If you’re looking at an interesting argument against the trade sanctions to which the DPRK (North Korea) is currently subject, this article is worth a read. It’s an interview with Felix Abt. Naturally, when I hear a businessman claiming his for-profit venture in North Korea is really a way of helping bring about reform there, I’m suspicious: it’s also a way of profiting off some of the most vulnerable people on Earth, and I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of business leading reform because business will (first and foremost, necessarily) always jigger things to benefit itself. It doubtless will bring reforms, but will …
Tag: idiots
Street Mobs and Cyber-Mobs
A discussion of the parallels between cybermob behaviours and the original mobs of Georgian London. The parallels are pretty profound, and maybe there’s some lessons to be learned from how all of this was dealt with the first time around.
미안하다~아~아~아~아~아~아~앗!
So, I haven’t mentioned this: But I’ll get to that in a moment… I posted awhile back about the then-upcoming elections in Seoul, and how the adult children of two candidates had posted about their fathers–one, to our her (frontrunner) dad as a complete dirtbag and a deadbeat dad, and the other (who was then trailing in the polls) to ask people to consider the issues instead of celebrity (like that enjoyed by his father’s dirtbag competition). It occurs to me that I haven’t posted an update on the situation, so, for those who don’t know: the guy whose daughter …
Bev, Gandhi, and Chinese Drivers
The other day, I posted this video on Facebook: The responses on Facebook were interesting: Note that it was in the second response that the discussion suddenly focused on stupid things Koreans say to white people, like, “Wow, you can use chopsticks!” or “Please marry someone from your own country.” The second comment. It’s interesting because, as outsiders in a culture, people often tend to try fit their experiences into an understanding of that culture. Which, you know, is skewed by the fact that people tend to remember most clearly, the most offensive and idiotic exchanges they’ve experienced.1 In other …
The Gay Marriage-Pocalypse
This year, I’ve had two random people on Facebook who’d friended me for completely random reasons–one, a fellow saxophonist in Korea, and the other an Ezra Pound enthusiast in Indiana–completely lose their marbles on my Facebook Wall, after I posted something in support of marriage equality. The arguments are almost always the same: somehow my unapologetic atheism indicts my position; somehow they think I must be gay (presumably, because what heterosexual could support homosexual marriage? Ahem…); somehow gay marriage not being procreative is the problem, but not the only one (just one in a bag of trick arguments they pull …