In The Army Now, Or Maybe Not

Nearly two years of military service is mandatory for all male Koreans, but unlike the U.S. military the concept of a "conscientious objector" is a relatively new one.  However, the Korean Supreme Court has now made it possible for C.Os to avoid jail-time:

"The Supreme Court's ruling comes on the back of a decades-long fight by conscientious objectors, many of them Jehova's Witnesses, to push back against the country's stringent military service law, under which all men between the ages of 18 and 35 are required to perform at least 21 months of military service.

'We are happy to hear that the Supreme Court of South Korea has made a historic decision to recognize the rights of conscientious objectors,' said Paul Gillies, international spokesman for Jehovah's Witnesses at their world headquarters in New York.

'For the last 65 years, over 19,300 Jehovah's Witnesses (in South Korea) have been imprisoned for standing firm for their Christian beliefs. This ruling is a huge step forward in ending this policy of imprisoning our fellow believers for conscientious objection.'

However, the Thursday ruling will not affect those already in prison, and only applies to the cases considered by the court and those in future."

Military service is a Big Deal in South Korea, and men who shirk it are definitely looked down upon.  But C.O.s who pick up a criminal record basically can't work white collar jobs for the rest of their lives.  I'm guessing that before long this will change.

Confessions Of A FOX News Orphan

Ed from Gin and Tacos is reliably excellent on every topic, but here in The Baffler he really cuts close to home for me on the subject of FOX News Orphans, i.e., the grown-up children of formerly smart and successful parents who have gone full-#MAGA over the past two decades:

"Spend a full hour reading right-wing Facebook. It is like a funhouse mirror; you’ll feel the what-was-in-those-cookies sense of having entered a fantasy world of grievance and rage—a Lewis Carroll version of The Turner Diaries, a John Birch Society children’s book for sundowning grandpas. It is a barrage of propaganda crafted around the biases of old white people to exploit their deepest racial fears and authoritarian-follower personality traits. Much of it makes Fox News look tame and responsible by comparison. Toy commercials could only dream of reaching kids as effectively as the right-wing noise machine hooks our elders.

Now imagine looking at that for hours per day, every day.

What would be left of your brain after several years of that? Like the president they so blindly love, the brains they once had become a puddle of Cracker Barrel sausage gravy strewn with flotsam and jetsam of the Greatest Hits of the reactionary playbook. These are randomly sampled, irrespective of time, logic, or coherence. Immigrant caravans! Soros! New Black Panthers! Vince Foster! Card Check! Seth Rich! Uranium One! MS-13! Crisis Actors! Anchor babies! Whitewater! Her emails! Cap and Trade! Thugs! Birth Certificate! Every obsession is equally relevant. And the right time to be very, very mad about all of it is right now."

I guess I should tread lightly here but it's interesting that my dad, who happens to have a Ph.D. in biology and had a very successful career in science, is basically one of these Zombie Republicans now.  It hasn't been easy to maintain a relationship with him, honestly, and Ed is right to point out the utter weirdness of these people.  During phone calls, snail-mail letters, and my annual visits, I try to stick to neutral topics like the weather and sports, but within three minutes of discussing Seahawks football he'll be asking me about Maxine Waters or Seth Rich.  He can't stay on any topic for longer than a cup of coffee without invoking the latest right-wing outrage de jour.

So maybe he's just poking fun at his liberal son?  All fun and games?

Well, no.  For years I've noticed that while standing in a supermarket check-out line he would sometimes bring up these kinds of FOX keywords with absolute strangers, or with (god forbid) the checkout clerk.  Because they must brood and fret and stew about whatever it is Limbaugh was on about earlier today just like he does, right?

(During the Obama years my sister and I were convinced that he'd shoot his mouth off about "this black Muslim president" and get beat up or worse, contacted by the police over a potential death threat, intentional or not.)

I'm convinced that simple pleasures like a sunny day or a glass of wine are permanently diminished for him, what with the constant siren call of "lock her up" or "Kenyan Muslim" resonating throughout his head always, everywhere.

Here's the kicker though -- as awful as Facebook is, my dad brought this upon himself with a steady diet of pre-internet media starting during the Clinton 90s, and exploding after 9/11.  He doesn't even own a computer, but Limbaugh and Hannity and The Weekly Standard were enough to poison him forever.  Analog paranoia and hate is more than sufficient to ruin a formerly free-thinking person.  And no doubt, Facebook has come along at the opportune time to amplify this lunacy to exponential heights of bitter madness.

It's brainwashing of the highest level.  Between hours of FOX on cable and radio, daily, I doubt Jim Jones could have done a better job of basically turning a high-functioning mind against itself and, frankly, fucking up what was once a perfectly imperfect but sorely missed father-son relationship.

The History of Right-Wing Hate (And Denial)

Matt Ford on the American denial of right-wing terrorism throughout history:

"Elaine Frantz Parsons, a historian who studied the organization, noted in her 2015 book, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction, that Klan denialism shaped public perceptions of the group as well as the responses to it. While journalists and federal officials went to great lengths to document the group’s atrocities, 'the national debate over the Klan failed to move beyond the simple question of the Klan’s existence,' she wrote. 'Skepticism about the Ku-Klux even in the fact of abundant proof of the Ku-Klux’s existence endured and thrived, perhaps because people on all sides of the era’s partisan conflicts at times found ambiguity about the Ku-Klux desirable and productive,' Parsons wrote.

There was overwhelming evidence to refute the denialists’ claims. Klansmen routinely engaged in murder, rape, and other forms of violence that left behind scars, corpses, and witnesses. Larger cells carried out massacres and skirmished with local militias and federal troops. The Justice Department, which was founded in 1870 to enforce federal anti-Klan laws, prosecuted and convicted hundreds of its members in public trials."

"Good people on both sides," of course.

This Is America

White Nationalists are going on murder sprees and it's all just a bit too surreal looking at my home country from the relative comfort of South Korea.

I checked in with the Washington State voting board (online, very convenient) and found that my snail-mail ballot had reached the state.

So, I voted.  In a relatively Blue State.

And that doesn't mean much but it's all we've got to fight against literal fascism and racial cleansing, isn't it?

"escape the corset"

South Korea is having its #MeToo moment:

"Cha is part of a growing movement in South Korea fighting against unrealistic beauty standards that call for women to spend hours applying makeup and perform skincare regimes that involve 10 steps or more at each end of the day. Among their complaints is that women must wake up two hours before work to ensure perfect makeup, meticulously removing dead skin with peeling gel and steam towels before beginning their regimen.

Women sick of the laborious routine have started to post videos on social media of destroyed piles of cosmetics with the catch-cry 'escape the corset', likening makeup to the garments that were part of daily women’s garments for years and worked to constrain bodies into a uniform shape.

The trend is part of a larger push against the country’s patriarchal society that has seen record numbers of women take to the streets to demand greater equality and fight against issues such as illegal filming and sexual assault."

The illegal filming of women in bathrooms is definitely a disturbing trend here.

In much less serious news, in a country where people wears masks when they have a cold, I've had a number of female college students admit that they'll also wear one when they don't feel like putting on makeup.

I'm Tired Of Living In Interesting Times

It'll be good times when a Trump supporter straps on a suicide vest and blows up a bunch of people and the @NYT reminds us that Sarah Sanders once couldn't eat artisanal fried chicken because BOTH SIDES DO IT.

— Register To Vote, Then Vote. (@wetcasements) October 25, 2018

If You Believe

I thought First Man was amazing, a perfect blend of tense action inside rickety metal tubes being flung into space at ungodly speeds and, even better, a family drama involving an American Hero who's too shaken by the deaths of friends and colleagues to function fully as a human being and father until his wife snaps him out of it.

Granted, I'll watch anything with Ryan Gosling but this really was superb.  And now, I'll have to watch anything with Claire Foy as well.

(Does that mean I have to go watch La La Land now?  Normally I don't do musicals.  And yes, that includes Hamilton.)

Who Could Have Known?

Tim Heidecker, "Richard Spencer"

Neo-Nazi also turns out to be neo-wife and child abuser:

"During their marriage, the white nationalist leader sometimes told her to use her own savings to pay for groceries, saying that his money was 'for the cause', she alleged. He also regularly failed to pay water, internet, electricity and cellphone bills and failed to make healthcare payments, causing their health insurance to lapse three times, including once shortly before the birth of their second child.

In 2014, when she was pregnant with their first child, he held her down with his body weight and grabbed her by the neck and the jaw, leaving bruises, she alleged. In 2017, when she was nine months pregnant, he attempted to punch her in the face, she claimed."

Trump's rise to power was really about economic anxiety and had nothing to do with white racial resentment.

Korean Music That Isn't K-pop!

Say Sue Me, "Old Town"

These guys are from Busan, and I think they're really great.  Buy their new album here.

I get some Yo La Tengo vibes, with maybe some Galaxie 500 and Feelies too.

Weeding Out

South Korean national identity isn't the easiest thing for a foreigner to understand.  To wit, with Canada legalizing marijuana South Korea has announced that Korean nationals who smoke weed abroad will be prosecuted to the fullest extent:

"Weed smokers will be punished according to the Korean law, even if they did so in countries where smoking marijuana is legal. There won’t be an exception,' said Yoon Se-jin, head of the narcotics crime investigation division at Gyeonggi Nambu provincial police agency, according to the Korea Times.

South Korean law is based on the concept that laws made in Seoul still apply to citizens anywhere in the world, and violations, even while abroad, can technically lead to punishment when they return home. Those who smoke weed could face up to five years in prison.

South Korea strictly enforces drugs laws even for small amounts, and celebrities caught smoking weed are often paraded in front of media for apology tours. Officials work to project an image of a “drug-free nation” and only about 12,000 drug arrests were made in 2015 in a country of more than 50 million people."

As the article states, it's hard to see how this can be enforced.  But the declaration of a virtuous ethnic identity that reaches across all borders is more likely the practical intention.

9.3

I'm not sure why Pitchfork has always gotten so much hate.  On the one hand in the internet age, nobody has the time to listen to every new band out there.  On the other, like everything in the universe when it's good it's good and when it's bad it's bad.

So what?

Anyhow, this is good Pitchfork, reviewing supposed wunderkinder band Greta Van Fleet:

"Greta Van Fleet sound like they did weed exactly once, called the cops, and tried to record a Led Zeppelin album before they arrested themselves."

It helps that the description is completely accurate.