How can there possibly be any legal mitigation when we're talking about a guy in a 5-ton bus purposely swerving into a bicyclist? To bring "aggravating factors" into that unbalanced an equation seems ridiculous to me.
Like, if I get into a fistfight with some other dude, and we're both unarmed, then okay, maybe I could understand a legal situation where one or the other of us argues that there was an "aggravating factor" that sparked the brawl. We are, after all, unarmed, and the altercation is occurring on more or less equal grounds. But this situation is like if, instead of being unarmed, I pulled out a machete against an unarmed person and started hacking away. I mean, at some point we have to be able to say that this is so overboard that mitigating circumstances don't mean shit, because any reasonable person would understand that, no matter what the situation, it takes a seriously unbalanced individual to resort to actions so extreme. A punch in the face could perhaps be justified partially by "aggravating factors," but not swerving a bus into somebody riding a bike.
Okay, this might just be my American-ness kicking in (I'm fully aware and critical of our country's problems with heavy sentences and whatnot), but doesn't 17 months seem a bit short for attempted murder? Or does purposely swerving a bus (a deadly weapon) into a person on a bike not count as attempted murder in the UK? In America, after good behavior, you'd probably be looking at least at about 2 or 3 years behind bars, depending on the state where the crime took place.
That's exactly what it is. Do you ever listen to yourself, constantly telling people what they "deserve" and what they don't? Seems pretty obvious that this all stems from a deep, powerful anger that you're holding onto.
I don't think it's always necessarily a PC bang thing. I think there are probably shut-ins too.
Anger Anger Anger Anger Anger!
I think they end up living with their parents and just sort of sponging. It's often the case that people will end up living with their parents even after they start normal careers. Families are just closer in Korea, and it lets them save money by sticking together. Once they go off and get married, they'll find their own places with their new spouses. But for example, younger, unmarried teachers that I've worked with at my high school, have often still lived at home with their parents, even though they have what is considered a very stable, secure, career-style job.
In the case of a person who sponges off of his/her parents, I think it's often the case that the parents put up with it because they feel guilty about "burning out" their child. It's also an extension of the tendency to think "it's a passing phase" or "he'll grow out of it with time." In reality, though, it's often the case that kids experience real, long-term trauma from having all of the pressures of education stacked on them, to the point where they just kind of fizzle out. There's a kid in the school where I teach who, in this year alone (his freshman year), bounced between like 3 different schools before he got to ours, and missed something like 50 or 60 days of school due to anxiety issues from all the pressure of testing and whatnot. I've talked to the kid, and he actually seems pretty astute and bright (at least where English is concerned), but he's obviously just been completely ruined by all the pressure. I wouldn't be surprised if he turns into one of these sort of catatonic young adults, who simply can't deal with the pressure because of all the trauma they've faced in this culture.
I have to say, one thing I'd never want to be is a male, Korean high school student. It's study, study, study, and you basically live at school for 3 years. And then what you've got to look forward to after that, even if it "all pans out" and you get into a respectable university, is eventually serving a mandatory period in the military. Your ultimate dream is to get some cubicle job with one of the huge conglomerates like Samsung or LG, and that's basically your life, all planned out for you. University is actually considered a sort of respite from all of it, from what I understand. It must feel like something just short of doing a real prison stint.
I think Korea has a school addiction, we need to treat them for this awful affliction.
That is a great point. If there's anything making children (especially high schoolers) miserable, it's the fact that their lives are basically just school, school, school for 12 years. Actually, I think Korea is sort of normal for the first 9 years of it (depends on how many private academies individual parents make their children attend). But once they get into high school, they're studying at least from 8:30AM to 11PM, Monday-Friday. I believe, at least in my city, starting this school year they've ended mandatory, twice-monthly Saturday classes. So that's a start. But education really is an arms race here in Korea. It's fueled by the wealthy, carried on by the aspirational middle class, and an enormous financial burden to the lower class and poor. In order to compete, parents have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month (depending on how many children they have) to send their kids to private academies, just so they can "keep up" and have a shot at getting into the best universities. It's crazy.
I think the point is that, when you hear about gaming being related to some sort of crime, it's simply too easy to jump to the conclusion that the gaming was responsible for it. For example, take parents who leave their child to starve to death while they play video games (I think I remember hearing about that kind of story). Who's to say that those parents wouldn't simply have become obsessed with something else if they hadn't been into video games? The problem is the mentality that made them feel it was okay to be neglectful to their child. If it hadn't been that, it likely would have been something else. So when you focus on the gaming aspect, all it means, usually, is that you're failing to address the real root causes. If the government wants to limit how much time minors can spend playing video games, that may well be a good thing. But let's not pretend that it has anything to do with stopping bullying, because it doesn't. There's no reason to delude ourselves, here.
Actually, the Korean government does need to start interfering in citizens' lives, just not in this way. They need to have frank discussions, and develop rational policy and public advocacy about domestic abuse and psychological disorders/treatment, for example. But the thing is that, in Korea, what happens inside the home is sacrosanct, even if it's a drunk, abusive father beating his wife and children. Bureaucrats don't want to talk about that kind of stuff, because even mentioning it in a general sense of public advocacy would be considered a sort of trespass on that territory. It would also be shameful to admit that such a thing actually happens in Korea (just like homosexuality!). And yet, the public nevertheless hungers for solutions to the bullying problem, so bureaucrats will latch onto those "solutions" which sound best to the public, the easiest of which is to blame some facet of pop culture.
You're relying on Korean bureaucrats to be people of reason, though. Not sure that's a winning proposition.
That's the thing. Kids in Korea, especially high school kids, are just doing SCHOOL SCHOOL SCHOOL all the time, to the point where they can't really cultivate lives of their own. So in their free time, they do more convenient things, like playing video games (or watching TV, or whatever). It's the singleminded obsession with education that really pushes kids into these activities, more than anything else. I mean, what else are you going to do at 11PM, as a high school student, after an entire day spent on lessons and study? What's open at that hour? Oh yeah, the PC bang.
Yeah, I think what you're running into is the extreme cultural taboo against doing anything that might marr a child's official record. One of the teachers I work with at my school has been telling me a lot about this kid who missed tons of school during this past year, and the kid's mother (who's a teacher at another high school) is asking him to have the absences marked as illness-related so they won't be held against him when it comes time to apply to universities. There is very much this sense that problems will right themselves, if given time, and that nothing good can ever come of treating a young person too harshly. There's some merit to taking a lighter hand with students, don't get me wrong. I think that a lot of times we go way too far in America. But in Korea, it's the exact opposite. They take far too light a hand in situations where consistency and upholding the rules is more properly in order. Nobody wants to ruffle any feathers. And of course, kids are keenly aware of this this cultural quirk, so more and more of them are beginning to realize that they can get away with all sorts of shit that most kids were too afraid to try in previous generations.
The reason why Korean schools have shitty discipline is not because the teachers can't hit the students anymore. I'll admit that, back when they could hit the students, the students probably were better behaved. But the ultimate reason why the students are so out of control is because schools are set up so the homeroom teachers have to do absolutely everything. They are the disciplinarians, but at the same time, they have to deal with these kids everyday.
So what do you do in that situation? Well, some teachers do the right thing, and keep their students disciplined, even if it hurts their relationship with their homeroom class. But other teachers do the easy thing--and understanding the horrors of being a Korean homeroom teacher, I don't necessarily blame them for this--and take it too easy on their students.
The major difference in America is that, if you fuck up a teacher's shit there, they can just send you down to the principal's office to be dealt with by the administration. In Korea, the administration doesn't interact with students at all. Most of the students probably don't even know the principal's name. And I'm not trying to say that this makes American schools perfect, because it doesn't. But at least teachers in America have a modicum of support from administrative staff, and aren't expected to be fully responsible for handling discipline problems on their own. In Korea, no teacher would even think of approaching, say, the vice principal, for assistance in dealing with a student, because that would be an admission that they can't do their job, and they'd catch shit for it. The only time the VP will ever get involved is if a parent enters the equation and nothing else can be done about it (usually a parent has to threaten to bring the police into a situation before the administration will even give two shits).
TL;DR: Korean teachers receive absolutely no administrative support. I have a hard time understanding what the VP, and especially the principal, even do in my school. I think the principal just stamps documents in the morning and then goes out to play golf, and the VP stamps more documents for the principal to stamp while discreetly browsing softcore pics on his PC and trying not to think of how much he wants a glass of whiskey.
What we're seeing here is basically a mix of the good ol' technophobic hysteria, which you can find quite easily in America, with a culture that is just really far behind when it comes to dealing with touchy issues like domestic abuse, psychological disorders/treatment, etc. A big component of this whole thing is that they don't want to encroach on the darker aspects of peoples' private home lives (things like fathers who beat their wives and children), because interfering with that sort of thing is very much a cultural taboo. But they can't not do something, so they're content to attack mainstream culture instead, even with no rational basis for doing so. What it comes down to, more than anything else, is a kind of cultural cowardice. And we can still see the same thing in America, but not quite on this level anymore. I live in Korea, and I feel like people here are maybe more or less where America was on the bullying issue in the 1980s or early 90s, in that there's a sort of "new" cultural awareness of it (people are "talking about it" a lot), but the dialogue surrounding the issue is still very primitive and misdirected.
Anyone who lives here knows that the average high school kid (at least those at academic high schools, i.e. kids who are planning on going to university) barely have enough free time on any given weekday for it to be possible to nurture anything like a real video game addiction. This doesn't mean it never happens, of course, but when you're locked up in education mode from 8AM-11PM 5 or 6 days a week, it must be hard to find the time.
Did you even read what I wrote? I'm making the same point as you.
No. Words--and that includes epithets--aren't created equal.
No, but they won't generally think twice if a black person says it. So yeah, we do consider context when it comes to that word.
Listen, I personally recoil whenever I hear anybody say "faggot," pretty much without regard to context. But at the same time, I find it really hard to get, like, vein-poppingly offended by those instances where, yeah, it is pretty much being used to mean "lame," and I'm fairly certain that the person saying it doesn't harbor real animosity toward homosexuals. I'm never going to look at that and say "Well, that couldn't have been said any better." But at the same time, I'm not going to pretend that I've got an enemy where I really don't.
And sure, if you asked me, well, would I think the same thing about a white dude who said "nigger"? And the answer, of course, is that I would not. Words, and our perceptions of them, are not created equal. That one, specifically when used by a white person, has a special chemistry of its own that makes it different from almost any other epithet in our culture.
...we don't just let people say they want to use "nigger" in whatever context they want and we'll just sit back and accept their explanation.
Of course we do. A lot of people just happen to think that ending the word with an "-a" and ending the word with an "-er" makes them two different things.
kotaku.com/core
They created a whole new site that filters out this stuff for those who don't want to read it. You have the option not to even see stories like this. Try using it.
