Sometimes, there’s nothing to do but laugh at them: The internet has taught us a number of things about human beings: Weirdness is way more well-distributed than we used to admit or believe. Groups of people can achieve pretty incredible things acting in concert, across vast distances, like building and refining the OS I’m using. Unpopular is simply a different value of popular. There are some uncomfortable truths mixed in there, too, though. One of them is the following: Some people are unrepentantly, irredeemably assholes… and the more anonymous they are, the more they allow their nature to show. At …
Tag: idiots
With Gods Like These…
I got the oddest comment on the last post I made. The content was unrelated to my post, but instructed readers to Google a few keywords leading straight to the comment-poster’s own blog, which was about… Er, well, I’ll let the email I just sent him speak for itself. Dear Mr. Hagedorn, Just curious what the connection is, in your head, between my review of a few recent movies — none of them theological in nature at all — and your inane theory that the real sin that got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden was… (drum roll)… anal …
“Low-Quality English Teachers”
There’s a meme that’s floating about in Korea that “low quality English teachers” or “unqualified foreign English teachers” are multitude here. Well, and indeed, depending on what you consider a language teacher, and what you think the qualifications ought to be, they could be argued to be legion… but in Korea, “unqualified” or “low quality” is an ethical judgment: unqualified is often misused by Koreans discussing foreign teachers in English, as Matt points out here, and then misunderstood to mean something more like “dangerous” or “criminal” or “bad.” Of course, the facts of life in Korean society include a degree …
“90% of All Unsolved Murders in Kyeonggi Province Were Committed By…”
… is the beginning of sentence you know was written by a moron. It’s part of the sole comment on this article, about a Bangladeshi man who apparently killed a Korean woman half his age, which concludes with the police still trying to figure out why he did it. The comment is a priceless example of Korean netizen commentary. After claiming that Koreans need to start putting electronic bracelets on Southeast Asians in Korea–despite the fact that crime rates are much higher across the board among Koreans than non-Koreans here (this morning’s news had a litany of horrors, such as …
Sarah Palin and her North Korean Allies
This is just kinda pathetic… … but it’s not like it’s uncommon for me to be asked, when I travel in the West and people ask where I live, whether I mean North Korea or South. Not that I would think any of the people who ask me this ought to be running a country, and Palin clearly shouldn’t be (even considered for it) either. But there’s a reason she got as far as candidate for VP, and the reason is that there are tons of people just as uninformed, uninterested, and ignorant as she is. If there weren’t vast …
An Indefinable Mood
Those who are watching the world news are likely discomfited by the action North Korea took today, or, rather, as it is now 24 Nov., yesterday afternoon on Korean time. I’m finding it harder right now to get a bead on the mood here than at any point during the last eight years. During my evening class, essentially nothing class-related got done: we got together, talked about the situation, and students got calls from their mothers and friends who were trying to hash out plans for the night. Since a number of my students are from Incheon (the coastal city …
Did You Think About It?
Believe it or not, the title of this post is not a reference to the hordes of students who’ve been asking me to create a thesis for them for their Graduation Requirement Presentation. (Though it could have been. The last month or so has become a stream of one-on-one tutoring sessions for people who apparently were not trained in formulating a thesis and supporting arguments. Which… well, frankly, if you’re going to test people on a skill, you ought to be making sure they’re learning it first, or it seems unfair. And the real kicker is: the students need to …
Something to Munch On
I have an insane day ahead of me: last minute desperate students will be seeking advising throughout my afternoon break, since tomorrow’s the deadline for second applications for their Grad Presentation Proposal; I will be lucky if I fit lunch in fitting lunch in no matter what, but it will be a trial; midterm exam in my Public Speaking class tonight, in a room I’ll bet will not be properly heated for the event (because normally there’s no class there, and it’s in an older building) And I’m going to the office a half hour early, because… yep, someone “needs …
Islamophobia in Korea, and the Story of Tablo
Those of us who have lived in Korea know that regardless of what most people think here–for I think a lot of Koreans, especially younger ones, are relatively open-minded by comparison–the bigots and morons get pretty loud, and they don’t seem to get challenged on it. (Maybe that’s normal in the USA or other places: I’m not sure. It sure wasn’t so normal in the part of Canada in which I grew up. We had bigots, of course, and there was a degree of ignorance about race, multiculturalism, and difference; my best friend in high school had experiences of going …
Phoneless Till Friday (Probably)
The thing I’m going to complain about isn’t that the KT shop gave me a note with the address for the service center, but didn’t write the name of the service center (so it was impossible to find and I went to the wrong place, because guess what? All Apple products except iPhones are serviced at one place, and iPhones are serviced at the other). It’s not that my employer, when offering an iPhone 4 to each professor on tenure track, failed to ask (though when I asked, I was told it had been cleared, of course) whether non-Koreans could …