Well, Maybe Some Version of "But Her E-mails!" As Well

I didn't think the apocalypse would be this stupid.

— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) September 19, 2017

Pretty much the only tweet you need to understand 2017.

"Shitler Youth"

Laurie Penny cuts to the chase regarding the insufferable "both sides do it" of American political discourse:

"In the United States, radicalized extremists on the far right are also due for a rebrand, having been embarrassed on the international stage in Charlottesville by fellow travelers who took the street-fighting-Nazi live-action roleplay too far, marched around screaming about being replaced by Jews, and murdered someone. The Shitler Youth are now going through desperate conniptions trying to claim that anti-fascists are morally equivalent to fascists, that “all sides” are aggressive and forthright, which is a little like claiming that, as both take a toll on the body, cancer and chemotherapy are basically the same.

Shit got real, eh? One minute you’re a nice normal boy with hobbies and internet friends, and the next, your picture’s all over the place holding a torch and doing the Nuremberg uglyface and your parents won’t talk to you because everyone thinks you’re a militant racist, and they’re right. If I may talk directly to these self-deluding subterraneans: I’m sorry to be the one to point this out, but you have been radicalized. There’s a reason people call you Vanilla ISIS. ISIS think they’re rebels, too. Have a good hard look at these Defend Europe twits with their rickety armada. These are your people. They’re your compadres. You are paddling beside them in the shallow end of political discourse, screaming when anything living nibbles your toes."

Even when confronted with literal Nazis and Klan members in Charlottesville, the American media can't help but reach up its own ass to find some sort of inane comparison.

I mean, at least FOX knows what it's doing.  Less right-wing news outlets?  Not so much.

"rational foundations"

There are plenty of good-to-great pieces on why Trump's UN temper tantrum will do the opposite of what he thinks it will, but it doesn't get much more precise than this:

"For North Korea, Trump's words merely provide further justification for its nuclear weapons programme. Though the regime is typically depicted as crazed (and in some respects it is), its nuclear project rests on rational foundations. For Kim, the lesson from the fall of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi was that tyrants pay a price for relinquishing their arms. The persistent threats from the US strengthen the regime's domestic position and reinforce a siege mentality. Though North Korea must be deterred from a pre-emptive strike, it must also be offered incentives to pursue a different path."

But remember, Hillary was the real threat to world peace.

"political and biological enemies"

What a lovely country:

"A federal appeals court has denied white supremacist Dylann Roof’s request to replace his Jewish and Indian lawyers who are appealing his death sentence for a racist massacre in South Carolina a day after he filed it.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a one-page, 11-word denial Tuesday.

Roof’s handwritten appeal was filed Monday. He wrote: 'It will be impossible for me to trust two attorneys that are my political and biological enemies.'

Roof was sentenced to death in January after being convicted of hate crimes in the killings of nine black worshippers at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church in June 2015."

Trumpistan.  Honestly surprised the Trump White House hasn't hired young master Dylann to be in charge of racial outreach or some such.

I Love You Daegu But You're Bringing Me Down

I realize regional airports will always be more expensive than national ones, but I was shocked to find out that getting from Daegu to Tokyo costs twice as much as it does going from Seoul to Tokyo.

Not a huge deal, as I'm quite familiar with the comfy and cheap express bus that takes me straight to Incheon (Seoul) Airport, but one of these days I'd love to actually use the "International" airport located in my fair city.

Anyhow, the tickets are purchased for five days in Tokyo for MEGA CHUSEOK in two weeks.  I haven't had sake in years.

I'm going to change that.

Whiny Foreigner Returns! Why Korean Academic Ceremonies Are Terrible And You Will Die During One Of Them!

After nine years (!) in South Korea you'd think I'd have developed a thicker skin against the absolute gonzo-cheese-ball manner in which they run academic ceremonies.  While I've actually participated in some slightly lower key academic conferences (still fucking bizarro-land compared to American colleges), an academic award ceremony is truly a sight to behold.

To set the stage -- my college received an award from the Korean government for academic excellence.  (Long story short: as a technical health college we produce a lot of majors the country is in dire need of as the low birth-rate demographics are tumbling off a cliff.)  This afternoon we had the final ceremony involving our president and a bunch of other ones from colleges around the country.  My boss insisted I attend.

For starters, when you show up at the auditorium two women dressed in high heels, mini-skirts, and little 1960's era stewardess hats shout "Welcome!" more at you than to you.  (The "Orange Ladies" as I call them are routinely brought in for any campus event involving outsiders.)  I can't imagine being an actual female academic at one of these events and having to walk through a gauntlet of this unintentional but obvious misogyny buy hey, Korea.

The first hour of the ceremony was notable for the playing of Sousa-like marches between each speaker, and a mini-light show as well.  The music was truly deafening, and I can only guess it was to make sure nobody fell asleep.  Maybe I'm just a cynical creep by nature, but stuff like this is just so middle-school musical in nature and cringe-worthy for someone who went to an American college where award ceremonies didn't involve 12 speakers and two different A.V. techs.

So basically there was a string of speeches and then the award ceremony proper.  There were three "waves" as far as I could tell -- the first group of people got flowers (okay, I admit flowers are always nice), the second group got more gift bags, and the third got these honking brass plaques (동판).  For every stage there were multiple pauses so photographers and video folks from each university involved could get their footage, so what should have taken 10 minutes took 30.

And then, right in the middle of the brass-plaque ceremony, the Sousa marches swelled and then were replaced by, I swear to the FSM, the Star Wars rebel victory march.

All five minutes of it.

Basically, I'm not even mad that's amazing.

R.I.P. Grant

Husker Du, "Books About UFOs"

Husker Du's Grant Hart is dead at a too young 56.

Fuck this year.

"Got More Heat Than A Dollar in The Dryer"

Brand New Heavies ft. Black Sheep, "State of Yo"

Was Heavy Rhyme Experience, Vol. 1 the best album of the 90's or the bestest?  Discuss.

One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mega-Chuseok!

South Korea is weird when it comes to holidays.  If one happens to fall on a Saturday or Sunday, you effectively "lose it."  No fiddling about to move it to the previous Friday or next Monday, no sir.  So living here as long as I have, a winter ritual is to look at the upcoming year's calendar and figure out weather or not the Time Lords have screwed you over yet again, or if you'll get that coveted Tuesday to Thursday major holiday that you've been dying for.

It's strange, and doubly so as a teacher.  I can deal with having to make up a set of Monday classes, but a Wednesday or a Thursday?  When you could just slide it over a bit and give everyone a nice three-day weekend?

Nope.  Because Korea.

Anyhow, this year we've got MEGA CHUSEOK coming up (Korean version of Thanksgiving).  Combined with bookend weekends, it amounts to a whole ten freakin' days of holiday in a country where working on Saturdays is still sort of expected of a lot of people.

It's a big deal folks.

Anyhow, my tentative plan is to visit a friend in Japan and then maybe go down to Busan.  This would have been the perfect time to finally do New Zealand or Australia like I've always wanted, but I'm fine with some lower-key travel.  Flights to Tokyo are very cheap from here of course.

And I've seen The Lord of the Rings and all the Mad Max films so I've pretty much been to NZ and Oz already, right?

Living The Dream

This week with my college students we’re doing appearance and personality.  So my big in-class exercise was to have them write a list of features that would be a part of their “Dream Boyfriend or Girlfriend.”

But one of my students this semester in an honest-to-Jeebus nun, and I was worried last night that she might struggle with the exercise or get offended.

But nope.  Her Dream Boyfriend is tall, thin, handsome, kind, and generous, just like literally every other single one of the Dream Boyfriends.

And presumably he’s not a godless atheist but who the hell knows we didn’t get that far.

"no deeper existential reckoning is required"

You should really read the whole thing since it's such a long and thoughtful and searing piece about Trump and White Supremacy in America, but here's your excerpt from Ta-nehesi Coates' new essay:

"The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required."