I Am OK With Literally Everything Being Political Now

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— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 5, 2018

It took a Trump-loving franchise to get me to root for the Eagles and I feel fine about it.

Important ESL-related Discussion Post

motherfucker it's _pants_ not _trousers_ #ESL #ESLthuglife #USAUSAUSA

— "Stable Genius" James (@wetcasements) February 1, 2018

Another Thing We Should Abolish

I'm as big of a news and politics junkie as they come and even I can't bring myself to watch Trumpolini's SotU.

Seriously, what's the point?  As the internet likes to say, don't feed the [ultimate] troll.

"John Kennedy's pulmanesque explained"

The Fall, "The Man Whose Head Expanded"

Mark E. Smith is dead at 60.  The world is a little less bright and weird today.

And you have to love the fact that he played himself in 24 Hour Party People.

Only The Beginning

America, 2018: a doctor rapes over 150 girls for nearly 20 years and finally gets justice far, far too late:

"Seven minutes into her testimony last Tuesday, delivered alongside her mother, Kyle looked up at Judge Rosemarie Aquilina and politely asked if she could address Nassar directly.

She reminded him of how her parents invited him round to their home after she had accused him. Sitting in her living room, he had denied abusing her and had said that if she was ever really abused, she should remember to report it.

'Well Larry, I'm here,' she told him in court. 'Not to tell someone, but to tell everyone.

'Perhaps you have figured it out by now, but little girls don't stay little forever. They grow into strong women who return to destroy your world."

The president of Michigan State has resigned.

While no amount of money can ever really cure the damage done, here's hoping MSU gets sued into oblivion.

As I snarked on twitter previously, we can start worrying about "witch hunts" against men once we've created a society where teenage girls can go to a doctor without the fear of being fingered and abused, then literally told to shut up about it.

Spare The Hike, Spoil The Worker

South Korea famously requires all men to serve almost two years of mandatory military service.  And once that's finished, all Korean entry-level employees may face the possibility of "corporate" military service / training:

"Other examples include Daegu Bank taking 64 recruits on a 100-kilometer hike last October, or Shinhan Bank forcing new employees in 2014 to hold a saddle stance while reciting passages written by the famous Korean independence activist Ahn Chang-ho. 

Unsurprisingly, such methods are not very popular with employees themselves. According to a survey of 296 people by Job Korea, a job searching website, 74 percent of respondents said training new recruits is 'necessary,' with 66.7 percent adding that the purpose of such training ought to be to learn basic information about the job.

Yet many companies continue to feel that these practices are the most effective. 'This happens because companies have a militarized view and ignore the value of creativity and independence,' said Lee Byoung-hoon, professor of sociology at Chung-Ang University. 'But in the fourth industrial revolution, this militarized view is outmoded.'”

Discussing this article with my adult students, I was happy to just sit back and let the older ones share their (insane) stories of Korean work culture in the 70's and 80's.  You may think a group hike would be a relaxing team-building exercise, but in South Korea it's a competition between various company departments.

It's Korea.  It's always about competition.

Also worth noting / puking about:

"Recently, KB Bank faced public criticism when it was revealed it had made hirees walk 100 kilometers (62 miles) and had provided birth control pills to female employees. 'We provided birth control pills based on desire,' said one KB Bank official. But one employee who participated in the training said, 'The hiring team gave us the birth control, telling us to control our periods during the training period.'”

Ugh.

"dystopia for some is utopia for others"

From a Boston Review interview with China Mieville:

"It is hard to avoid the sense that these are particularly terrible days, that dystopia is bleeding vividly into the quotidian, and hence, presumably, into 'realism,' if that was ever a category in which one was interested. At this point, however, comes an obligatory warning about the historical ubiquity of the questionable belief that Things Have Got Worse, and of the sheer arrogance of despair, the aggrandisement of thinking that one lives in the Worst Times.

But hot on the heels of that, we need a countercorrective to a no-less arrogant assumption that things will likely be alright, out of fear that thinking otherwise would indeed be arrogant. Against surrender to the complacency and historical myopia of steady-state politics—of precluding, as a real possibility, epochal degeneration.

There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. I think these are dreadful, sadistic times, getting worse—though with abrupt and salutary countertendencies—and there is no reason that their end point might not be utter catastrophe. For me, facing that is urgent, as is the deployment (or anti-moralist rehabilitation) of categories such as 'decadence' and 'Barbarism' (as in 'Socialism or . . .').

It is not as if the world has not long, long been one in which vast numbers live in dystopian depredation. The horizon is more visible now to many who had thought themselves insulated, if they thought about it at all. And dystopia for some is utopia for others. To repeat something I have said elsewhere, we live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours."

Philosophical Debate

Is a five-foot long tapeworm worth it for eating lots of delicious sushi?

— "Stable Genius" James (@wetcasements) January 22, 2018

Here We Go

I bought my tickets for the Pyeongchang Olympics a few days ago.  By Korean standards, the website was very easy to use.  By international standards, it was only a bit of train-wreck but I could use it in Chrome which was pretty mind-blowing.

I'll be going for two days and seeing a) a US men's hockey match, b) two rounds, male and female, of aerial skiing, and c) the finals of the women's Super-G skiing event.

I wanted to try and see an event where South Korea had a good shot at medaling (basically, short-track skating) but those events were incredibly expensive (over 200 bucks).  The tickets I got weren't exactly cheap either, but I'm excited.

Kind of a Big Deal

North and South Korea, while competing separately, will march under the joint "Unification Flag" at the upcoming Pyeongchang Olympics next month.

The history of the flag is fascinating:

"The flag was first used in 1991 when the two countries competed as a single team in the 41st World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba, Japan and the 8th World Youth Football Championship in Lisbon, Portugal. The two countries' teams marched together under the flag in the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia; the 2002 Asian Games in Busan, South Korea; the 2003 Summer Universiade in Daegu, South Korea; the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece; the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy; and the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar; however, the two countries competed separately in sporting events. The flag was not used in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. Not only was a unified team shelved, even Beijing Olympics Organization Committee (BOCOG)'s plan to make the two Korean teams turn up back to back during the opening ceremony was rejected due to opposition by the North Korean delegation at the last moment."

By my "stable genius" math skills, this will be the eighth time it's been used officially.

Flag-wise, I love the colors but am kind of put off by how damn literal the thing is.  It's downright Rorschachian.

Apples, Meet Oranges

"ZOMG #metoo is a witch hunt against men!"

Meanwhile, a prominent US doctor raped over 200 girl athletes and nobody. did. anything. about. it.

Discuss.

— "Stable Genius" James (@wetcasements) January 16, 2018