I could not agree more.

Yes, and there’s no shame in that. Americans benefited from their openness to world cultures. They got Einstein, Bell and a host of other self-made Americans, people who were proud to become Americans and willing to work for and defend their adopted country. America gave them something to believe in - individual betterment, opportunity, social causes.

America disproved the myths of racial and cultural supremecy by allowing all races and cultures to contribute to its greatness. Those who have to resort to racial supremecy for a sense of self worth are truly scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Direct some of that delicious sarcasm my way if you like, trol. I enjoy it.

Thanks, trol. And even though I did not take your well-pointed comment as an insult, I don’t really mind insults either. Sometimes they do some good.

The truth be told, non Koreans are constantly kissing our arses in the media. The only remarks we are interested in hearing from outsiders are these: “Korea is a beautiful country. It has a wonderful culture. The people are gracious. The food is delicious. Korea is dynamic.” Considering how many times we have braodcast this, it’s truly a testiment to our insecurity that we never tire of rebroadcasting it. It seems that the foreigners have found and exposed our weakness. It’s too obvious for them to miss and too painful for us to admit. We want to be praised and we bridle at criticism. We start diplomatic wars over this nonsense.

We constantly assure ourselves that “foreigners are interested in our culture.” We emblazen our TV screens with meaningless phrases of self-praise like “Wonderful Korea”. The North may have a personality cult, but we have a racial cult.

Perhaps we don’t really want to improve. It seems we only want to be enabled.

well, that goes without saying. and those that go around yapping “best race” and “smartest race” are clearly drunk or morons, koreans or no. koreans do seem to work pretty hard, though. but i hear the same about japanese and others.

sorry for the sarcasm - it’s obnoxious practice.

I’m not saying that Koreans are specially unique. Some Japanese sometimes say this about themselves, and I find it hard to stomach coming from any nationality. But I will say that, generally, Koreans (and Japanese too, for that matter) are hard workers. There’s certainly no such thing as a 40-hour work week in Korea for business or office people. And witness the gruelling years of preparation for entrance exams students have to go through. (It’s quite possible that many Koreans are working harder than they would like to work, since there isn’t really much choice in the matter….)

Regarding the difference in economic performance between the South and the North, I would have thought it was a question of the management philosophies of the people in charge. Non-market economies lack the incentives to encourage people to do their best or to contribute their talents to society in the best way possible. In the North’s case, economic activity appears to be largely centred on funding the guy in charge, as well as the military. So the economy doesn’t properly harness people’s talents, and a lot of its output is being channelled not into profit and reinvestment, but into non-revenue-generating sectors of the economy.

Who let the dog in??