Regular commenter Val passed on this cool online experiment. It’s a site where non-Americans could vote for whomever they’d vote for if they were American today. I meant to post this earlier, but I forgot, and now the voting is ended. The results, though, are interesting in their overwhelming majority-ness. Hmm. One wonders whether conservativism in any government is bound to appeal only to people within that nation, while the liberal government (for a definition of “liberal” relative to the given state, that is) in a given nation is likelier to have appeal internationally? (For example, many Westerners I know …
Tag: politics
Stuff Going On
Well, lots of things going on… in a personal sense, too, though I’m not ready to blog my recent news. Instead: There’s some great fiction online that I need to link to. For now, just one story: the wonderfully nastyglee party that is Tina Connolly’s “A Day Out, with Stereoscopes” is up at Birkensnake. I’ve a copy of the zine, actually, and it’s lovely. You could do worse than to subscribe. Tina has a talent for mixing the cute with the horrifying. Ever heard of Drapetomania? It’s this disease that can be summed up as “longing to be free and …
Bruce Sterling at Lift 2008, Jeju
I thought about going to the Lift conference in Jeju, just because Bruce Sterling was talking there. I didn’t get around to it, but thanks to a post by Florence Chee, I was made aware of the online video of his talk. For anyone interested in Korea, the future, and/or SF, it’s worth checking out, since Bruce Sterling is a major SF author and futurist, and since it’s all about Korea. Unfortunately, I think Bruce skipped the likeliest solution to the problems he outlines early on in his talk: physical restraint. I suspect that the North Korean borders will become …
How Candlegirl and V Took on 2MB
It feels so long ago, but I still think it’s worth a look back: My article on the SFnal side of the anti-2MB protests that rocked Seoul this past summer, titled “How Candle Girl and V Took on 2MB”, is now up at the excellent Clarkesworld. It touches on the political reception and adaptation of foreign SF, techno-protest culture, Korean politics and food-culture, and more. Not quite something for everyone, but lots of stuff swirling around the nexus there. The ending is a bit, well, dated — I wrote it back in August, and it sounds like the protests just …
“Low Quality Foreigners” and Mockery Thereof
Right, so if you’ve been around the Korean expat blogosphere at all, you’ll have seen this image: Okay, so yes, this is a cartoon about a “low quality foreigner,” a creature which has been a bugbear in several different communities in Korea, not all of them Korean. Yes, mostly it’s Koreans who’re talking about it in terms of “low quality foreigners,” because that’s how the term gets translated and that’s the kind of terms Korean media would use to say what Westerners living here would call “total f*cking losers who don’t belong here.” But before I get into that, I …