Botond173
1d ago
It's still not advisable though. Getting lost or suffering an injury can have grave consequences in such a situation, especially if there's no cell phone signal.
Botond173
3d ago
I'd say the decisive factor was the armistice in 1953, and the Americans not leaving. The war was never terminated in a clear manner, and was instead transformed into the mess that persists to this day, with the DMZ and so on. Had the North Koreans been capable enough to successfully and swiftly reunify the country through force, as it happened in Vietnam, Korea today would be a more or less normally functioning, average Asian nation, as Vietnam is. This'd be preferable to the current situation. One consequence of American military presence was the widening exposure of the populace to American cultural concepts, such as radical feminism. Also, there wouldn't be any Sarah Jeongs in the US.
Another factor was the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in 1979, which the Americans probably had some role in by either abetting it or supporting it. If there was one South Korean leader after 1953 who had both the willingness and ability to turn the country into a more or less normally functioning Asian nation without the current social dystopia of implemented cyberpunk, it was definitely him. If given 5 or 10 more years, it might have worked. But it was not to be, and he was replaced by a stooge of Washington.
Botond173
3d ago
You can't write this and then not give us anything!
Check the quotes in the original comment, I suggest.
Botond173
3d ago
There's a graph that circulates on Twitter frequently about how Western youth are supposedly polarizing sharply away from each other, with women becoming more left-wing and men becoming more right-wing, and if you actually look at the graph it just shows men becoming mildly more conservative, a change that is barely perceptible, while women are stampeding to the left.
South Korea is an exemption though, as far as I can tell.
Botond173
3d ago
Plenty of married couples rent?
I'm sure they do, generally as long as they're still childless. Once they're not, I'm not sure most people see that as a viable option.
Botond173
3d ago
To emphasize the point, men in their cohort who enter the workforce had their mandatory military service counted as work experience and so enter at a higher pay level.
Well, there's a rather self-evident political option to remedy this.
Buying a house is a precondition to marrying under Korean social norms.
Is there any society where owning a house/apartment is not generally considered necessary before marriage?
Botond173
1hr ago
So after reading of this online trend I decided to look up information on bear attacks in Russia, as I remembered reading that those often become a serious issue on a local level.
There's an interesting tidbit I've found: "Kamchatka brown bears are generally not dangerous to humans, and only 1% of encounters result in attack." (The cited source is a Kamchatka Ecology and Environmental Institute study.)
To be sure, brown bears are no joke, and the Kamchatkan subspecies is even less of a joke: "The Kamchatka brown bear is the biggest brown bear in Eurasia, with a body length of 2.4 m (7.9 ft) to 3 m (9.8 ft) tall on hind legs, and a weight up to at least 650 kg (1,430 lb). It is about the size of the Kodiak bear..."
Anyway, the 1% figure is somewhat surprising and seems to underpin the feminist argument at first sight. However, I'd be very surprised if solitary female-on-male encounters in the woods were statistically as dangerous anywhere in the world.
Botond173
1hr ago
Botond173
3d ago
Russia is actively taking refugees from the middle east and elsewhere and shipping them to the Finnish border where they are provided with bicycles and told to cross.
How is that, in effect, different from what Serbian, Macedonian and Turkish authorities were doing in 2015?
Botond173
2d ago
how Darwin and Margaret Sanger were racists
I'd look at those separately as they're just lame-ass attempts at the DR3 narrative.
Botond173
14hr ago
Botond173
18hr ago
That's the point. Fried ice does not and can not exist. It's an old Arab proverb, supposedly.
Botond173
1d ago
It's worth pointing out though that I can imagine many mainstream Republicans (not those heavily involved in the Christian Right) would also be more or less sympathetic to Sanger's ideas if they actually checked out what those were.
Botond173
1d ago
I don't know. But that's what I consider plausible by looking at the one relevant historical parallel, Vietnam.
Botond173
2d ago
Apparently Korean women assume that they are feminist allies, and aren't icky betas, I suppose.
Botond173
18hr ago
Fair enough. When I first read it, I didn't notice that the story also entails boning.
Botond173
2d ago
Yes, it doesn't add up, although the general narrative of the comment is fairly convincing. Simple anthropology tells us that roughly an equal number of boys and girls are born into upper middle class South Korean families. They have the same advantages in life. For every single woman with high expectations, there's a well-paid single man of similar social status.
Botond173
2d ago
It's just the same old shit. They get their "information" about the West from clickbait trash sites, and conclude that Western men are different, when, in fact, men are just men everywhere, and women are just women everywhere. Also, women want fried ice.
Botond173
1d ago
Early 20s reader of The Ethical Slut finally finds the rich foreign gentleman she's been trying to snag. Comes back raving about how the first date was amazing, he must have spent $500 between dinner and the hotel, she's finally found the man of her dreams. A week later he has to go on an international business trip, and stops answering his phone. Oddly, his phone is ringing like it's still in Korea ...
To be fair, this behavior is genuinely puzzling.
The simple truth is that nobody, either man or woman, should ever go hiking in the woods alone, with or without bears inhabiting those woods, period.
More options
Context Copy link