Open Thread #279

Too much time at barber shops?

So what the deal with the comment section? I thought it was fixed the way everyone liked it.

Here’s one for you, Mr. Barch:

http://archives.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=1761583

Disqus simply works better as a threaded discussion tool. Change is hard, but often for the best.

Must be more of that global warming climate change Algore warned us about before he took all that Big Oil money from the Middle East.

Not only does discus not load in Safari in OSX 10.6.8, it will not load on the iPad using either Safari or Dolphin browser. The last blog change seems to have broken this and it only works now in Firefox 18.1

Don’t know if anyone else is getting up at 4:00 am these days to watch the Aussie Open (that second set in the Federer/Tomic match this morning was one for the ages), but let me just compliment the boys in Kia’s marketing department for pretty much owning all the real estate on center court. Damn!

Anyway, Federer is so ridiculously and gorgeously graceful, he is a pure joy to watch. Still, every time I see him play, I can’t help but think what might have been:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFfA6CMG7-E

Now, it’s off to the courts to work on my own sad, sad backhand!

DLB

I have no problem with threaded comments, I just thought the previous one was finalized and would be here to stay. Perhaps this might be better since it saves space and scrolling time.

I’m getting up at 4:00 a.m. tomorrow but it’s already booked for the Mizzou-Florida game. If it’s any consolation, Mizzou always loses any game that gets me up at an odd hour.

Ha ha – Q it almost seems as if I hurt your feelings. Go back to the Bare Facts and post it there as well. Also go to the original author’s link and click “his” name – it will take you to an explanation she gave (Bum was correct).

Yep. Once again.

DL, I haven’t seen any of the Aussie Open, but I wonder whether the advertising is digitally inserted on a green screen for a Korean audience. I suppose that if you aren’t in ROK and in CA then Kia paid big bucks.

De nada — just please invite me to your housewarming party when the time comes.

The comments display much better now on mobile devices and the recent comments sidebar has returned as well.

Which mobile devices are you using – Android or iOS? Is disqus loading the same as before the makeover or slower?

btw, can i show you my new poster about the comfort women?

perhaps in a tolkien world. i think i will pass.

Okay, but the offer stands if you’re ever in Korea.

Reading a lot into the post aren’t we Pawi?  Especially considering that you apparently read nothing that I wrote or….you were reading selectively.  As it has been explained more than once – I thought the original article “Joseon Girls Gone Wild” was amusing at best and downright unbelievable.  As to the rest of your post – anyone who knows me can find the glaring errors in what you wrote.  Think before you write.

 You’re really taking ‘The Good Earth’ to heart a little too closely, shipmate.

The Rotana network, an Anti-American news channel is owned by Rupert Murdoch, you know the media tycoon that owns your favorite Foxnews.  Rotana aired a movie showing American soldiers(the bad guys) who massacred Iraqi civilians then sold their organs to Jews.

Do you have something against Al Jazeera English or as you say “big oil”?  Where were you when Rupert Murdock bought Rotana, you really should stop watching so much Foxnews.

Robert Neff,

Although this isn’t from the Chosun dynasty and I’m not sure whether this has been covered not his blog, I figured you might be interested in this: 
http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/culture/2013/01/16/0901000000AKR20130116184400005.HTML

Going to Vegas next week.  Any tips on where to go, where to stay, where to lose $100 I set aside for a little gambling?

Yeah, it seems the newest version of Disqus doesn’t play well with the iPad. I’ve downgraded until they work out that kink.

Again, I may be able to agree with some of what you say and that some pictures were – obviously staged – but not all of them.

Nor were the Japanese the only ones to make postcards that you seem to find offensive.  Were the French, Russian, Americans (Methodist), German, Italian and British all in on the act to colonize Korea through postcards?  You also claimed that the postcards issued through the Korean postal service and their French advisor had no bared-breasts – can you be certain of that?  I can’t remember the number of different cards (for some reason 150 sticks in my head) that were issued and admit I have not seen them all but there are some cards there that you would apparently find offensive.

I think, that for the most part – once again – that most of the postcards were made and sold to make money and had no real nefarious conspiracy associated with them. Some companies make dumb mistakes – but it doesn’t always mean a conspiracy to colonize:

http://www.rjkoehler.com/2012/06/19/full-of-primitive-energy-indeed/

I’ve been confusing Robert Neff on this blog with another Robert Neff in Japan.

Now I know who’s who.

Have you two ever met? I think it’s a sign.

Wow – BIG difference. This is from the iPad. This appears to be a discus problem.

Cool Q – we can agree to disagree (although I do agree with you to an extent).  I also thought it was kind of strange that you would have made the comment:

Japan, the imitator of Western powers, emulated the methodology of colonial propaganda.

I was just finishing transcribing this quote from an early visitor to Korea who also described the Japanese as the kings if imitators and being incapable of invention but never failed to improve whatever detail of life they chose to adopt.

Q – I always enjoy our little interactions because, unlike others, you always bring something to the table.

If memory serves, there is a detailed account of the manner in which Japanese policy makers very deliberately and carefully benchmarked French colonial policy in formulating their own approach to Korea and Taiwan in Mark Caprio’s Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Assimilation-Policies-1910-1945-International/dp/0295989017/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y).

Another relatively well-balanced book on point is Taylor Atkins, Primitive Selves:  Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945 (http://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Selves-Japanese-1910-1945-Colonialisms/dp/0520266749/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_z).

Each is more illuminating than Qball”s whinging drive-by victim card throw-downs

 Cloudfive,

Nice choice – Ms. Baker certainly was a very attractive woman. And I hope Q’s satisfied, that is to say I hope he take the issue at hand, well what I mean is…

When Rupert Murdock was Australian – he was always a nice guy to the Australian Public – so was his father.  He invested his money and “media influence” into helping “good” government parties get into power that did wonders for the Australian public, including universal free health care, free education for all Australians to tertiary level, recognition of the People’s Republic of China, and public ownership of Australia’s oil, gas and mineral resources.

Now that he is American and he got into trouble with  the News of the World, owned by News Corporation, which had been regularly hacking the phones of celebrities, royalty and public citizens in the UK – he has to get his ratings back from somewhere – even if he is allowing bad stories about the country which has now given him citizenship and residence (the USA) to be shown on the Rotana network.

Don’ t forget “The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War”:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Imperial-Cruise-History-ebook/dp/B002P8N0UC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358739925&sr=8-1&keywords=imperial+cruise

Rare collection of Edo Japan pictures might tell how much Japan has improved at the end of 19C.  Especially, the first two photos of the same Japanese man taken at a studio setting seem to well reflect the photographer’s intention to tell how much Japan has transfigured.

That isn’t just any black woman.  Isn’t it Josephine Baker?

Whatever one’s personal opinion about the book is, you could not deny the vast reference –TR’ s own writings, news articles of the time, witness, etc. — Mr. Bradley has extensively researched and quoted for his book.

Mr. Bradley’s premise is that TR’s foreign policy has played a vital role in the monstrous expansion of Japanese militarism, which eventually resulted in the attack of Pearl Harbor decades later.  Of course, TR did not expect it and he let the Frankenstein grow for the benefit of the US, but retrospectively it was so. 

My main interest in the book, though, is not whether TR was personally responsible for the suffering of the author’s father.  The book is fascinating in excavating the US-Japan relation under TR’s presidency, his role in Japan’s colonization of Korea, and most astoundingly the Nobel Peace prize winner’s racist philosophy,

That’s the problem with Bradley’s book: he treats as a premise what he needs to establish by evidence and argument. 
And good luck with that, considering that Japanese expansionsim began long before TR took office, and continued after he left, on a billards table that had a lot more moving balls than the two that Bradley and you want to consider in some sort of a vacuum as an example of newtonian mechanics.  Consider, eg., vis-a-vis Japanese expansionism,  the Tokugawa absorption of Ezo and the Ryukyus completed in the early Meiji, and vis-a-vis the coming of WW2 30years of post-TR administration events, involving not just the US but a number of other countries and not just political conflict but years of trade disputes.

As for Korea, it’s very hard to imagine what Roosevelt might have done, even if he thought that Koreans deserved help.  By the time he took office, he had learned firsthand how difficult such intervention could be as a result of the difficulty that the US with the Philippine Insurrection, especially with a numerically small US Army and a US Navy that was largely obsolete.  TR had no significant role in Japan’s colonization of Korea other than getting out of the way of a steamroller that the US was unprepared and had no national interest in opposing.

They say that hindsight is 20/20, but in the case of you and Mr. Bradley it’s occluded by other biases.

I’d love to, but I’m a mere hobbyist and my level of reading isn’t good enough to figure out what characters should be where the inscriptions have been rubbed off. I can’t say much more than what is in that news article.

The people you referred would be rather antiwar activist figures than politicians who had power to wield “Big Sticks.” As you admitted, TR was a racist. And racism was not an idiosyncratic penchant of a few politicians in the 19th and early 20th century. It was a deeply embedded prevalent culture and mind of American and European societies, especially toward “yellow” and “black” races. If you ever read the book, it would not be hard to find how much racism worked in TR’ s political career and his policy toward Asia.

Would there be more defense for racism of TR who wrote in his article “National Life and Character”(1894) that Blacks were “a perfectly stupid race” and it would take “many thousand years” before the Black became even “as intellectual as the [ancient] Athenian?”

Yesterday afternoon at a friend’s Inauguration-watching party, I suddenly found myself between two 40-somethings arguing over the relative merits of Halo versus Call of Duty.

Gawd almighty!

For the live of me, I will never understand the Silicon Valley interests of a certain type of grown men!

Fortunately, there were a couple of non-dorks in the crowd, and the afternoon was not a total loss. The real surprise: meeting one of those guys who, as a high school kid in Korea, was ranked first in his year in taking the university entrance exam!

I can’t recall the term Koreans use for that accomplishment, but the guy went on to get his MBA and Ph.D. at Stanford.

Pretty impressive.

DLB

Due to subcomment space ran out, I would like to start a new one in response to Sperwer. 

First, as for TR’s education at Harvard and Columbia law school, his favorite law professor Burgess taught that “only White people could rule because the Teuton had created the idea of the state.”  Later in 1910, TR wrote to Burgess “Your teaching was one of the formative influences in my life.  You impressed me more than you’ll ever know.”

Second, it was TR that was so obsessed with racial theme: “[Theodore Roosevelt] viewd the entire breadth of the American past through a racial lens.  With constant, almost compulsive attention to underlying racial themes, he researched, analyzed, and synthesized the raw materials of history.  The force of race in history occupied a singularly imporant place in Roosevelt’s broad intellectual outlook.” (Dyer, Theoedore Roosebelt and the Idea of Race, 47) 

Third, TR’s compliment to Japan as honorary Arians were nothing but extension of White supremacy idea.

since we’ve got an open thread, I’ll give you a link to something I wrote today about ROKon Magazine. It was a long time ago and no one cares but me, but it might be an interesting read nonetheless. http://www.asiapundits.com/regions/korea/rokon-magazine-a-reassessment/