Korea National Police Agency going all out to prevent foreign suspects from falling victim to racist Korean police

This is an interesting story translated over at Korea Beat:

From now on, detectives investigating crimes by foreigners will be re-assigned whenever they make racially discriminatory remarks.

The National Police Agency (경찰청) announced on the 7th that, in order to protect the rights of foreigners suspected of crimes and to expand the reliability and impartiality of the detectives who investigate those crimes, those detectives will be subject to a system of removal.

According to the Agency, investigators who use racially discriminatory language, fail to notify the consulates of foreign criminal suspects, compel suspects to make statements through force or lack of sleep, or fail to read them their Miranda rights, will be re-assigned at the request of the suspects in order to prevent improper investigative techniques.

Unlike when Korean suspects file such a request, where an investigative means committee is formed and makes a decision on the detectives being re-assigned, for foreign affairs detectives there will be automatic re-assignment without a committee or reason given.

Wow. That's great that the National Police Agency is so keen to prevent foreign suspects from falling victim to racist cops, but automatic re-assignment seems to have some potential for abuse itself. It would seem that a savvy suspect could simply keep making accusations of racially discriminatory language in order to impede an investigation.

Perhaps rules will be in place to guard against such action (e.g., verifying what is said by means of videotaping of interrogations). I hope this also doesn't become merely new rules that are not enforced. Still, I think there are enough organizations, from Catholic charities helping foreign migrant workers from poor countries to groups like ATEK, that would easily create such an international stink if such rules were violated against an innocent person, that they could keep the police reasonably in check. One would hope, anyway.

...

You had me at hello.

Take the above cartoon. Replace Roy with two Indian residents of South Korea. Replace the alien heads shaped like hands with a South Korean child's kochu. Replace the annihilation of Earth with the aforementioned Indian residents of South Korea going to prison. Then you have the first story of this Marmot's Hole post.

An epic rant (on the difficulty of hiring good teachers)

This is from a comment I left at Brian's site two years ago, but in the interest of taking some of my longer, more informative, and/or more researched comments on other blogs and migrating them to my own, I thought I'd reprint this one here in one glorious post.

It starts in response to one commenter suggesting that Koreans don't want native English-speaking "foreigners" to teach English but would prefer to have Koreans teaching English.

[SoKos] want reliable people to teach English. There are some hard-working, clever, innovative, and enthusiastic native-speaking English teachers in Korea — lots! — but there are also some flaky-assed muther fu¢kers who make the whole lot of you look very, very bad, because when hiring schools look at a résumé it's a frickin' crapshoot as to which ones are going to be the guy or gal who doesn't show up on time, doesn't do lesson plans, comes to work hungover on Monday, takes drugs, puts more energy into weekend private tutoring than his/her visa-sponsored (and legal) job, etc., etc.

In the past, I've been in a position of hiring and taking care of "foreigners," and I've gotten really really fu¢ked over by people who just didn't give a sh¡t about their job. There was one person who was hired for a year-long contract and when she heard it might not be renewed started LYING about why she couldn't come in to work. When I confronted her about it, she said she didn't feel obliged because she wasn't going to get rehired — even though she had another two months on her contract and nobody told her she wasn't getting rehired (she was supposed to, but a final decision was not made because of budgetary constraints).

Or the person who made me drop an entire day's worth of work and skip my own grad school classes because she'd lied to us about getting her visa paperwork done, forcing me to go and grovel to immigration.

Or the person who promised to be at a certain place at a certain time but then called in sick because she was actually hungover. Twice in two weeks.

Or the person who walked out because the money wasn't being paid up front instead of at the end like everyone else was getting, while cussing out my superior because the Koreans were all trying to cheat him.

And that was just last week. ;)

In fact, none of them were Black, as the fellow on the right is supposed to be.

And through all this, the native Koreans I work with are just standing there with a collective bewildered look of "WTF???"

And I and every foreigner working with us — Korean or White or Black — is just wanting to shoot these people because it is THEY that are making Koreans distrust foreign workers in Korea because it is such a crapshoot.

Do none of you work with flaky people like I described? Am I just incredibly unlucky in who we encountered? The experience of others I know says, "No," it's par for the course. I know that for each one of these flakes, there are several more who do a passable job, and at least one or two people who really go the extra mile, but there is an inherent insecurity about which ones will that be.

And THAT — plus the lack of time investment that an outsider has put into getting into his/her position — is why the Kwangju School Board or the Seoul Ministry of Education is loath to entrust a handful of "foreigners" (God, do I hate that word) with greater responsibility and authority.

It has to be negotiated and it has to be earned. Nobody, no organization, is really working on the negotiation part. That's what ATEK should be doing, that's what KOTESOL should be doing. Everybody should be returning English teaching to the professional status it once was. The backpackers and those with a non-invested backpacker mentality/attitude are eroding the profession. Not all of them, but a lot.

Trust, professionalism, seriousness, and dedication are what need to become the stereotypes of this profession. Whining about bad treatment is worthless (after a point). Figure out what you can do about you, or rather, what your group can do about your group.

None of these people is me.

The discussion itself was interesting, and I encourage you to go to Brian's and read the rest. One person suggested that "a lot of it could have been avoided if the organization you were employed by took the time to do interviews and get to know the people you were bringing over." To which I replied:

Interview?! We were supposed to interview them?

Seriously, though, we did interview them. Each and everyone one of them, except for the guy who thought Koreans were cheating him by not paying him up front; he was recommended by someone I knew.

None of these people either.

And that is another problem in the Koreans-versus-foreigner dynamic: there is a tendency whereby Koreans feel responsible if they recommend someone for a job (even to the point of troubleshooting if there is a problem) whereas Westerners would recommend whomever is available, and then assume they're doing you a favor (which they are).

There are loads of exceptions to this (I know plenty of Westerners who act very "Korean" about recommendations for important positions, and I know lots of Koreans who go against the Korean grain on this), but it's a good rule of thumb when it comes to understanding the different POV where Koreans and Westerners might be coming from. ...

Even though interviews are a highly imperfect process, it is better to do them than to not. There are types of people you will weed out in an interview that you wouldn't if you saw them just on paper. But narcissists and charisma men who do well in interviews can also be among the least dedicated to their job and workplace, so that's part of the crapshoot.

The outcry over Blackout Korea

Blackout Korea, about which I gave my two cents last year, has suddenly become a bit of a hot topic lately. The Marmot wrote a post on it, in part because of this write-up on it, due to this interview with the site's anonymous owner.

Though I did suggest last year that the site was somewhat amusing, I agree that a few of the posted pictures do cross the line (the Marmite assault, the simulated ass rape, and perhaps this one below). I also hadn't been aware that, despite the supposed sociological justification for the site (see the interview link), the owner had been deliberately avoiding posting pictures of blacked-out foreigners because, "when I was starting it out I wanted to establish the site as a mostly Korean phenomenon." A tad distorting, methinks, but okay, at least now he's got pics like those familiar to anyone whose college life included keggers, except it's outside.

Frankly, it hadn't occurred to me last year that a string of such posts would encourage more and more outrageous behavior on the part of the picture taker. I would have thought that most of the shutterbugs would realize that legal considerations in the ROK over invasion of privacy might make it a tad imprudent to be making the happy face in such photos, much less the randier scenes.

What I really don't get is exposing the face of the guy who's blacked-out, while blacking out the face of the guy who's exposing himself.

Ah, why fight it? I encourage you to send me submissions of foreign nationals exposing themselves in Korea for my new blog, Exposed Waygooks!

UPDATE:
I decided it would be a little more prudent and a little less hypocritical if I altered these pictures myself to obscure the drunk guy's face. I mean the drunk Korean guy, the one who's passed out. (I'm fairly confident about the inebriated status of the others in the photo.)

And yes, I realize my choice to "add noise" to the photo does make it look like he vomited a bunch of pixels.

Ban Kimoon wants mandatory HIV testing to end for foreign teachers

Back in the 1980s, there was a joke about AIDS that went something like this:

Q: What's the toughest part about getting AIDS?
A: Trying to convince your parents you're Haitian.

Read a bit further and you'll see the relevance (and if the joke makes no sense to you, that should underscore my point about living like it's 1985).

Anyway, remember a few weeks ago, when I pointed out that E6 and E9 visa holders getting compulsory HIV testing lifted while E2 visa holders would have to continue with the mandatory testing was the result of two different government ministries making two different policies? [In case you're new to South Korea's visa regimen, the E6 is ostensibly an "entertainer" visa, but many of the people who get this visa are sex workers. ATEK, the Association of Teachers of English in Korea, "applauds" removing mandatory HIV testing for this group.]

At the time, I subtly hinted that the mandatory HIV testing requirement would eventually be lifted for E2 visa holders as well, and it appears that day may be sooner rather than letter. None other than the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Kimoon, is pressuring Seoul to drop the tests:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is urging South Korea to scrap a requirement that foreign teachers take an HIV test, an official said Tuesday.

South Korea dropped a travel ban in January for most foreigners with the virus that causes AIDS, drawing praise from the United Nations. But it still requires foreign teachers, most of whom teach English, to take HIV tests. The ban is largely the result of pressure by parents.
In a meeting last week with Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik in Seoul, Ban urged that the HIV test requirement be abolished, said Yoo Sung-sik, a spokesman for Kim. Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, was in Seoul to attend a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a globalism-enforced PC standard, and make no mistake, it will mean more people dying in South Korea. Based on the state of HIV and AIDS a quarter century ago, when most cases in the US were transmitted through homosexual contact, testing for this fatal disease became a privacy issue that was deeply enmeshed with gay rights. Today, however, HIV is manageable as a chronic disease if it's caught early, yet instead of treating HIV infection like tuberculosis, hepatitis, or prostate cancer, we still treat it in such a way that reduces the chance of survival of the already-infected and increases the likelihood of more new infections.

SecGen Ban would also like you to not do that monthly breast self-exam, forgo that prostate checkup, not bother to make sure your Thanksgiving turkey is cooked long enough and at a high enough temperature, choose not to wear a seatbelt, walk out into the street without making sure no traffic is coming, and encourage your government to gut their meat inspection duties.

So why is ATEK applauding the removal of mandatory HIV testing for sex workers? In a country where 800 of the total 7800 confirmed HIV infections are foreign nationals (from places like the US, where 1 in 200 are HIV-positive), why is Ban Kimoon trying to eliminate HIV testing of foreign workers?

The answer is simple: HIV and AIDS are treated as if nothing has changed since 1985, when instead we should be treating this deadly infection primarily as a public health challenge, not a human rights issue. (And mandatory HIV testing is not the only public health arena where "human rights" are being used to trump legitimate public health concerns; there are groups trying to eliminate the ban on homosexual men from donating blood, a legally upheld prohibition aimed at preventing HIV transmission through blood transfusions by blocking the group of people with the greatest risk of HIV infection.)

This is being driven by a twisted sense of PC-influenced "fairness" and "equality" for foreign workers, when in fact most South Korean nationals are tested for HIV infection in some way and the government provides mandatory HIV treatment if they test positive. Late last year I asked what would be a fair policy for HIV testing in Korea, but what I had in mind then and now is something that applies fairness in the other direction:

1. Mandatory testing for anyone with a visa that allows them to stay in South Korea beyond the period of a tourist visa (preferably in line with mandatory testing for all ROK nationals residing in South Korea as well).
2. Deny long-term visa if they test positive (except for F-series family visas)
3. Provide foreign residents who test positive during their residency in South Korea with the same comprehensive HIV treatment that ROK nationals would receive. Provide a long-term medical treatment visa for such individuals, if necessary.

If you're truly concerned with foreign workers' rights in South Korea, that last one is the one you should really get behind.

Now I know mine is not a popular position, but calling mandatory HIV testing a human rights issue does not magically take the risk away. It could, however, remove the stigma. South Korea is in a unique position where (a) its infection rate is low and manageable, in part because of a high degree of testing, and (b) it provides comprehensive care to those who are infected, in a way that saves lives and prevents new infections. In other words, South Korea is poised to achieve an HIV-managed status, and it's in a situation where it's cost-effective to try to achieve that.

Why, then, are we trying to muck it up with a "human rights" approach to HIV testing that will lead to more HIV infections and more AIDS-related deaths?

UPDATE:
This post from June 2009 discusses the notion, apparently misleading, that foreign nationals who test positive for HIV are all summarily deported.

iPhoreigner [revised]

[above: Caption this picture. I thought of a few, but they're all kinda offensive.]

Apparently KT has been listening to all the complaints from foreign nationals who had difficulty connecting to the Borg getting an iPhone in Korea. According to the Korea Times (the other KT), Korea Telecom will rewrite the iPhone contracts to make it easier for some of those who are not ROK nationals or holders of something resembling permanent residency to get them:

KT, the country's second-largest mobile-phone carrier after SK Telecom, announced a set of measures Sunday to make its handsets more affordable and accessible to non-Korean users.

The company's revised service plans for foreigners include lowered visa barriers for registering phones and larger flexibility in phone installment and monthly payment plans. KT will also increase its number of multi-lingual stores in Seoul, where questions can be fielded in English, Chinese, Japanese and other languages.

"The idea is to allow foreign nationals to subscribe to our telecommunications services on the same conditions as Koreans," said Jin Byung-gwon, a KT spokesman.

"The specialized stores for foreigners will be first established in districts such as Itaewon and Gwanghwamun and areas around colleges, such as Kyung Hee University, which are known for their large number of foreign residents. The stores will be introduced in other metropolitan cities and also in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, which has a large foreign community."

Previously, foreign nationals with F-2, F-4 or F-5 visas, which are issued to those with Korean "blood" heritage, or people married to a Korean national or granted permanent residential status, were able to sign the conventional two-year contracts for iPhones and other mobile phones.

Foreign residents with other types of visas could only get the phones on one-year contracts and also had to buy the handsets upfront and not in monthly installments, which was a strain on their wallets.

Basically, the plans that allowed for the iPhone to be paid for over a period of two years in a way that made it extremely cheap up front were not available to those without citizenship or something resembling permanent residency. KT has now fixed that so that some contract visa workers (e.g., those on certain kinds of E-series visas but not E2 visa holders yet) and student visa holders can enjoy those same benefits.

And now that some of the formerly vanquished have emerged victorious in their fight against The (Korean) Man™, I'm sure they'll take up the mantle for those foreign nationals in, say, the United States who have the exact same problem. Right? Right?!

[crickets chirping]

UPDATE:
I dropped the ball a bit on this one (see first and third comments below) and have tried to fix it by adding the highlighted portions and taking out the strikethru portions.

The failure to find a way to allow E2 visa holders — among the most vocal in the international community — to take advantage of the subsidies allowed by the two-year contracts puts us right back at square one.

Just curious

I plan to do a lot more fact-finding on HIV/AIDS policy, particularly testing, once I'm back in the ROK, to affirm or refute the claims made by Ben Wagner (of ATEK's no-testing-for-all campaign) and the activist AIDS/HIV report used for the human rights campaign he spearheaded. The above graphic, which appeared in Ben Wagner's Korea Herald article on the subject, is related to the following claim from the report:

As of 2004, there had been 459 HIV/AIDS cases reported among foreigners in Korea. Once a non-Korean is found to be HIV-positive, he or she is forced to leave the country without any care or counseling. Between 1985 and 2002, more than 200 foreigners were deported from Korea under the Immigration Control Law (Article 2, Paragraph 1) after their HIV/AIDS diagnoses became known.

I do not want to make light of the issue, but the claim (cited by Ben Wagner in various places) doesn't entirely jive with the statistics presented. Specifically, if an HIV-positive non-ROK national is "forced to leave the country," how did the 200 or so HIV-positive people cited in the above paragraph or the 126 people (647 minus 521) end up not being deported?

I'm not asking to be glib or to catch Ben Wagner in a "gotcha" moment. I am asking because I want to know about the actual process and its enforcement? Are these people who were found to be HIV-positive before or shortly after they arrived in the Republic of Korea? Are long-time residents who test positive for HIV also kicked out? Are people of certain visa types more likely or less likely to be deported? 

The same report seems to suggest that the Korean government does something a lot of other countries don't, which is to pay for fairly expensive treatment to keep the HIV-positive healthy:

The KNIH monitors the immunological status of PLWHA free of charge, and the Korean government pays for 100% of the cost of highly active antiretroviral therapy medication for Korean PLWHA. Seven AIDS shelters throughout the Korean peninsula are available for PLWHA. The shelters provide board, counseling, rehabilitation services, and education.

PLWHA refers to "people living with HIV or AIDS." 

Even though the above part of the report uncharacteristically paints the ROK authorities in a positive light, I probably should investigate this claim as well, including seeing how much (if any) the Korean health insurance scheme pays for people suffering from full-blown AIDS (i.e., the latter stages of the disease when patients are quite sick, a point that the antiretroviral regime hopefully will prevent). 

Now here is where it gets sticky. If South Korea is paying such a significant amount of money for each HIV-positive individual, can it afford to take on the health care costs of non-citizens who became infected with this deadly virus prior to ever residing in the country? 

From a national policy perspective or an insurance theory perspective, such a thing would become unsustainable. It would create a moral hazard of sorts, where HIV-positive individuals would have a tremendous incentive to get themselves into the system, which could end up with dire fiscal consequences that end up adversely affecting the citizens and legal residents for whom the insurance scheme was set up. 

I am not trying to justify deportation of HIV-positive foreign nationals. If I were forced to formulate an opinion right now, it would be that foreign nationals who became infected with HIV while living in the Republic of Korea should not be deported and should be covered by the National Health Insurance Corporation the same as any ROK national. Ditto with the "vouched for" foreign nationals (i.e., F2, F4, and F5 individuals), at least those whose spouse, parents, or children were ROK nationals. 

Anyway, this post is not meant to make a statement, but to ask the questions listed above. I'm writing this largely for my own notes, so I know what questions to pursue, along with my investigation as to what testing regimen is part of mandatory health checkups for teachers (both "regular" and "irregular") in the schools ("public," "private," and "extracurricular"). 

Thus far, it appears that both regular and irregular teachers at the public and private school level are given health exams that include testing for HIV, syphilis, and several other STDs, contrary to the report often cited by Ben Wagner as evidence of unequal treatment faced by E2 visa holders. 

Teachers at extracurricular schools (i.e., hagwon), however, are not faced with this kind of thing as part of their employment, though it appears that most would be subject to HIV testing through other activities in their life (e.g., military service and later military training, other types of health checkup, etc.). 

Say what you meme!

This is a work in progress. I will add and subtract things, and maybe amend some explanation. In some circles, it is referred to simply as "The Post."

I've been collecting memes from the various K-blogs. Some of these take the form of stereotypes or generalizations, and some of them have a strong element of truth to them, at least to some segment of the population. The problem is when they are uncritically accepted as being applicable to most or virtually all of the population.

It's entirely possible that I am guilty of the same selective gaze over which I bash many of the bloggers and commenters, but what is noteworthy is not just how the widely circulated memes are so overwhelmingly negative, but how even the positive ones come with qualification. In essence, Korea is the country that can do no right.

1. VANK represents all Koreans; their attitudes are typical of Koreans.
2. Koreans are intractably dishonest.
3. Korean work is inferior, particularly to the United States, other Western countries, and especially Japan.
4. Korea is full of racists. Extreme meme: Korean is the most racist country in East Asia, the world, the Universe (take your pick).
5. Korean men are perverts who sexually abuse women.
6. Korean men are assholes who physically abuse women.
7. Korean men are dicks who verbally abuse women.
8. Korean men are subpar, so Korean women want a foreign guy (read: White guy).
9. Korean men are boring.
   
10. If anything good comes out of Korea, it's the exception. If anything bad comes out of Korea, it's par for the course.
11. Koreans are ungrateful to the Allied Forces for liberating Korea in 1945, especially the United States.
12. Koreans are ungrateful to the UN Forces for saving Korea in 1950, especially the United States.
13. If something Korean looks good, it's derivative or copied from somewhere else, probably Japan or the US.
14. If something Korean looks bad, what do you expect, it's Korean.
15. If you are a "foreigner," Koreans will never accept you.
16. Being a foreigner is never to your benefit in Korea. A foreigner can never come out on top in a disagreement.
17. Korean is too racist and xenophobic to ever be a global power.
18. If you are a "foreigner" working in a Korean company, you are simply a token foreigner. You're probably just doing proofreading and teaching English to your boss every morning. Note: "Token foreigner" is often written as "token whitey," since many of the Whites in Korea see themselves as the default "foreigner" in Korea, or at least the default Westerner.
19. Koreans are ignorant fools for thinking that Whites represent Westerners.
20. Most "foreigners" who commit crimes in Korea are actually kyopo (ethnic Koreans from overseas), so real "foreigners" aren't so bad at all.
21. Koreans will never accept "foreigners" as Koreans.
22. Government action is often aimed at keeping foreigners down.
23. Koreans are like Nazis, but without the power — so far.
24. Koreans have small penises. Except for the women (who act like they have small penises).
25. Asian men in general have small penises.
26. Korean men are mostly impotent due to excessive smoking and drinking.
27. Korean men (i.e., ajŏshi, ajeossi) are perpetually drunk (corollary: Ajŏshis are alcoholics.)
28. Most Korean men cheat on their wives.
29. Korea hides its true HIV infection rates to avoid national embarrassment.
30. Korean prostitution thrives behind every telephone pole (and barber shop pole).
    
31. Korean police are incompetent.
    
32. Korean police are lazy.
33. Korean police do not care about solving crimes where a "foreigner" is the victim.
34. If a foreigner even appears to be responsible for a crime, Korean police will come down hard on that person.
35. The Korean media is obsessed with crimes committed by "foreigners," especially English teachers. (This meme in particular gets a lot of play, ironically, because English-language K-blogs highlight crime stories involving "foreigners," way beyond how much play they get in the Korean-language news media.)
    
36. Koreans think Korea is a perfect country.
37. Koreans never complain about Korea; they only complain about foreigners and foreign countries.
38. If a Korean is nice to you, they want something.
39. If a Korean is nice to you without wanting something, they're doing so only because they care about bolstering Korean national image.
40. Korea is a third-world country playing dress-up as a first-world country.
41. Koreans are rude. Extreme meme: Koreans are the rudest people in Asia, if not the world. And if there is life on other planets, Koreans certainly out-rude them, too.
42. Koreans aren't really as smart as standardized tests would make them out to be.
43. Koreans may have mad rote memorization skills, but they have zero critical thinking or creativity skills.
44. Hyundais are crappy cars. (corollary: Kias are crappy cars.)
45. Samsung is a pale imitation of Sony.
46. Hyundai's efforts to improve their brand image will fail because no one will forget Hyundai Excels circa 1986. Never ever, because we won't let them.
47. Koreans hate Blacks and hold racist viewpoints toward them. Necessary subconscious corollary: Whites have somehow magically become not racist toward Blacks.
48. Minorities in America, Canada, etc., are treated much better than "foreigners" in Korea. (Necessary subconscious corollary: White people in America know what it's like to be a minority member in America, and it's really not so bad.)
49. Korean-Americans have no business whining about racist treatment in America. If you don't like it, go home. Corollary: How can you bitch about what happens in America when such-and-such is happening to Americans in Korea?
50. South Koreans do not want reunification, even though they say they do.
51. South Koreans will do whatever they can to prevent reunification. (Necessary subconscious corollary: All other countries are working feverishly toward Korean reunification, but South Korea keeps derailing it.)
52. Koreans hate Japan (the government, the people, etc.).
53. Koreans are hypocrites because they love Japanese stuff.
54. Koreans are also hypocrites because they model their national development after Japan.
55. Only Koreans care about Tokto/Takeshima. Corollaries: Japanese don't care about Tokto/Takeshima; "Foreigners" are uninterested in Tokto/Takeshima (it's a boring and insufferable topic, so move on).
56. Korean girls are secretly whores. Corollary: Some of them not a secret at all, but everyday Koreans willfully deny it.
57. Koreans are bad drivers. Extreme meme: Koreans are the worst drivers in the world.
58. Koreans are filthy people who litter everywhere. Extreme meme: Koreans are the dirtiest group of people in the world, and Korea is practically covered in litter.
59. Young Koreans don't care about the elderly.
60. Many Koreans are closet pedophiles who are easily masked because Koreans don't really care if kids are being sexually abused. (Corollary: Koreans care about children being sexually abused only when a "foreigner" — especially an English teacher — is the suspect.)
61. Korean ajŏshi (아저씨, older men) are self-centered bumpkins who ruin everything. (Corollary frequently uttered by a famous person I know who makes his money masking his disdain for Koreans: "Koreans are just farmers in suits.")
62. At heart, Koreans are corrupt people who will do whatever they can to get what they want, be that bribes, lies, arm-twisting, plying with women, or flattery.
63. No matter how hard they learn, Koreans are sh¡tty English speakers.
64. Koreans send their kids to English classes as a feel-good placebo. Corollary: Koreans send their kids to English classes as a parenting substitute.
65. Korean Christians are hypocritical pharisees.
66. If a foreigner is in an argument with a Korean, the Korean is probably wrong.
67. If Koreans see another Korean arguing or fighting with a "foreigner," they will come to the Korean's aid, regardless of whether he/she is in the right.
68. Koreans are illogical and emotional.
69. The Korean government is inept.
70. Local Korean governments are even more inept.
71. Rampant sexual assault is common in Korea and rarely gets reported.
72. The so-called Korean Wave is a media myth engineered by the Korean press and the Korean government. (Corollary: Koreans are the only ones who believe it exists.)
73. Korean music groups have no real talent.
74. Successful male Korean music groups and solo artists are closeted homosexuals.
75. Korean men in general are effeminate; their metrosexual tendencies mask their closeted (or latent) homosexuality; in fact, most may be gay. (Corollary: Korean men's unique effeminate nature may be hormonally induced.)
76. Female Korean celebrities had to sleep their way to where they are. Related corollary: If they are no longer popular, it's because they refused to sleep with someone.
77. All pretty girls in Korea have had plastic surgery, probably lots of it. Their own grandmothers can't recognize them, except by smell.
78. In general, Koreans and Korea just don't have a clue.
79. Above all else, Koreans see foreigners as dirty.
80. Koreans are just sixty years out of mud huts.
81. When bad things happen to me, it's because I'm a foreigner.
82. Koreans go on and on about how Korea has four seasons, including that only Korea has four seasons and this makes Korea unique and/or superior. 
83. Korean courts will let you off for anything if you claim you were drunk at the time. (Corollary: The "I was drunk" defense doesn't work for foreigners.)
84. Hypocrisy is a cultural trait of Koreans. 
85. All Korean universities, all Korean academics, and all Korean degrees are fraudulent (evidence: people believe it in their bones).
86. still working on these (last updated November 4, 2012) ...

In a sense, I've condensed the K-blogosphere to its purest form. Just as a daily dose of resveratrol can replace the consumption of a hundred or so glasses of wine, randomly going through this list each day, when preceded by a glance at the day's headlines, can be the equivalent of a stroll through a few dozen blogs (or, rather, their comments section).

If you find yourself throwing these out one by one in a confrontation with a KoKo, take a step back. If you find yourself thinking just like this most of the day, also take a step back.