How Yeonmi controls suffering

It is our brain that is in charge of our relation to the external world, and that interprets the world and our experiences in it. Thankfully, the brain does not have “a life of its own”—it is actually one of the most controllable organs in our bodies, as long as we’re aware of it. If suffering is experienced in the brain only (as opposed to physical forms of suffering, like torture or disease), then by definition, that suffering is a decision. That’s why I strongly believe that the great majority of the suffering we experience is actually caused by ourselves and the decisions we make.

How wokeness is like North Korean propaganda

Critical race theory and antiracism share with Marxism-Leninism (and Juche, its North Korean offshoot) an arcane vocabulary and impenetrable set of ideas that serve less as a tool of political change than as a social sorting mechanism that keeps the governing class as separate as possible from ordinary people. – Along these lines, “wokeness” now appears to be just an obnoxious rhetorical style that helps cover for something else: a coercive system administered by governing elites that demands adherence to an ever expanding corpus of basically random sets of laws and regulations designed to keep the lower classes in check.