Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bucheon bum]

[Ya-ta Boy]

I'm reminded a bit of the mother in the grocery store who is confronted with a kid throwing a tantrum. She can ignore the misbehavior, she can isolate the kid so he doesn't disturb anyone else, or she can cave to his emotional blackmail and give him what he wants and guarantee he will do it again.

As OTOH said, the piggy bank incident was one piggy bank in one office. That story should not be put on the same level with the Bali bombing, for instance. If mentioned, that story should be met with an and then forgotten.

When someone in the Moslem world starts frothing at the mouth, and there are around a billion of them so you can be sure there are some nut cases in the group, then it would behoove us to use a bit of rationality and calmly work out the most rational response. Most of the responses should be to ignore it. I call for more discrimination--in our responses.

For most of these 'incidents' the media should not be calling up politicians and religious leaders for a quotable quote: they should be calling comedians.

[gang ah jee]

[On the other hand]

Bucheon Bum wrote:

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[Junior]

[Ya-ta Boy]

The plague reflected a theme found throughout the history [Thucycides' The Peloponnesian War] a horrific liberating effect is likewise brought on by the conundrum of wars, making men resort to things that they would otherwise never consider during their rational calculations in peace and tranquility, when they have so much to lose. And because Athens was Greece's intellectual center and entertained pretensions of singular humanity and a self-proclaimed elevated culture, the pandemonium that followed from the plague reminds us that civilization can be lost anywhere and at any time.

Furthermore, because the outbreak occurred in the second year of the twenty-seven-year-long war, a threshold had been crossed: once the Athenians had been reduced to such straits, it was nearly impossible to recover their moral bearings in subsequent years. Criminality and savagery become accustomed, or rather institutionalized, behaviors, almost as if the Athenians, once freed from decades of civilizing influences, could not shake off the newfound habits of brutality. The death of Pericles during the epidemic is emblematic of the Athenian descent, the perishing of the last singular statesman who might have had the intellect and moral authority to steady the Athenians amid the savagery. To Thucydides, the wages of the plague are not just misery, death, and disability. They are the lawless precursors to more deliberate policies that follow in a variety of brutal Athenian actions taken against rebellious allies and neutral states.

From Victor Davis Hanson's "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War" (pp. 77-7.

Change two words: plague to 9/11 and Athenian to American.

[ddeubel]

And let's not forget that holiest of books '' The Plague". Holy because it forcefully demands us to look at the truest message of what it is to be human...............

What? To find our selves and our worth in fighting evil. Not an obvious evil that the crowds would shout out about. Not the evil of the one who'd want to protect his own turf or praise him/her self....

NO, the evil that is there before all of us - equally. The evil of suspicion and whisper, the evil of those who'd create an "other", the evil of fear and murmurings and the eventual crowd.

I think you are addressing that -- that when a society rolls one small way, it rolllllllllls a long way. Unstopped. The veneer of civilization is very , very thin and we live in scary times.....too much weaponry (as also 4,000 years ago, in comparing investment) and too many controlling too few.

The remedy? Be who you are. Be vigiliant not of others but of yourself -- what you can become, unawares....be a free man, not a man who says he's free.....

DD

[thepeel]

delete.

[happeningthang]

[Gopher]

[Pligganease]

[happeningthang]

[bucheon bum]

[Gopher]