The Underbridges of Internetland

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 …

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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 …

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“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 …

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“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 …

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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 …

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