(identity 'myron)

Wed, 22 Oct 2003

Hell has frozen over [/World]

India is launching a peace initiative to normalise ties with Pakistan. What next? Peace for Israel - Palestine? US - World (kidding)? Forgive my cynicism and blasphemy, but fetch me my ice skates for when I go to hell for surely it has frozen over.

Seriously though, if you watch and read enough news, sometimes it seems like the world is full of nothing but people who want to kill all the other people around them. That motives only differ by religion, race, or non-existant WMD makes absolutely no moral difference.

Jose Saramago, in his Nobel lecture, said he wrote Blindness to "remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures." Go read his original lecture and the subsequent banquet speech for his Nobel prize. They're interesting, to say the least.

A nice quote:

"This same schizophrenic humanity that has the capacity to send instruments to a planet to study the composition of its rocks can with indifference note the deaths of millions of people from starvation. To go to Mars seems more easy than going to the neighbour."

// posted at 23:19. permalink   comments

Hello enjokousai [/Japan]

"Who needs the sites when you've got five dirty old men ready to pay you at all times?"

Quote comes from japantoday of a 16 year-old high school student, in response to new laws prohibiting those under 18 from using Internet matchmaking sites.

As always, the comments are even better than the quote itself. One interesting bit was a comment on a linguistic issue:

I think part of the problem lies in the language...

Anywhere else in the world selling sex for money = prostitution.

Here, it's 'compensated dating'

There is no stigma attached to the term when in fact, they are prostitutes.

In other countries they'd be considered 'hookers'.

Same thing goes for cheating; here it's called 'cunning', which lends itself more towards being clever, albeit in a deceptive way... the definition of cheating is much more harsh and direct.

He's a cheater!
He's cunning like a fox.

There's a difference...

That "compensated dating" term is especially intriguing. It sounds like something North American political correctness could cook up. Yet the intention of using the term is clearly not political correctness, as we understand it, at all. PC is meant to remove discriminatory and so connotated terms, but it isn't also meant to remove moral connotations. It's really throwing the baby out with the bath water. This would be akin to calling drug addicts the "narcotically inclined" or something.

The craziest thing is that there was no political correctness movement here. If these words are indeed used for these meanings, then they are a part of the language itself, not some creation of an overzealous minority group.

Update: According to WWWJDic, the term commonly used for teen prostitution really does translate to "dating with compensation". See here.

// posted at 21:43. permalink   comments

Land of the Rising Sun [/Japan]

Sunrise. For the first time, it's foggy here and it's nice. No more electrical wires as far as the eye can see, they're all concealed by a thick white blanket. And the sun is prime for some good photography, if only my camera handling skills were more willing.

// posted at 15:30. permalink   comments