The Marmot’s got a post up about yet another idiot Canadian in Korea. You know, Americans have a bad rap internationally, and though I wish I could agree with my friend Jessie that Canadians aren’t really as internationally beloved as they like to think they are, I do find a lot of Koreans more positive about Canada and Canadians than they are about the USA and American citizens. It’s sad, really. When I came over to Korea, I was surprised to find so many Canadians here. At first, I took shared nationality as a kind of sign that, well, I …
Tag: KOREA
On Censorship the Civil Society letter: PUBLISHED!
For those who don’t reread old posts, you’ll miss a big update here, so I’m re-posting the info here… my letter to the Korea Times was published, at least on their website, under the Thoughts of the Times column, and you can view it here. Ooops, except I guess they found a title a little harsh: “Censorship, Paternalist Disdain, and the Civil Society” they changed to “Censorship and Civil Society.” Ah well… The rest of the text looks intact.
Korean Government Expresses Its Contempt For The Citizenry Again
Marmot’s Hole has a story up about its contempt for the people by banning parodies that might affect elections. A Seoul court on Thursday fined a college student 1.5 million won for producing and spreading parodies through the Internet that aimed to defame certain candidates ahead of the April 15 general elections. It is the first time in South Korea that a citizen has been punished for producing parody works on the Internet. The 26-year-old student, identified by the surname Shin, was accused of creating and posting some 20 parody photos on the Internet that were considered unfair for some …
The Cut Between the Chapters
If it’s not romanticizing it to say so (or maybe even if it is) I shall deem this post a document of the moment where the Iksan chapter(s) of my life ended (though not the presence of Iksan and her children in my story), and where the chapter(s) of my life began. Woo Jin My last night in Iksan, I visited with a couple of old friends. First, I met with Woo Jin, as I mentioned before. I found we could actually be friends, which made me happy. She and I talked about some very important things and once again …
Romanticism and Nations
Ever since about a month ago, I’ve had a kind of niggling little problem eating away at my thinking. At that time, I was discussion nationalism and the rule of law with my famous Northstar class. I asked the class about what they thought of the Geneva Conventions and the justifiability of war… basically asking if the idea of a “just war” philosophy or tradition is acceptable, since the validity of that idea is something the code outlined in the Geneva Conventions to some degree implies. One of the students got herself into what I thought was a conundrum. Except that …