US foreign policy?

I appreciate you showing me how not to make a point in “a pointlessly hostile and asshole way”!

I appreciate your honesty in admitting that you consider human well-being to be irrelevant!

Absolutely disgusting:

Being surrounded and yelled at about “misrepresenting reality” is not how serious United Nations-hosted negotiations are meant to proceed. But that is what happened to Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth during talks about a global treaty to slash plastic pollution in Ottawa, Canada. The employees of a large US chemicals company “formed a ring” around her, she says.

At another event in Ottawa, Carney Almroth was “harassed and intimidated” by a plastic packaging representative, who barged into the room and shouted that she was fearmongering and pushing misinformation. That meeting was an official event organised by the UN. “So I filed the harassment reports with the UN,” said Carney Almroth. “The guy had to apologise, and then he left the meeting. He was at the next meeting.”

China takes care of its people

Unless you are an Uyghur.

Maybe this is finally a good use for depleted uranium?

Ugh, I really hate it when people make comics like this that make it seem like solving our problems would be so simple. In the real world, where things are a lot messier, you need the blade to be at least several times higher for it to work properly!

…into the giant black hole in the middle!

A couple of decades ago I got really confused because I found a lot of papers referring to “comer” cubes, but could not find an actual definition. Eventually I figured out that these were actually “corner” cubes, but somewhere a transcription error occurred that merged the r and n into an m, and this error kept getting propagated because people were just copying and pasting.

Not really; being as derisive of the authors as that comment was contributed absolutely nothing positive to the conversation.

That entire comment is specifically being derisive of the article authors, so it is calling them “intellectual supremacists”, rather than agreeing with them.

I am fine with someone arguing that maybe the traits we consider to be a sign of intelligence are defined too narrowly–though in this case it is a really weird take because the article authors would clearly completely agree with this sentiment! I am not so fine with them calling the people they disagree with things like “intellectual supremacists”.

That is a really dumb response to an article whose whole point was to argue that we have been thinking too narrowly about intelligence.