BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

More insults, great. You wound yourself up more and more in your first post that one can't really help but interpret reaction.

this xenophobic dynamic plays out in multicultural west just as much as monocultural 'racist' korea. old tabloid-reading people are xenophobic and politicians find it expedient to blame everything on some external 'Other' beyond their responsibility. OMG! THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE!

A simple "no" would have sufficed to my response to that, but you had to escalate it even further, like you're doing now.

I posted the article because I agreed with its assessment that this was a dumb idea. I'm not making any points about Asian racism or whatever. It's really your own fault if someone here thinks you're being difficult. You've always been super touchy on stuff and one of the most exhausting users to anticipate. "Oh shit, I bet uzique is gonna have words with me on that. Better dig in for an unnecessary two week long argument." The huge irony is in you calling someone else autistic.

Dilbert did (maybe tongue-in-cheek) reply to that effect, though it was my post you quoted. It's a non-argument at this point though, isn't it? Boiling down to we're both in agreement that the policy sucks, makes no sense, and risks doing great harm. The rest is really garnish that would normally be flicked off an omelette before consumption.

i never claimed that whites were exclusively racist or even the worst racists?

i already spoke before i went about korea's attitudes to foreigners and all of their well-worn tropes?

do you think i'm surprised that a country with a long history of resentment about colonizers (asian and european), and a long history of US occupation and an armed forces presence ... has negative stereotypes about disease-ridden, sexually rapacious foreigners? their capital city has had a huge US army base right in the centre of it for all of its modern history ffs. no shit they have lots of racist ideas about drunken and touchy-feely soldiers, and by extension low-life westerners.

you recycle tired tropes from the far-right's 'culture war' about multicultural cities and races mixing. i don't have a problem with those things. of course i have a problem with racism and mistreatment of people on that basis, anywhere in the world. but this is, at the end of the day, a small complaint. no one has spat in my face, physically assaulted me, or shot me to death. for racially-aggravated acts of mass slaughter and violence, whites really do seem to populate the high-score leaderboards.

Last edited by uziq (2021-03-18 02:00:19)

it's not an expected response at all, but grievances about military personnel and tropes about 'dirty foreigners' are timeless stereotypes. they feature in right-wing conservative media. they're not 'evolutionary' responses, they're not 'natural', they're not 'logical' or whatever other stupid pseudo-scientific babble you use. they are rhetorical ploys and sensational aspects of xenophobia and conservatism. better to ask who owns the papers or which politicians are benefitting from this stuff. it's always about an establishment consolidating itself.

not every korean is racist. i've had many great interactions here with old korean men who approach me and want to talk. they're interested in where i'm from and expressive of their (and our) shared histories. i spent an afternoon drinking makgeoli outside a city-centre shrine with old men. not a single negative response or bad moment.

but, as i said my first post, many koreans are whipped up by certain tabloid-level media and evince the same ugly attitudes as xenophobes anywhere else. am i meant to be surprised or supposedly naive because i've discovered it in another country? it doesn't surprise me at all. sorry to disappoint your little thesis.

'we are territorial animals at the end of the day' is just the sort of wishy-washy, evolutionary psychology hogwash that is extremely scientifically dubious.

same people who divide humans into 'alphas' and 'betas' and think we can draw parallels between highly complex human social organisation and wolves in captivity. it's not a very long slide to comparing our political ideologies to lobsters.

i am extremely hesitant to ascribe anything that arises historically to 'evolutionary' or 'instinctual' responses. it's so vague that it can justify anything, anywhere, at any time. best to keep to historical analysis rather than imputing, say, korea's attitudes towards foreigners to 'the animal instinct to hold territory'. extremely shaky stuff. i think having a major war in living memory and a painful chapter of brutal colonial occupation might be more germane than, er, the primeval human animal wanting its own cave.

humans have free will and can say no to our biological drives and baser instincts. dilbert has never had a child. amazing that he can reject his screaming hormones and most vital genetic drive, but can't stop being a cunt about indian taxi drivers. very convenient, that.

As to Koreans not physically or verbally assaulting you; I'd consider it a cultural difference rather than evidence of more racial tolerance. Their racism is more hidden than overt.

every interaction i've had with koreans thus far has been amicable and civil. i think people mostly everywhere are good people in close inter-personal situations. it's easy to be racist in the abstract, to get angry at newspaper stories or incensed at 'refugees': face to face we're much more disposed to empathy, curiosity, and just general fellow-feeling. i've had nothing but good experiences here. but please, continue to tell me how the lack of bad experiences is actually *checks notes* evidence of confucian attitudes and, ackshually, they're being super racist to me.

Last edited by uziq (2021-03-18 03:11:42)

well done at describing what a culture is. as a student of 'culture', i think any efforts to draw a link to 'evolution' or 'biology' is very complex stuff. you don't find these huge evolutionary generalisations in, say, structural anthropology.

evolutionary psychology is out of fashion now. it's okay. a few decades ago geographers thought you could explain a country's culture because of its climate and location, too, and the effect of weather and terrain. that is also a fucking nonsense and similarly is out of fashion.

Last edited by uziq (2021-03-18 03:20:06)

conversations and pleasant interactions with them means tolerance, though, doesn't it? lmao.

uziq wrote:

conversations and pleasant interactions with them means tolerance, though, doesn't it? lmao.

Sure. And I'm also sure your current consideration is bound to become more nuanced the longer you live there.

Larssen wrote:

uziq wrote:

well done at describing what a culture is. as a student of 'culture', i think any efforts to draw a link to 'evolution' or 'biology' is very complex stuff. you don't find these huge evolutionary generalisations in, say, structural anthropology.

evolutionary psychology is out of fashion now. it's okay. a few decades ago geographers thought you could explain a country's culture because of its climate and location, too, and the effect of weather and terrain. that is also a fucking nonsense and similarly is out of fashion.

I think you should be open to the possibility. There's a weirdness in the social sciences of late that people and groups of people can and only should be seen as tabula rasa. You're not inmediately on a slippery slope to eugenics by stating that we're also still a bunch of animals with instinctual needs and wants.

nobody has seriously claimed that human beings are a tabula rasa in centuries. you are really not acquainted with the social sciences. constructivism, for instance, is not the same thing as saying that everyone is a tabula rasa. contemporary genetics research has much to say about epigenetic phenomena, for instance.

uziq wrote:

Larssen wrote:

uziq wrote:

well done at describing what a culture is. as a student of 'culture', i think any efforts to draw a link to 'evolution' or 'biology' is very complex stuff. you don't find these huge evolutionary generalisations in, say, structural anthropology.

evolutionary psychology is out of fashion now. it's okay. a few decades ago geographers thought you could explain a country's culture because of its climate and location, too, and the effect of weather and terrain. that is also a fucking nonsense and similarly is out of fashion.

I think you should be open to the possibility. There's a weirdness in the social sciences of late that people and groups of people can and only should be seen as tabula rasa. You're not inmediately on a slippery slope to eugenics by stating that we're also still a bunch of animals with instinctual needs and wants.

nobody has seriously claimed that human beings are a tabula rasa in centuries. you are really not acquainted with the social sciences. constructivism, for instance, is not the same thing as saying that everyone is a tabula rasa. contemporary genetics research has much to say about epigenetic phenomena, for instance.

Nobody is regurgitating the words tabula rasa but beneath a lot of social commentary when it comes to identity formation or racism is that it's all just learned behaviours. The arguments to prove this usually focus on people of mixed ethnic heritage and their struggles to fit in with both groups to argue the concepts are a construct and can be un-learned I suppose. Great, but it also strikes me as a naive hopefulness and I'm not really seeing any place on the planet that is or ever has been free of any identity biases. I'm not exactly writing an article here, merely stating that it wouldn't surprise me and strikes me as possible that humans may have some ingrained behavioural traits when it comes to marking our place vis-a-vis others, and intended or unintended consequences.

Last edited by Larssen (2021-03-18 03:57:36)

uziq wrote:

i've always said i'm ready to encounter it. but it doesn't contradict my basic point that most people, in all places, are basically nice and tolerant.

When there's enough food to go around, which typically there isn't.

If everyone is so peaceful and tolerant why are the Chinese and Russians being so aggressive?

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2021-03-18 05:06:24)

Just to be clear, I think I'm permitted to have some level of this "multicultural experience building" from going to korean, indian, turkish, etc. stores and large business districts and chatting up some of the 1st/2nd gen people working or shopping there. It only seems fair that if uzique gets to learn about korea from a korean, I should be allowed to learn about korea from a korean without getting belittled and invalidated on an internet forum.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Just to be clear, I think I'm permitted to have some level of this "multicultural experience building" from going to korean, indian, turkish, etc. stores and large business districts and chatting up some of the 1st/2nd gen people working or shopping there. It only seems fair that if uzique gets to learn about korea from a korean, I should be allowed to learn about korea from a korean without getting belittled and invalidated on an internet forum.

korean-americans are not korean my guy. even they receive racism from 'real' koreans. look up the term gyopo. this is not exactly unheard of stuff.

buying indian masala sauces and chit-chatting with a shop clerk in the pacific north-west is not exactly attuning yourself to an asian culture.

i am not claiming to be a korea expert and i have said, time and time again, that i'm sure i have lots of painful and uncomfortable learning experiences ahead. but you seem to really think that you can get the measure of the world from a logging town where kurt cubain once scored heroin.

Last edited by uziq (2021-03-18 06:20:40)