links for 2010-07-10

The cyber-vigilantism (or bullying) in Korea, is practiced mostly by men. More reasonable voices online have analyzed this phenomenon as modern witch hunting performed by belligerent netizens, in reaction to Korean women gaining more power while men struggle under heaping social and economic pressure. The ‘girls' are everyday people who have been caught doing something annoying, mean or idiotic. But unfortunately, by ticking off vocal Korean netizens, it takes only a day for their lives to be mercilessly ruined.

The source for this simplistic and wrong-sounding analysis isn’t given. But I can tell you, Patricia Sellers, why the millennials aren’t following in your self-regarding footsteps. First, because there is very evidently no “pay, benefits, stability or prestige” to be had from the pack of thieves and vandals who currently are in charge. You need only look at how much cash the corpocrats are sitting on and the unemployment figures you cite above in order to see this. (You could start with a look at your own office.) And second, because one look at certain smug, selfish, wantonly destructive representatives of your generation is enough to convince anyone that whatever it is you did yourselves is best avoided.

What each of these firing offenses have in common is that they angered and offended the neocon Right. Isn't that a strange dynamic for the supposedly Liberal Media: the only viewpoint-based firings of journalists are ones where the journalist breaches neoconservative orthodoxy? Have there ever been any viewpoint-based firings of establishment journalists by The Liberal Media because of comments which offended liberals? None that I can recall. I foolishly thought that when George Bush's own Press Secretary mocked the American media for being "too deferential" to the Bush administration, that would at least put a dent in that most fictitious American myth: The Liberal Media. But it didn't; nothing does, not even the endless spate of journalist firings for deviating from right-wing dogma.