Tag: idiots

Blaming the Internet

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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 …

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Street Mobs and Cyber-Mobs

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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.

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미안하다~아~아~아~아~아~아~앗!

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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 …

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Bev, Gandhi, and Chinese Drivers

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The other day, I posted this video on Facebook: The responses on Facebook were interesting: https://www.facebook.com/gord.sellar/posts/10152490693171070 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 …

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The Gay Marriage-Pocalypse

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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 …

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About that MBC Parody Video

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A good long time ago, James at The Grand Narrative urged me to write about the things I discuss below. I thought it was a good idea, but relented at first, thinking that maybe I might get fired the way Gerry Bevers was for posting about Dokdo. Then I got busy, and stayed busy. Then I left Korea. And here we are. But this video came up again, where I live now, as part of a discussion about sexism and racism in Korea, and I realized that I’d never gotten around to it, and that I should. Because I learned …

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A Few Things to Realize About Bullying

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Once again the world is talking about bullying. The depressing story of Amanda Todd has shown up in the world news. Even before the Amanda Todd story came out, though, I was thinking about this. I see some problems with the way we’re talking about bullying. Things that really, really irk me. I’m going to try lay them out as clearly and simply as I can:

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Back to the… Wait, What?

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Well, while Typhoon Bolaven does its worst out there–and it doesn’t have me particularly alarmed at the moment, though I’m not venturing outside or anything… our neighborhood is in a panic, though, and the local mini-marts were cleaned out as you can see in the featured image for this post–I’m thinking about what the hell to do with the course I foolishly agreed to teach this semester. That course is a Foundations in Greco-Roman Mythology and Biblical Narrative course. You know, the kind of thing you spend a summer preparing a course outline and readings package for? As with most …

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What Debate?

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Bryan Kay’s article, “South Korea’s Racism Debate,” amuses me mostly because I don’t think there’s really all that much of a debate going on at all. When Miss Jiwaku has tried, with some of her Korean friends and acquaintances, to talk about the issue, she’s had a pretty disappointing success rate: often, she runs into the usual justifications, evasions, or dismissals that any non-Korean can tell you about. She’s lost friends over it. What’s more heartbreaking is that some of those friends wouldn’t even empathize about the crap she’s had to put up with herself — the intersection of sexism and …

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Chocolat (쇼콜라) — The Mixed-Race Girl Group

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Miss Jiwaku recently complained on her blog of how the whole musical trend of girl groups and boy bands has “ruined everything” in Korea, especially advertising. I’ve noted a few times on my Twitter feed how when actual girl groups aren’t being used to advertise water parks, girl group-like collections of women have been created for advertising. For one park, she informed me, a “girl group” was actually formed — the “Ocean Girls”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIg46YFuqIU This, she assures me, was not the case a decade ago, when water park ads featured… you know, kids playing and families enjoying themselves together, and …

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