so much hostility jeez
i haven't insulted anyone in this thread; i just found the descrirption entirely unfair and shared my opinion that there can be more important things than having a "social life"
certainly not the type of thing that should inspire this kind of contempt

United States6173 Posts

November 06 2009 06:53 GMT

#22

@FuDDx: I guess it's fun. It's nice learning all this stuff and having that much wider and varied a perspective on things. But still...the workload makes it very easy to forget that. T_T

@Athos: What kind of school do you go to? Is it a smaller one? One of the nice things about going to a public university like I chose to do is that there are a lot of random classes like this where the professors are really just teaching a subject they really like or are deeply involved with.

@phosphorylation: No one share your point of view, your view is beyond rationalization at this point (mainly due to your stubbornness about it), and the worst part is, you keep coming back to this thread.

You are seeing things that aren't there in what I say, and are slandering me, by firefoot77's definition. Of course no one's going to like you. -_-;;

Athos

United States2484 Posts

November 06 2009 06:57 GMT

#23

Yeah I go to a smaller private school (Brandeis). Thing is, there are a lot of classes that are random and specific like this one, hell I'm taking modern Russian history next semester. There just aren't any specific Korean history ones. Again, I'm sure a lot of this content is covered in Modern Asian history.

phosphorylation

United States2935 Posts

November 06 2009 07:13 GMT

#24

I am certainly not slandering you. wtf
Your description of progamers is far more slanderous (I admit that it was an unfortunate word choice) than my ... responses to you.

What are the things that I see that doesn't exist? Amazingly enough, you still haven't responded to my initial criticism of how you decided to describe korean progamers -- and that is the only problem I had with in your initial post. Of course, you were quite unsavory in your subsequent posts. but that just seems to be your character.

Anyway, I am actually interested in what you wrote for the essay. So how was the korean cultural and national identity reconstructed after the occupation?

United States6173 Posts

November 06 2009 08:41 GMT

#25

On November 06 2009 15:57 Athos wrote:
Yeah I go to a smaller private school (Brandeis). Thing is, there are a lot of classes that are random and specific like this one, hell I'm taking modern Russian history next semester. There just aren't any specific Korean history ones. Again, I'm sure a lot of this content is covered in Modern Asian history.

Oh no shit! My dad got his doctorate at Brandeis!

And I see. I guess for this kind of class, it would vary from school to school depending on the faculty there at the time. :\

On November 06 2009 16:13 phosphorylation wrote:
I am certainly not slandering you. wtf
Your description of progamers is far more slanderous (I admit that it was an unfortunate word choice) than my ... responses to you.

What are the things that I see that doesn't exist? Amazingly enough, you still haven't responded to my initial criticism of how you decided to describe korean progamers -- and that is the only problem I had with in your initial post. Of course, you were quite unsavory in your subsequent posts. but that just seems to be your character.

Anyway, I am actually interested in what you wrote for the essay. So how was the korean cultural and national identity reconstructed after the occupation?

Thanks for giving me one more thing to waste my time with as I study for exams. (:

So...

slander (n.)
1. Law. Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person's reputation.
2. A false and malicious statement or report about someone.

You've made statements accusing me of speaking badly of Korean progamers, and you somehow came to assume that I also insulted people who have no social lives. You also by some mysterious line of thought completely beyond me that seem to believe I consider saying someone has no social life to be a horrible insult.

Then you continue to (in my earnest opinion, stubbornly) disagree with everything I and everyone else in this thread say and hold to your original opinion, and continue to call me out as some nerd-bashing asshole with a superiority complex.

I may certainly have a superiority complex, and I am most certainly an asshole, but I still solemnly believe you reacted critically (and not in a good way) over nothing. The emphasis was put on progamers being nerds with no social life because dumb western users here on TL seem to expect such people to be overflowing with personality in spite of that. As a result, not only are the progamers misunderstood and labeled as socially inept sheople, the entire nation of Korea is brought in as well.

My essay involved analyzing stuff about Korean interpersonal relations based on some essays written by random intellectuals from both inside and outside of Korea. It had shit to do with the lingering/pervading Confucianism in contemporary Korean society and how that's good and bad and contrasting Korean society to US society, blah blah blah. I wrote a terrible essay, don't worry.

How was Korean national and cultural identity reconstructed after the occupation? Well...we haven't read all that much directly on that topic yet, and I don't know myself; most of the readings so far have been geared more towards explicating what Korean culture is like in general (since you don't need to be a Korean from Korea to take this class).

How is a weird question to ask. All it takes is even a small grain of nationalism and cultural pride to build up an identity as a nation. Korea, in particular (well...maybe not in comparison to most Asian countries), has a remarkable amount of solidarity among its people, so I'm certain that helped in unifying the nation and keeping it at least fairly of one mind.

So...simply put...Korea wanted to become Korea again after having their culture ripped apart by Japan and then being a puppet satellite nation for the USSR and USA, and have worked to build themselves up to what they are now, I guess?

phosphorylation

United States2935 Posts

November 06 2009 08:54 GMT

#26

I think Korean textbooks and education in general are VERY good at producing patriots.
Hell, I was only in 3rd grade when I moved from Korea to the US, but I am still a die-hard Korean jingoist.
Is the education biased, in terms of presentation of facts and historiography? Most likely. But as long as it is able to inspire incredible solidarity among the Korean people and steer the patriotism into something productive, I see absolutely nothing wrong with it.

United States6173 Posts

November 06 2009 09:48 GMT

#27

There are certainly issues with the ingrained solidarity that's an integral part of Korean culture, however. Well...there are positives to it too, but also issues.

Korea is great in that it's a nation and country full of one peoples. Everyone shares the same history, experiences, etc, and considering the amount of adversity Korea (as an identity) faced throughout the 20th century, that level of unity and solidarity was likely only strengthened. What you have now is the level of sameness and surprising amount of collectiveness you see in Korea.

Everyone has the same standards and whatnot, but it really goes beyond what you'd expect, even as a single nation of a single people.

One of the essays assigned in this class examined this. Basically, the guy wrote contrasting western Social Exchange Theory with what he considered a Confucian system of natural giving/benevolence/whatever you want to call it. The essay was written some time in the '80s, I think, and I'm not a sociology guy, so I don't know if that Exchange theory is still popular or relevant.

In any case, at the time, certainly, western sociologists broke down all interpersonal interactions as nothing more than give-and-take exchanges. People deal with others investing their own time, money, energy, in order to get out time, money or energy from the other. It's kind of a horrible way to look at things, that there is no altruism or generosity in relationships, but whatever. In a way, it can make sense...and even now, I'm hardly qualified to argue with them. Beyond that, I barely even have a grasp of what that theory is all about.

However, he looked at Korean culture and society, and argued that it was not dominated by this idea of exchange. He saw it as practicing a real-life manifestation of Confucian benevolence. The Korean people deal with each other because they are brothers and sisters. In Confucianism, the base unit of society is the family. There is no real "I", but there is a "we" ("Cheong"?). You can look at every societal unit as a member of a metaphorical family (with the president/dictator/king/whatever it was at the time being the metaphorical father/patriarch). Everyone is a member of the greater family of China because their nuclear family is.

He argues this is the origin of the cultural and social solidarity you see in Korea...at least if I read it correctly. Anyway, that's not the important thing. The important thing is that this produces an inclusive collectivist mindset among Koreans concerning their fellow Koreans. And so Koreans can, unlike in western societies, where individualism is encouraged (and thus all are separate units competing for individuality and self-expression), act outside the system of Exchange dominating western thought, acting truly outside the thought of any gain.

The flip side of this, however, is that in order to be included in that gregarious lack of exchange (and to by extension be considered a part of the greater Korean identity), the freedom one has to self-express and his individualism is rather stifled. One has to rather strictly adhere to that greater identity. If you've ever studied Heidegger, you could say that one must be inauthentic and remain a part of the Anonymous They or whatever. Being taboo in any way results in a marginalization and ostracization of fitting degree and can even destroy one's ability to be a part of his own nation.

Sadly, I think that was better written than the essay I turned in earlier today. -_-