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 …