|
Korean Job Discussion Forums
"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
kinerry
Joined: 01 Jun 2009
|
 Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:17 am Post subject: |
 |
|
| Old Gil wrote: |
| ChilgokBlackHole wrote: |
| Old Gil wrote: |
"It's nothing to be ashamed of" is what I said, that does not equate to shouting it from the rooftops. There are certain social prejudices at work that will cost me money. I like money, as do I like drugs. But money trumps.
There is nothing wrong with liking drugs, but I'm not about to go on a campaign to convince the Koreans of this, and ergo I'm not going to risk losing my job because of it. |
So why do you insist upon defending your position here in a public forum that you know the locals read, and having your opinion projected on the rest of us, instead of taking all the heat yourself? |
I don't put any stock in the locals' opinion when it comes to drug use. I haven't used any drug in over 4 years (with the exception of the good ones: alcohol and nicotine). If they want to sensationalize these facts they are more than welcome to. |
Did you just call alcohol a good drug? The research says otherwise.
Can't find a direct link right now, but here's a blog about it.
http://drbenkim.com/ten-most-dangerous-drugs.html |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Perceptioncheck
Joined: 13 Oct 2008
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 6:24 am Post subject: |
|
|
| TheUrbanMyth wrote: |
| Perceptioncheck wrote: |
| ChilgokBlackHole wrote: |
| Old Gil wrote: |
"It's nothing to be ashamed of" is what I said, that does not equate to shouting it from the rooftops. There are certain social prejudices at work that will cost me money. I like money, as do I like drugs. But money trumps.
There is nothing wrong with liking drugs, but I'm not about to go on a campaign to convince the Koreans of this, and ergo I'm not going to risk losing my job because of it. |
So why do you insist upon defending your position here in a public forum that you know the locals read, and having your opinion projected on the rest of us, instead of taking all the heat yourself? |
I think you are grossly underestimating 'the locals' if you believe they would consider the opinion of one nameless poster on Daves ESL cafe indicative of the larger expat community in Korea. |
That's what AES does pretty much though. It takes one or two isolated cases and extrapolates from them to paint all the NETS with a broad brush. |
So what exactly are you saying? That we should censor ourselves because of an extremist fringe group who will, in all liklihood, fabricate what they cannot find? Thanks, but no thanks.
| Quote: |
| That's it. What Old Gil is doing, by not standing up and taking credit, when he says "I like drugs," he's saying "We like drugs." That's just not true. He needs to back up those statements with his personal information if he wants them to be regarded as his personal opinion. |
If someone is so mentally retarded they cannot distinguish between one nameless poster on an internet forum and the entire expat community, well. . .that's their problem, not mine.
People who have it in for whitey will have it in for whitey regardless of all the *** lickery apologists. They will make ludicrious leaps of logic. They will take what they want and they will twist it. Kind of like what I found on another site, regarding our conversation here on Dave's:
| Quote: |
| Good God! And I was hoping that the mushroom part of this post was about favorite pizza toppings. Silly me. It's not like some native English teachers are planning on going to Korea and working illegally. From Dave's ESL Cafe, Korean Jobs Forum. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
chachee99
Joined: 20 Oct 2004
Location: Seoul Korea
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 7:29 am Post subject: |
|
|
| VFRinterceptor wrote: |
| I call BS on this troll. |
I second this! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
ChilgokBlackHole
Joined: 21 Nov 2009
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:34 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Perceptioncheck wrote: |
| So what exactly are you saying? That we should censor ourselves because of an extremist fringe group who will, in all liklihood, fabricate what they cannot find? Thanks, but no thanks. |
You should censor yourself because these people are your customers, and what you say here could easily be printed in a conservative rag tomorrow. I guess it's okay to pee in the swimming pool if nobody knows specifically who peed, right? I mean, nobody wants to swim in pee, but by your logic, if nobody knows who specifically did it, it's not disgusting. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Perceptioncheck
Joined: 13 Oct 2008
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 5:17 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| ChilgokBlackHole wrote: |
| Perceptioncheck wrote: |
| So what exactly are you saying? That we should censor ourselves because of an extremist fringe group who will, in all liklihood, fabricate what they cannot find? Thanks, but no thanks. |
You should censor yourself because these people are your customers, and what you say here could easily be printed in a conservative rag tomorrow. I guess it's okay to pee in the swimming pool if nobody knows specifically who peed, right? I mean, nobody wants to swim in pee, but by your logic, if nobody knows who specifically did it, it's not disgusting. |
WTF? Are you high, sir? Imbibed some mushrooms? Smoked a bit of the waccy baccy?
Youa can't equate having a debate about drugs with pissing in a swimming pool. Your extension of 'logic' is reeeeediculous and meaningless. I will, however, agree that pissing in swimming pools is disgusting. You have me on that.
And please explain to me how 'these people' are my customers? You totally lost me on that one.
Finally, why should I give two hoots if what I say is 'printed in a conservative rag'. After all, said rag will be read by conservatives who already have their minds made up. Said rag won't print anything good. Said rag won't give a balanced report. So why should I care? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Street Magic
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 6:06 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| ChilgokBlackHole wrote: |
| Perceptioncheck wrote: |
| So what exactly are you saying? That we should censor ourselves because of an extremist fringe group who will, in all liklihood, fabricate what they cannot find? Thanks, but no thanks. |
You should censor yourself because these people are your customers, and what you say here could easily be printed in a conservative rag tomorrow. I guess it's okay to pee in the swimming pool if nobody knows specifically who peed, right? I mean, nobody wants to swim in pee, but by your logic, if nobody knows who specifically did it, it's not disgusting. |
That metaphor would only make sense if someone wanted to pee on you as a punishment for admitting to having done something benign like eating an hour before swimming ten years ago, but since the only evidence of said benign infraction came from an anonymous internet post, the punishing party instead decided to pee on everyone.
The problem with the pee in your original metaphor is that it seems at first to represent the hardships brought upon the teaching community as a whole by anonymous individuals when the individual not being anonymous wouldn't make the pool any less pee filled. That's because it doesn't make sense to use a metaphorical action with direct consequences (the consequence of urinating is urine) in representing an actual action with indirect consequences (the consequence of a potentially scandalous anonymous admission is the chance it will be seen by locals and used as a reason to attack the foreign teaching community).
With the latter case, not being anonymous would mitigate the harm to the rest of the community because the individual making the admission was never the one directly harming the community in the first place. The fact that your metaphor impossibly merges an anonymous admission with the potential consequences of others reacting to said admission implies that the immediacy of the disgustingness of the pee wasn't a metaphor for the consequences of local media or grassroots retaliation against the foreign teaching community at all but rather a metaphor for your own immediate disgust with the approval of the use of certain controlled substances. The invocation of the threat of another foreign teacher smear campaign was just a ploy to avoid having to defend the ultimately indefensible stance of arbitrary prohibition. This interpretation is further supported by your repeated conflation of shame with the fear of punishment.
All that aside, if I had accepted your argument, I would have refrained from posting here just now because I would have arrived at the only sane conclusion someone concerned with the potential this thread has to spark a foreign teacher witch hunt could arrive at-- that any bumping of this thread regardless of the content of your post will only increase the likelihood of said witch hunt.
So what's been your motivation for posting here? Surely you understand that no Korean netizen or reporter with an ax to grind will bother to mention that post on the third page where an anonymous teacher declared how drugs are bad? Maybe your first post could have convinced others of the importance of discretion, but it's not as though you said anything other members hadn't already said in this very thread. And even granting the utility of your first post, we're still left with the unsolved mystery of your campaign of high profile discretion mongering that followed.
Is the chance to defend your pride in an anonymous internet argument really worth prolonging the life of a thread you allegedly believe is harming the foreign teaching community? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
ChilgokBlackHole
Joined: 21 Nov 2009
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 7:31 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Perceptioncheck wrote: |
| And please explain to me how 'these people' are my customers? You totally lost me on that one. |
This is the core of your argument. There is no denying that group-think is king these days, cross-culturally, all over the world. "These people" are the Koreans. The locals. The people who pay your salary. Now you know that public opinion can turn against us at the drop of a hat. This is fact. By advocating drug use while behind a message board handle, you are simply giving the netizens the rope they will use to hang you.
Imagine the headline: "English Teachers Advocate Drug Use On Popular Message Board"
Then they post quotes from this very thread. People read those things online, they may even see it on television. Then walking down the street, they see me. "Hyunnim, do you think he is the one who likes to use drugs?" "Well, maybe he is, and maybe he ain't, but I know I don't trust them waegooks. Not when they all love to use drugs."
Read some history from 8th Army soldiers who have been here for years. They'll tell you: Stay low, stay quiet, and take the money.
In this thread, people are not doing that. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
ChilgokBlackHole
Joined: 21 Nov 2009
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 7:32 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Street Magic wrote: |
| Is the chance to defend your pride in an anonymous internet argument really worth prolonging the life of a thread you allegedly believe is harming the foreign teaching community? |
I'm actually hoping that the thread goes away entirely. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Perceptioncheck
Joined: 13 Oct 2008
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 8:15 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| ChilgokBlackHole wrote: |
| Perceptioncheck wrote: |
| And please explain to me how 'these people' are my customers? You totally lost me on that one. |
This is the core of your argument. There is no denying that group-think is king these days, cross-culturally, all over the world. "These people" are the Koreans. The locals. The people who pay your salary. Now you know that public opinion can turn against us at the drop of a hat. This is fact. By advocating drug use while behind a message board handle, you are simply giving the netizens the rope they will use to hang you.
Imagine the headline: "English Teachers Advocate Drug Use On Popular Message Board"
Then they post quotes from this very thread. People read those things online, they may even see it on television. Then walking down the street, they see me. "Hyunnim, do you think he is the one who likes to use drugs?" "Well, maybe he is, and maybe he ain't, but I know I don't trust them waegooks. Not when they all love to use drugs."
Read some history from 8th Army soldiers who have been here for years. They'll tell you: Stay low, stay quiet, and take the money.
In this thread, people are not doing that. |
Are you trying to say that AES represents the viewpoint of the majority of Koreans?
The core of my arguement is that extremist groups are going to think negatively of foriegners no matter what we post on these boards.
In this thread, there are many people who DO NOT advocate the use of drugs. And I don't think anyone advocated drug use in Korea. Sheeeeit, AES should be delighted with all the anti-drug posts on here. But will that make it into their "headlines"? I don't think so. "The Majority Of Foreigners Do Not Advise Doing Drugs Before Coming To Korea and None Advise Doing Drugs Within The Country" doesn't have quite the same ring as some fear-mongering fictional account.
Any newspaper or television show that uses anonomous quotes from an internet forum as a source is of laughable quality. That's right, laughable. And yes, you can quote me on that.
Sorry, but this group of nutbars is not going to stifle my freedom of expression. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
DosEquisXX
Joined: 04 Nov 2009
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 8:21 pm Post subject: |
|
|
I think the problem here is that each of you are talking about a different group of people. BlackHole is talking about the Korean population as a whole whereas PerceptionCheck is mostly referring to Korean extremists. They are rarely one and the same.
So in all actuality, both of your arguments are right. There's just a disconnect between you two. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
ESL Milk "Everyday
Joined: 12 Sep 2007
|
| Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 2:15 am Post subject: |
|
|
I know a Korean man who told me that growing marijuana was actually quite the common practice amongst farmers in Jeolla province up until maybe the 80s or 90s. To tell the truth, I would even say it's likely that a lot of Korea's former problems were rapidly swept under the rug through a lot of self-denial, quasi-fascist nationalism, sensationalist pseudo-science, and revisionist history
Personally, I think all drugs should be legal-- it would severely cut down the amount of crime everywhere. But I definitely don't think anyone could or should try to convince the Korean government of as much. First of all, because they'll just put you on some watchlist, and second of all, because who really cares about what the Korean government thinks?
I definitely have a problem with some of you coming out and saying 'You shouldn't even talk about taking drugs'... because it's not like when you come to Korea, you have to deny that you tried them, or even that you enjoyed them. I don't think there's anything wrong with experimenting with that kind of thing-- and I definitely don't think there's anything wrong with getting high every now and then.
If it's every day then you might have a problem, but if it's just every now and then, I don't see the harm. If you're too weak and undisciplined to say no when you don't want to do them or when they're making you feel terrible, then that's your own issue. It doesn't mean everyone everywhere has to stop doing drugs.
I'd say even heroin or crack aren't something you couldn't stop doing if you really tried. Doctors give heroin to patients recovering from surgery and lots of them don't turn into addicts. Almost all addictions are 80% psychological, if you ask me.
Obviously bringing drugs into Korea is a really stupid idea, doing them in Korea is kind of a jerky thing to do, and I have no sympathy for people who are sentenced to life in prison because they were caught dealing or whatever... but the Korean government has absolutely no right to tell you that you can't get high in a country that's a little more lenient about it all... and testing foreigners for drugs is complete BS... it doesn't mean anything at all if you have THC or whatever in your blood when you just got to Korea... if you're high as a kite while teaching, however... then you probably should be kicked out. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
frankly speaking
Joined: 23 Oct 2005
|
| Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 7:03 am Post subject: |
|
|
Good job mods for keeping this thread going.
This thread has now been cited and quoted, to show how low some Native English speakers are.
It wasn't from a Korean either, it was from everyone's favorite ASS-SteveSchertzer. The idealist who think that teaching English is a way to save teen prostitutes.
I know this guy is an arrogant loser, but threads on teaching forums about inbound teachers contemplating doing drugs, just isn't needed.
I am certain that in time more will write about this stupid thread.
In the future OP, just ask what drugs are tested for. Don't write all the other pro drug crap. It doesn't help anyone. And for those that keep supporting the concept of leisure drug use, your beliefs are your own and should remain with yourself. Why discuss how great drugs are on a forum for teaching in a country where they are illegal? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Gwangjuboy
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Location: England
|
| Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 3:05 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| frankly speaking wrote: |
| And for those that keep supporting the concept of leisure drug use, your beliefs are your own and should remain with yourself. Why discuss how great drugs are on a forum for teaching in a country where they are illegal? |
So are you proposing a form of censorship then? It is entirely legitmate to hold a debate about drug use on this board. Many academics have engaged in the same discussion! I understand the reservations some have about zelous worms like SS using this kind of debate as a platform from which to criticise English teachers, but his own narrow mindedness and lack of academic qualification mean that these worries should take a back seat to the spirit of open debate.
I also want to add that I am not advocating Hunter Thompson-like drugs binges in Korea - I never would myself; I am limiting my thoughts to the debate about whether certain types of drugs should even be criminalised considering the fact that alcohol and cigarettes are both legal. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
ChilgokBlackHole
Joined: 21 Nov 2009
|
| Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 5:42 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| frankly speaking wrote: |
| And for those that keep supporting the concept of leisure drug use, your beliefs are your own and should remain with yourself. Why discuss how great drugs are on a forum for teaching in a country where they are illegal? |
Asked and answered. I guess the pro-drug people here don't really think their words can come back and make us all look bad, but the difference between them and SS: Steve can get in a major newspaper anytime he wants. I've never seen "Old Gil" as a byline. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Old Gil
Joined: 26 Sep 2009
Location: Got out! olleh!
|
| Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 7:13 am Post subject: |
|
|
| ChilgokBlackHole wrote: |
| frankly speaking wrote: |
| And for those that keep supporting the concept of leisure drug use, your beliefs are your own and should remain with yourself. Why discuss how great drugs are on a forum for teaching in a country where they are illegal? |
Asked and answered. I guess the pro-drug people here don't really think their words can come back and make us all look bad, but the difference between them and SS: Steve can get in a major newspaper anytime he wants. I've never seen "Old Gil" as a byline. |
What is your point? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
