Comment on Anon thinks she's exaggerating
Jiral@lemmy.world 1 week agoI am not saying she is not a serial liar who is earning her money from selling out to the populist right media, but you’d be surprised what humans can do in terms of pushing rail carriages, as long as the track is flat. Rail has very low friction. For a single person it is very hard, but if you have a dozen of people at it, things get doable.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qGJFDyrGEg
I could imagine that shunting work of individual carriages could be done by human force, if you have enough people available for it. With maybe two dozen people for one carriage it could be even not totally exhausting work. Still a rather crazy thing to do but perfectly possible.
Dreamcatcher@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I mean, that guy looks like a body builder and he’s using specific equipment and a technique to pull the train a few meters. Impressive, but it’s not relevant.
Pushing uses way less muscles and those people are supposed to be starving.
Yeah, if the train was wide enough. Trains aren’t wide enough to accommodate two dozen people pushing it from the back. They’re quite narrow, actually.
sukhmel@programming.dev 1 week ago
I thought they wouldn’t push it from the back, but from the sides, but I am not sure if I’m on board with the idea that they do in in NK at all
Jiral@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I have no idea if they did it in NK at any point. I am pretty sure it is nothing you can see in current North Korea. It is a bit older already but in 2008 two Austrians were travelling by rail, via Russia to North Korea. They entered the country via north by train in a way, that the North Korean regime officially allowed at that time but apparently had no process for to handle in any way, because they probably did not expect anyone crazy enough to take the full Transsib to North Korea. What they managed was travelling by train in North Korea, all the way from the very north, to the capital Pyongyang, where they were then greeted by their “guides” as usual for Western tourists.
They took a lot of pictures and videos of rural North Korea and its people and they had uncensored contact with regular North Koreans on the train, who were understandably very intrigued by those very strange people from abroad. I think to this day, the material they took is among the best, uncensored and non-biased evidence of life in North Korea. Limited as it may be from simply travelling by train across the country.
youtu.be/b1mzXFAzUjQ?t=694