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I don't understand the protests. I would expect educating Saudi youth in exceptionally liberal institutions like universities in the Northeast to have a net lib

• seieste 7y ago
  Kim Jong Un was educated in Switzerland, which has a very strong democratic environment, yet it didn’t change about how he ran North Korea.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • BeetleB 7y ago
    Would you argue that his education in Switzerland made North Korea any worse?
    • throw20102010 7y ago
      Not GP, but his education in Switzerland clarifies the fact that the leadership does not believe the propaganda they give to their populace. Kim is very aware that the promise of better living conditions is not a "lie manufactured by the West." He knows how bad his people have it compared to the rest of the world and still chooses to run his country the way he does. Food shortages are not a thing in Switzerland and also not a problem in his palace, but they are in other parts of DPRK. So maybe his Swiss education doesn't make his citizens worse off, but we do know it's not some misled idealist at the helm, but rather a dictator that knows full well what he's doing.
    • Ididntdothis 7y ago
      It certainly didn’t improve things either. He is a murderer like the rest of the family.
  • melling 7y ago
    Going for a proof by contradiction? What you should be doing is looking at the averages. Are educated people in general more liberal?
  • AJ007 7y ago
    He isn’t the only warlord/despot/war criminal receive at least some education in liberal Western schools. Perhaps either side to the argument presents a non falsifiable hypothesis given the sample sizes involved.
  • ourmandave 7y ago
    He's using his education to write beautiful letters to other world leaders.
  • pcr910303 7y ago
    Well, North Korea actually became much, much, much more free (in the inside world) than when e.g. Kim Jung Il or Kim Il Sung ran the country. At least, Kim Jung Eun looks like he is trying to. (He has a pretty open mind.) It's more of the military (of North Korea) that's keep stopping from e.g. negotiating with the U.S or concentrating on the economy.
  • rleigh 7y ago
    I don't wish to defend the regime in any way. However, do consider that while he has power, he's also the figurehead. There may be real constraints upon how much change he can meaningfully effect without the system falling apart entirely, or resulting in his removal if he treads on other powerful people's toes. He wouldn't be the first dictator which had to walk along a knife edge to maintain their power base and security.
    • alacombe 7y ago
      There is sure no better way to show how you are constrained by the system than by ordering the assassination of your exiled brother with nerve gas in a foreign country !
      • rleigh 7y ago
        I certainly don't doubt that he has considerable freedom of action in some areas, perhaps so long as his upper echelons agree with it. However, that doesn't imply he has the same freedom of action in all areas.
        • alacombe 7y ago
          It's not as if his "upper" echelon had a strange tendency to get suicided either.
      • Mediterraneo10 7y ago
        The OP’s entire point is that often such decisions may be compelled by the opinions of the generals surrounding Kim. It has often been claimed that while a godlike aura is created around the Kim dynasty for the North Korean masses, decisionmaking has always involved negotiation between the Kims and senior military officials.
        • alacombe 7y ago
          By senior military, do you mean his late uncle ? Assassinated as well.
• wybiral 7y ago
  > I don't understand the protests. They were about the human rights abuses and war which some people find worth protesting regardless of whether or not a handful of wealthy elites get to attend a liberal university.
• astazangasta 7y ago
  Saudis buy weapons BECAUSE they are educated in liberal institutions. Elites around the world have been sending their children to be educated in the West for centuries; what they learn here is an affinity for Western elites, because they are being educated along with the scions of Western families. Then they go home and govern their countries according to the dictates of the liberal order, viz., support the Washington consensus, partner with western companies, buy weapons, etc.
  • rolltiide 7y ago
    Yes, a big networking event amongst elites for future connections, deal flow and capital What the professors and course material say has very little to do with that. Also, people play within the rules of their country. Even the frontmen (heads of state) have to maintain consensus with their warhawking generals.
• mattmanser 7y ago
  It's a double edged sword. For a few reasons. Firstly it maintains an elite who are much better educated, and skilled, than those at home. Secondly, when there's lots of foreign students from the same place, they just clique up. In my university there were a lot of Chinese students that hung around almost exclusively with other Chinese students. One year I represented the student common room, a sort of social club/support network for everyone living in one of the 20 odd accommodation halls. Despite trying, the 50-100 Chinese in our hall never mixed, keeping themselves extremely secluded from the rest of us. I remember chatting regularly with one person. To put that in context, I knew the name and would at least exchange greetings with virtually every one of the other 200 odd people in the hall. There were a lot of other foreign students because it was a self catering hall. They were better, though still ultimately formed their own, mixed nationality, foreign students clique within a few weeks. It was more accessible though as the shared language was English.
  • spunker540 7y ago
    I think a lot of foreign students come to the US wanting to make friends with Americans and more-or-less “assimilate” but then quickly realize their English language skills aren’t as strong as they thought and that the cultural differences are larger than they thought and truthfully, that Americans aren’t as welcoming and tolerant of those differences as they thought. So they fallback to a much more comfortable situation by hanging out with other fellow transplants in what is still a very foreign and challenging situation. A much smaller scale example of this is when I studied for a semester in France. I thought my French was decent but it turned out to be barely comprehensible by native French-speakers which doesn’t make for easy or fun friendships.
    • whoevercares 7y ago
      Totally, I think the knowledge about the culture is also very important in such blind social setting. Otherwise the conversation ends fairly quickly. I do think most Americans are quite welcoming but it’s quite awkward when it comes to mutual knowledge of the other’s culture
    • cgriswald 7y ago
• anovikov 7y ago
  It's not, if anything, their Western education and living in Western surroundings prove to them (and they are sons of the elite and take control of their countries when they grow up), how incompatible their countries are, with the free world. They can't not see that trying to bring anything of that pleasant liberal world they see as students, into their land of savagery, will result in nothing but endless bloodshed and collapse of society. It's easy to free up and re-civilize some corners of the Earth which were oppressed for a short while by foreign force, say Eastern Europe which suffered for a while in the hands of Commies: they are happy to get back to their normalcy which is, being somewhat second-rate but more or less coherent, Western offshoot. Totally different thing is if you are speaking of nation that was formed in and by dictatorship and oppression of all kinds - from civil to religious - since time immemorial.
• reaperducer 7y ago
  I would expect educating Saudi youth in exceptionally liberal institutions like universities in the Northeast to have a net liberalizing effect on the Saudi government and culture long term. The article points out that very few Saudi youth end up in America's best schools. The vast majority go to second-tier schools because their academic levels keep them from getting into the best schools. The protests are about the elite institutions accepting funding from the Saudis, not students.
• finolex1 7y ago
  When reputable institutions refuse money, they make a strong statement about the virtues of the donor. This can turn the donor into an international pariah and make it harder to gloss over abuses/crimes back home. Of course, whether this effect outweighs the benefits of accepting money is debatable.
• strikelaserclaw 7y ago
  Most saudi students just come to party.