UPDATE (25 Nov. 2011): So, I got some of my facts wrong. I first heard the news about the FTA vote verbally, in the form of a couple of rants about how it went down. When I read the article, the wording was such that it didn’t contradict what I’d been led to believe had happened. So read the following with a grain of salt, and see the comments — especially that by Charles — afterwards. I’m going to leave the post as is, as a reminder to me to get the facts straight before I go off on my …
Tag: politics
Wonder Indeed…
Miss Jiwaku was once offered a job to travel to Indonesia, accompanying K-pop groups like Wonder Girls and translating for them. She was not, I must note, impressed with the fact she would be traveling with a pop group she considers a blight on Korea’s international reputation; for her, it was about getting paid a decent wage for honest work. Unfortunately, the organization offering the job — a Korean TV network tasked with making Korea look nice and plain and innocuous abroad, in English — did not offer her a decent wage. The wage was, well, laughable. One imagines maybe …
What I Learned From the Edward S. Curtis Showing at the Sejong Center
So, look. I’m, like, bright enough to know that colonization sucks. It’s bad. It can be (and has been) a force for great evil and pain in the lives of untold millions. But the way we talk about this, and think about this, can be a strange thing. Last night, Miss Jiwaku and I went to see a display of Edward Curtis photographs. If you don’t know who Curtis is, well, he was a photographer who made a compendium of images of Native Americans living in what he called a “primitive” state — that is, those who has not yet …
Subverting Democracy, One Vote at a Time
UPDATE (26 AUG 2011): So, the referendum failed due to low turnout. Er, hooray for talking people out of exercising their right to vote? Sigh. Well, at least the mayor resigned. Off, not doubt, to his fortified castle in Kangwon Province, to begin a long training session of necromantic rituals in preparation for the 2016 Presidential elections… ORIGINAL POST: There’s a referendum tomorrow, regarding with the lunches of schoolchildren should be subsidized by the government. This is an issue that has been building up, with the standard rhetoric on both sides: Right Wing: If we feed all the kids in …
The Don’t Talk About History Law
It’s really hard to talk about Langston Hughes in the context of the Harlem Renaissance without touching on not only his interest in the Soviets and their system, but also touching on why a number of African-American intellectuals (Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and many others) were drawn to “revolutionary” ideas, and to Communist ideology — after all, after hundreds of years of things not getting too much better, of pretty constant material, cultural, and social oppression and marginalization, I think it’s not hard to see why some African-Americans would have felt that a sudden, forceful reorganization of society would be the …