Sexism In South Korea

On a recent trip to the United States, a South Korean presidential spokesman was found to have sexually harassed an aide.  The larger picture:

“Five months after the country elected its first female leader, Park Geun-hye, last week’s incident involving her spokesman Yoon Chang-jung marred her first trip to Washington as president. It also highlighted the gender divide that remains in South Korea, where women say they get paid less than men and are given fewer promotions.

There’s an ‘unspoken consensus’ among influential South Korean men that they can avoid punishment for sexual harassment, office worker Joo Insun said. She added that a former employer responded to her own claims of a colleague’s misbehavior by scrutinizing her instead.”

Depressing and in my limited experience, entirely true.

The 90′s Are Officially “Classic”

The Breeders, “Divine Hammer” live

Last Splash just turned 20.  Dear lord.

Here’s a Mefi post I put together about it.

Good On Her

Angelina Jolie “comes out” about her pre-emptive double-mastectomy:

“On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.

But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.”

I’ve never been her biggest fan but it’s hard not to respect the hell out of her for going public with this.

Bueller

Every semester I’ve got “that” class — the knuckle-head brigade.  This semester Tuesdays are when I have to teach confront a group of 30 (mostly male) students who just don’t give a damn.

And at the end of the semester when they’re angrily and/or tearfully calling me up asking why they failed I’ll be happy to tell them — if you can’t be bothered to pay attention, I can’t be bothered to care about your academic future at this college.

It’s kind of depressing.  At least my other sections are going well.

For The Record

In past few weeks we’ve learned a few interesting things about a certain elite American university (rhymes with “Zarvard”).  First, there’s a “historian” there who basically gay-bashed a dead liberal economist, then resorted to a classic non-apology (“I have a gay friend and black wife ZOMG you guys!”).  Next, it was discovered that two “economists” there basically made a series of basic, simplistic errors in a paper that was held aloft as the fire-brand of austerity policies in Europe and America (policies that aren’t working, of course).  Finally, a Ph.D. dissertation committee there was found to have signed off on an obvious piece of racist social non-science by a guy with ties to a white supremacist organization.

All of this is just to say that when even “librul” institutions like Harvard are shoveling money at and providing institutional cover for obvious right-wing propaganda, we’re pretty well and truly fucked.

And for Republicans, it’s a thing of beauty.  As long as the academic bullshit machine rolls along spouting conservative talking points, they win.  When the academics are called out for their shoddy or basically non-existent research, that’s also great, because they can lament those egg-head liberal professors and bash all colleges and all serious attempts at logical inquiry in general.

tl;dr: I am so fucking sick and tired of Very Serious People.  And fuck Harvard.

Party Like It’s Your Birthday

My college is having a free, foreigner-friendly cultural event on Thursday night at 6 p.m. in honor of Buddha’s Birthdday.  If you’re in or around north Daegu let me know.

Damn Yankees

Interesting Washington Post piece on how countries in general, and South Korea in particular, went from being highly anti-American to strongly pro- in a mere 10 years or so:

“These attitudes peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s – just as Psy dropped a model tank before cheering crowds in Seoul – and, Moon writes, focused on the ever-visible American military presence. South Koreans were newly organizing themselves around a national pride and consciousness. But their nationalist energies, which they had developed as they formed a civil society and rejected the military dictatorship, suddenly lacked an outlet. Probably no one decided to refocus those energies on opposing the U.S. military presence, but it’s not hard to see how that might have happened organically, as Moon suggests. Though the U.S. force serves South Korean interests, it also can be seen as an insult to Korean nationalism, a reminder that it still relies on outside powers, and an intimation, however true or false, that the country might not be fully in Korean control.

In the mid-2000s, though, South Korea started downgrading its Sunshine Policy and shifting back toward the U.S. Partly this was due to internal politics, which saw power shift from the pro-Sunshine left to the pro-American right. But North Korea also helped, reneging on past agreements, aggressively expanding its nuclear weapons program and, in the process, alienating South Korea and accelerating Sunshine’s demise.”

I moved to South Korea in late 2008, kind of at the tail-end of large, public anti-US protests (that interestingly took the form of anti-US beef protests, but were really about a whole lot more than meat).  I remember the “old-timer” ex-pats at the time (“old-timer” being anyone who’s stayed longer than a single year) complaining about a recognizable anti-US bias from the media that really seems to have been flickering out moving into 2009 and beyond.

What’s most interesting to me is that, if the article is to be believed, the rising popularity of the United States was due entirely to South Korean politics (i.e., North Korea) and had very little to do with anything Obama has done beyond maintaining (and continuing to fund) a close military alliance.

Eye of the beholder and all that.

Scholars and Soldiers

I just bumped into a student who I assumed had graduated and moved on.  Turns out he’s actually back to finish after his mandatory two years of military service in the South Korean army.

I’m sure the logistics of bringing millions of young men into military service each year must be a nightmare, but it still seems strange that you can’t do your time either entirely before or after college.  Given that going to college is such a huge deal here I’m surprised by how many of my students have to basically “lose” two years before they can finish.

Feed Me

 

Daegu, South Korea.

The water cooler of the Daegu, YMCA, where I take my Korean classes every Saturday morning.

Am I making progress?  Yes, but not as much as I should be.  I really need to do more self-study during the week but it’s tough with work and all.

Still, it’s a great place.  I’ve had about six different teachers so far and they’re all fantastic.  And it’s good to have something that gets my butt out of bed on a Saturday as I’m prone to laziness.

Brains!

New evidence from Jamestown, Virginia proves that the first major European establishment in America turned to cannibalism:

“Gruesome archaeological evidence has emerged revealing how some of the first settlers of America survived a period of famine. The vicious winter of 1609, dubbed the Starving Time by historians, saw the colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, who had consumed every scrap of food in the settlement, turn to cannibalism. When help and supplies finally arrived the following spring, only 60 of the original 300 settlers were still alive. The skull of a 14-year-old girl, excavated last year from a rubbish dump at James Fort, has revealed a mass of cut marks, at first tentative, then fiercely smashing the skull apart to extract the brain and other soft tissue for food.”

In a former life I taught U.S. history.  The entire history of Jamestown is pretty damn mind-blowing.  (Pardon.)