My friend Florence Chee, who does smart-people theory about communications, mentioned on her twitter feed that there’s buzz in the air again about South Korea’s slow, loping movement toward a gaming curfew. The article she linked notes that it’s not just “extreme cases” (of the same kind that were routinely used to demonize Dungeons & Dragons back in the 1980s — guys kills his mom for being scolded to stop playing and then kills himself, for example) that justify the move, but also the more moderate example of kids who simply play all night, and therefore can’t concentrate when they …
Tag: politics
Link Buffet
I’ve got some stuff to do today, but I figured I’d clear out some of the links in my “To Blog” bookmark folder, so here’s some interesting stuff I’ve run across. Some are old links, but I found them all interesting. Niebelungenlied: after reading this review, I want this book. I have a boxed DVD set of the operas sitting here, waiting for me to watch them. I’m thinking this winter, I will do it, but I’d like to read this translation as well. And while, yes, the Nazis misused Wagner, and Wagner was a gross individual, that doesn’t make the …
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 …
“Is Internet Censorship Compatible with Democracy?”
It’s quiet in Seoul. Nobody seems to know whether we should be heading for the hills, or going back to work as usual. One thing Miss Jiwaku commented to me is that the quiet itself is scary. After all, when the media has been quiet in the past, it wasn’t always because there was no news. Probably every expat in Korea has heard stories of how news was controlled by the government back in the bad old days, and probably everyone who reads my blog knows that the status of censorship and control of online exchanges in Korea is, well, …
Elizabeth Moon on Islam “Citizenship”
I don’t know Elizabeth Moon personally, I don’t know her work, and I don’t have a clue whether her recent post (from a couple of weeks ago) ought to come as much of a surprise. I do know that there is some really questionable, problematic stuff in her post titled “Citizenship” — and as much as people were calling it a post on Islam, Islam isn’t the main topic. Which isn’t to deny that most of what’s off-putting and tiresome and all too familiar about it is what she says about Islam; my point is that there’s more in there …
Happy Chuseok, or, “If I Were White, Would You Beat and Abuse Me?”
While the holiday still registers on my own radar as little more than some time off work, I know some people out there might excited about Chuseok tomorrow, and I hope people do enjoy it as much as possible. (Though in my experience, Chuseok is viewed with dread by women of all ages, and young men, as the time when family tortures one another; when women are stuck doing insanely intensive kitchen duty, and where young people are constantly grilled about when they will get plastic surgery, get more plastic surgery, finish school, get a job, get a better job, …
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi & Stephen Harper’s Unceremonious Assrape of Toronto
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com As I mentioned to some friends, my dad once let me stay up late to watch this on CBC. I have no idea why it aired so late, though I suspect we were getting shows on Toronto time — thus an hour or two later in our timezone, which was a constant annoyance. I wasn’t supposed to tell my sisters, as they had gone to bed and would be mad if they knew I was allowed to stay up… even though I was older than them. But I figure after recounting so many of Kipling’s …
BP, Chickens, Roosts
I’ve been reading about the BP Oil Spill down in the Gulf of Mexico, about how people discussing where in the litany of biggest single oil spills ever the current one fits in [1], about how it might hit the Gulf Stream and spread all around the Atlantic, about how painful it is to see it. Well, I’ve held my tongue, but I’ll be honest, folks. When Malcolm X said that thing about chickens coming home to roost, maybe it was impolitic. It’s probably impolitic for me to use his words now… but that’s because it’s true. This is what …
Random Linkage
I didn’t know until this week, but both Corey Haim and Gary Coleman died this year. Which means little to me, except that when I was searching for other things, these two cases came up in Google again and again. Zenkimchi on the internationalization of Korean food, and how the guys claiming to spearhead it are going wrong… all a case of not knowing their market, and having things backwards. My rule about Korean restaurants isn’t quite the opposite of his title — the best Korean restaurants aren’t always the cheapest, though he’s right that the worst are usually the …
For Neda
One of the comments to this post included a link to this video documentary “For Neda”… about a woman who was murdered (along with so many others) during the recent post-election crackdown in Iran last year, about a year ago now. I said that the video deserved its own post, and it does. Watch it!