It’s an interesting—and distressing—thought exercise to imagine just what the major candidates for any upcoming election might retroactively criminalize, or how they might abuse unprecedented access into people’s private lives. Seriously. Now think 3-6 elections further off…
Archives: Tweets
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The concern about celebrities who are harassed and commit suicide is a common pretext to argue for some online system that won’t fix the problem at all (just as it didn’t before), but will chill criticism and allow unprecedented access to people’s online/private lives. Also, it’s worth remembering that (pseudo-)real name systems don’t magically disappear once they’re in place. One party might just “punish” bullies online. But another party later could use it to criminalize (even retroactively) any comment they wanted to online—even this one.
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(But there were definite chilling effects. Students brought it up in group “free discussions” and in debates, speeches, and presentations, talking about their fear of criticizing what they felt were “bad policies” for fear of “punishment” by the “government.”) All of this isn’t to say that online (and offline) bullying aren’t rampant problems here. They are. Action is needed to address this—start w/major political figures dropping the Red Pill act.
But Korean media opining on celebrity suicide/harassment is almost *never* about that.
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I guess this is just another sign that we’re on cue for a big push on the old “realname system” front: “Okay, real name systems are unconstitutional and did nothing last time we tried ’em, but how about PSEUDO-realname systems that are just as useless/bad? They’re fine, right?” Because this was, it’s worth recalling, all done before. Korea had a real name system for years, until the supreme court ruled it unconstitutional. During that period, nothing significant was done about harassment and bullying online—no reduction at all:
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Of course, the constant insults online and offline directed at women, LGBTQ folks, disabled, foreigners, poor, biracial Koreans, crime victims, etc. don’t get discussed this way, & we must endlessly wait and discuss whether an anti-discrimination law is necessary.
Of course. https://t.co/SupXsY3Yqv But oh, golly, emoticons are “defamation” and “can be” illegal.
Any wagers how long it takes for some far-right manosphere kook here to apply that not to “🤮” but rather to “🤏”? Say, as a defense in his murder trial? “Her emoticonic defamation drove me to it, Your Honour.”
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Samurai Cat in the Real World by Mark E. Rogers gordsellar.com/2022/02/10/sam…
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I’m only now learning that the name of the Saskatchewan lunatic (sorry, Canada) who launched that #FluTruxKlan Gofundme is named “Tamara Lich.” For those of us who have ever played D&D, suddenly it all makes sense… twitter.com/Garossino/stat…
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Just heard a UK English speaker refer to a vacuum cleaner as a “Hoover” and it felt like home. 🙂
(That was the term we used in family throughout my childhood. It was a verb, too, not just a noun. “Your job today is to hoover the floor.”) When I was very young, my dad even had a side gig on weekends “hoovering” the hallways in the giant apartment building overlooking the trailer court we lived in. I used to go with him, at least on weekends. (I think he did it alone on Wednesday nights too, but I’m not sure.)
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Well, this confirms my worst fears, but who’s going to listen because all the widespread messaging to the contrary has crowded out common sense and reason but hey corporations will benefit from brief return to “normality” (before a much worse collapse). twitter.com/BlakeMMurdoch/…
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@ahimsakerp @benedict_rs And when Darko said that, he noted that most authors fall along a spectrum between those poles, and oscillate in their position within it multiple times throughout texts. But it’s 2022, so we gotta put everything into Box A or Box B, I guess. Life’s so much “simpler” that way…
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It’s been 16 years and I still miss him. I can hear him muttering, “Well, for crying in a bloody bucket.” (It was only picking up the cake for the post-funeral party that we realized he’d been sneakily cursing for all those years. Say it in a UK accent and you’ll hear it.) My son would have loved sitting on his knee and hearing stories about Malawi and meeting leopards in the bush and hunting a wounded lion to protect livestock and all that. (I know I did.)
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@CanEmbKorea @USEmbassySeoul @UKinKorea @AusAmbROK @IndiainROK twitter.com/koryodynasty/s…
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Uh oh, looks like someone on Wall Street rewatched The Matrix:
“But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.” twitter.com/HeerJeet/statu…
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@ImpChan I was literally shocked at how well the women understood the guys’ concerns and challenges, and how poorly the guys understood the womens’. But it was easy to see how it stayed that way: most female students just affirmed their male peers’ assumptions and avoided conflict. @ImpChan I feel like that’s probably the most triggering thing for a lot of antifeminist guys: the experience of not having their clueless state and comfortable ignorance complimented and reaffirmed, more than the more extreme lashing out that probably occasionally occurs.
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@ImpChan I can only say that if a guy has the time to guzzle Red Pill talking points and Prager U videos about about how the Gender Wage Gap doesn’t exist, he has time to inform himself about what feminists here are actually talking about. Failure to do that is, on some level, a choice. @ImpChan There was this classroom exercise I used to do with undergrads in EFL conversation classes. Students love to complain, so this was an exercise where I waved a wand and they were invited to speak as a member of another gender—usually, because this was 2008, “the opposite sex.”
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@ImpChan I mean, yeah, though I tend to err on the side of cutting the oppressed group some slack when they are finding their voice, which, let’s be honest, is what feminism in Korea is still very much in the process of doing. It’s still very much contested and in flux. @ImpChan Or I should say, the more-oppressed group(s). Young men *could* recognize whatever oppression they experience as a shared thing and seek solidarity with their female peers. Some actually do. But a lot are choosing a misogynistic path instead. And as for “not knowing”…
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@JustinHowe @tweetsbymoi It’s the joy of aggravating humans with their simple little lives! You’re a force of nature, disruptive and capricious!
(This is why children absolutely LOVE it… trashing adult order and rules and systems is such a delight to them!) @JustinHowe @tweetsbymoi As my son said, “That goose is a GOOD guy at doing BAD stuff!”
(And yeah, the geese also screw with that boy and his glasses, but…)
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@ImpChan In all honesty, I have yet to see a female student speak up in a way that seemed like it was “too far” or “out for blood” in my classes. (Maybe in part because they’re often very outnumbered by male students?) In my classes, the problem behaviors have all been by male students.🤷♂️ @ImpChan And mostly it’s just guys just spouting Red Piller talking points about the gender wage gap, or claiming that “feminists are causing conflict” but I’ve had a few male students go quite a bit farther, and face zero repercussions even when very-unacceptable behavior is reported.
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@ImpChan Right, individual profs may or may not be attempting it, but I find there’s not so much of a systematic approach. I personally try, but no support + the need for good student evals to keep my limits how much I can really achieve beyond boundaries & occasionally calling out BS. @ImpChan (Especially since noting that mainline antifeminist talking points are erroneous often triggers kneejerk claims of oppression, “misandry,” feminist brainwash, cultural disrespect, etc. Also, many students simply cannot handle such discussions well in a foreign language.)
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I cannot unsee the obvious connection between all the violent crime against women and the accelerating antifeminist backlash among young men here. It’s… so obvious. Is anyone *actually* doing anything about it? https://t.co/R4pBdqNyUP These days universities, for example, have mandatory gender equality “education” but it’s basically “watch these videos or at least stream them while out of the room; then take a multiple choice test that only a moron could fail.”
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Chez nous, nobody can dispute that this is Weird Al’s best work, if only for the joy it brings to our son every time he hears it. (Dancing. Glee. Bouncing. Even the occasionall bit of lyrics being shouted out…)
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I understand why people used to call a phone number a second time after learning they’d called a wrong number, back when they were using rotary dialers or pushbutton phones. But wtf why do people do this on smartphones? Like, LOOK AT THE SCREEN. (It took some guy 4 calls over 24 hours to realize that, yes, MY phone number isn’t some Korean buddy’s [hone number. FOUR CALLS. I should have blocked him but I thought maybe it was a confused delivery guy or something.)
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Collecting the home addresses of MPs? Well, it didn’t take the antivax twits long to cross over into domestic terrorism… twitter.com/Justin_Ling/st…
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@ahimsakerp Yeah, it’s a subtweet to say I’m partway into statting up Avos now! (The random encounters for Circana took forever!)
Consider my tweet the equivalent of a monk scribbling, “Thank God, it will soon be dark” in the margin of a manuscript. 🙂
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In the meantime, I have a few MIDI controller pedals I can try get back into working order. It’s a job of work: hard to get the internal battery replacements here, and electronics fixit guys seem thinner on the ground in my small S. Korean city. (I feel like old gear just gets junked here, instead of sold/auctioned off, refurbished, and resold for cheap like back home.)
So I guess that’s something to keep me busy and learn till the looper pedal is feasible.
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I stood there, simultaneously sad for him because it was awful and he needed it so badly to be good, and also so incredibly envious: he had so many instruments and couldn’t play them, so much gear he couldn’t properly use, and it was crawling with bugs. I am pretty sure a part of this is that I’m resigning myself to putting off getting the looper pedal I was supposed to get this spring. It’s perfect for what I need, and even works as an audio interface, but stuff’s so uncertain right now. It can wait. (Sigh.)
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I asked him to play it back, though, and he got all cagey and weird. I went across teh grubby carpet to the mixing board, and tried to find how to turn up the monitor speakers. A small bug crawled out of the mixing board onto my hand. It was that filthy down there. Finally, I found the slider for the studio monitors and brought up the sound, and hit play. But he hadn’t actually recorded my mandobass thing. It was a recording of himself playing singing some pop tune off-key, backed by a drum machine and himself struggling w/guitar chords.