KoreaTimes(352) - Columnists, Opinion, page 11

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Opinion

Columnists

Articulating gay-ness in Korea

Back in the late 1990s when I spent a few years working at an English language institute in Seoul, something that almost seems like a rite of passage for Korean Americans, there were no gays in Korea even though I saw them everywhere. Let me explain. Having grown up in New York City, seeing gay people, especially gay men, was not an especially surprising event for me. However, when I first saw a gay man in Korea, it almost seemed as if he didn’t realize that he was gay. While I admit that you can’t judge a person by his or her cover, my “gay-dar” was pretty tuned and it was very quickly obvi...

2017-04-28 17:29

We beat the competition. Not you.

The image is that of a sparkling Southwest Airlines plane flying through the gorgeous sky. Underneath, the copy says, “We beat the competition. Not you.” Funny. And pretty brutal. This was only one of the countless mock advertising memes that popped up on social media platforms in the aftermath of the disastrous action by the United Airlines in forcibly yanking the Vietnamese American doctor from its flight from Chicago to Louisville. By now, everyone knows what happened, so I won’t recount what happened. Suffice it to say that it was pretty disturbing. And with the times being what they are...

2017-04-14 17:11

Become a certified 4th industrial revolutionary

Everything is certified these days. From used cars, massages and organic foods to program management and cyber security, certification is a ubiquitous and somewhat mysterious term that denotes a certain level of quality, authenticity, truthfulness, expertise, and everything good about the product or person. In fact, there are certifications that certify other certification processes so as to certify their capability to certify things in a certifiable way. It’s certifiably crazy sometimes. Granted, certification is oftentimes useful way for potential consumers to lessen their chances of buyin...

2017-03-31 16:48

Overcoming Korea's founder's syndrome

Many organizations experience the founder’s syndrome, in which a charismatic founder establishes a successful company on the power of his personality but ultimately becomes an impediment to the growth of the organization because of his need to remain in absolute control or misuse of the organization for personal gain. Most often, accountability and transparency are subverted by the founder himself through the use of nepotism, abusive leadership, and demands for personal loyalty that rivals those reserved for religious cults. Unless the founder’s syndrome can be overcome, it will prove to be ...

2017-03-17 16:58

What's tomorrow's critical infrastructure?

Back in 2001, I visited China to go to Mount Baekdu, which sits along the border between northeastern China and North Korea and is considered the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation. Its place in the Korean creation myth is so important that Kim Jong-il’s official bio claims that he was born on the mountain, although Soviet records say that he was really born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk in Russia. In any case, I actually wanted to talk about getting on a bus in Jilin to ride for four hours along a brand new highway to reach Mount Baekdu. While the highway was new, every...

2017-03-03 16:39

North Korea's `Game of Thrones'

A few months ago, I wrote about two widespread cognitive biases about North Korea that tend to mislead us when making policy decisions about North Korea. One, that North Korea is a one-party, socialist dictatorship like the former Soviet Union or today’s China, with internal decision-making dynamics similar to what we see in those systems. Wrong. North Korea is still essentially a monarchy with hereditary kings who rule in conjunction with a tight-knit group of elites mostly interrelated by blood and whose original elite stature was given through their forefathers’ participation in the origi...

2017-02-17 17:17

Angelina Jolie is both right and wrong

Angelina Jolie published an oped in the New York Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s Executive Order restricting travel from certain countries. Jolie writes, “The global refugee crisis and the threat from terrorism make it entirely justifiable that we consider how best to secure our borders. Every government must balance the needs of its citizens with its international responsibilities. But our response must be measured and should be based on facts, not fear.”

2017-02-03 16:24

Meaning of privacy when `they' know you better than you know yourself

A few years ago, Uber got into public relations trouble when they published a blog post describing how they can analyze ridership data to infer certain behavior on the part of riders: “One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns…we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep).”

2017-01-20 16:24

Just a Gangnam ajumma?

Kim Chong-in, the well-known economist who led the Democratic Party’s win in the last April’s parliamentary election as the interim president, recently said that Choi Soon-sil was nothing but a “Gangnam ajumma” who happened to subvert the whole governance process as a trusted confidant of President Park Geun-hye.

2017-01-06 17:30

Cognitive bias in negotiating with N. Korea

I’ve been a Korea watcher for a long time in formal and informal capacities.

2016-12-23 15:55

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