Thanks to the socialist dopes of the State of Washington for all those ballgames.

Got that right! Western Washington politics are fucked up like a football bat!

I’d thought you’d attended Washington Univ. in St. Louis, not UW.

I’m from St. Louis, but graduated from law school (I hesitate to say “attended law school” because I soon lost enthusiasm for that) in Seattle. Wash U offered me a full-tuition scholarship, but put a condition on it: I would have been required to have gotten good grades to keep it. Otherwise tuition would go back up to $24,000 a year. No, thank you.

U Dub, on the other hand, had tuition of $3500 a year for law school, and, more importantly, a rising Division 1 basketball team playing in an intimate bandbox arena. Thanks to the socialist dopes of the State of Washington for all those ballgames.

I honestly can’t recall a single conversation in my 25+ years in Korea where a friend bragged about being of yangban descent. Sure I’ve heard some older people mention it (maybe two or three times throughout my life), but only when the topic of ancestry came up. Surely, those kind of passive mentioning couldn’t have been the cause of the digust some of you portray. I suppose there could be some people who try to overcompensate for their unremarkable ancestry by constantly lying about it. But how could you guys all know a few, when I can’t even find one around me?

It’s quite simple.

Koreans can’t go around claiming to other Koreans that they are descendants of a royal family or yangban, because they’d be recognized as b.s. artists. But if they claim the same to a whitey ignorant of Korean history, they figure there’s a chance he might believe it.

Brendon’s response was so over the top (I highly doubt he didn’t understand what you actually meant), I think he was simply telling you to shove it. Good for you for still trying to elaborate.

No, I wasn’t simply telling him to shove it. I was highlighting the absurdity of WangKon’s comment — good grief, he even used quotes around the word “slavery” as if we weren’t talking about real slavery.

He’s smarter than that. Yes, good for WangKon for continuing to elaborate on his point — but I already knew he was smart.

Adding to my previous post, I’m now beyond suprised and onto genuinely amazed. Seriously, where do you guys meet all these living caricatures of the ignorant Korean? Judging from the hostility, I think it’d be fair to assume you’ve met more than a few of these ignorant people, the like who constantly brag about their yangban ancestry. I honestly can’t recall a single conversation in my 25+ years in Korea where a friend bragged about being of yangban descent. Sure I’ve heard some older people mention it (maybe two or three times throughout my life), but only when the topic of ancestry came up. Surely, those kind of passive mentioning couldn’t have been the cause of the digust some of you portray. I suppose there could be some people who try to overcompensate for their unremarkable ancestry by constantly lying about it. But how could you guys all know a few, when I can’t even find one around me? Where are all these people that are hopelessly unaware of these obvious shortcomings of our culture which 99% of the people around me at least acknowledge, if not criticize? Why does a comment that states that it was probably in Japan’s interest in colonizing Korea to free the no-bi’s derided upon, instead of simply being disagreed to?

Like I said, deep-seated resentment towards SOME negative aspects of Korean culture seems to be producing disgust for ALL aspects that that are different from America. I don’t believe for a minute that people who have closely experienced two or more cultures (like everyone here, I presume) don’t realize there is a trade-off between each contrasting characteristic. (E.g., That there are upsides and downsides to indvidualism just as there are to collectivism.) This is why I’m genuinely intrigued (I’m not being sarcastic) by the level of hostility I see here towards Korean culture, which in all fairness is probably not as despicably backward, compared to other cultures in the world, as it’s being made out to be. Who knows, maybe I’m completely missing something. If I am, I’m all ears.

But let’s be fair, Korea wasn’t the only country that had a parasitic class of people that was an impetiment to modernization.The Chinese had it also and they were carved up like a Christmas turkey by Europe.

Japan also had a parasitic class of people. They were the samurai, a class of warriors that had no wars to fight since the early 17th century.

Well, don’t know much about China, but to be really fair - or accurate, I would say - Japan by 1860 at least was already well on its way formally to disestablishing the samurai- a process that wasn’t without serious conflict, e.g., Saigo’s rebellion, the backdrop for Tom Cruise’s samurai cartoon, but which was accomplished fairly expeditiously because it was the culmination of a long process of copting the samurai into the bureaucracy of the Japanese state, a development that picked up a lot of steam when Japan began to modernize.

But to paraphrase Tina Turner, “What’s fairness got to do with it?” A fact is a fact; Korea’s decrepitude as a polity by the late 19th century - both on its own terms and in terms of the then paradigmatic world order - isn’t in the least ameliorated by the fact that there were other failed states around at the same time.

Recourse to such observations is just a variation of Korean pity pot called han.

But if it makes you feel better to take refuge in a solidarity of shared failure and misery, knock yourself out.

Korean slaves and commoners did not have surnames. Toward the end of the Choson dynasty, a growing number of affluent commoners and entrepreneurs secretly bought the status of nobility and adopted dignitary yangban surnames.

Adopted under the influence of the Japanese government, all Koreans were required to register their full names. Those without surnames mostly adopted the ones of their masters. The Korean surnames, Kim, Lee, Park and Choi were based on admiration and coveting of the status that the name represented, which is the trademark social quality of saving face in Korea.

Sonagi, I had a white gf who would describe her ethnic makeup as Czech, British, couple more Euro countries that escapes my memory now, and Cherokee. She tended to be especially proud of the Cherokee part.

Anyway, she also had big tits and a big ass. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. in the streets, Black guys were always checking her out. She would even say, sometimes, with a laugh, that she was a white chick with a black girl’s ass. I suggested maybe there may have been some blacks in her background as well. The response I got, I suppose, was something along the lines of a nonplussed look.