Tuesday, March 04, 2008

The man's keeping me down...

So Korea had an election a couple months back. The dude who was elected is nicknamed The Bulldozer. Maybe I wrote about him before, or I intended to. I think hes awesome, mainly because of his amazing nickname.

Anyway, turns out they have some strange election laws here in South Korea, and writing things about candidates online can be a violation of these election laws.

You can go to this page to get a vague idea about whats going on and how some people are saying it is corruption and even anti-democratic. Heres is what the link leads to:

Kim Hye-jin from Global Voices online has an interesting thread on the National Election Commission (NEC) in Korea and their attempts to censor online discussion of the presidential candidates. According to some, this smacks of dictatorship (link to the Korean):

Frankly speaking, it is insulting people who died for democracy.
Why did citizens and students have demonstrations and march? It was to let people know about corruption in politics. Now it has been developed on-line.
Do we have to get a permit in order to write on the internet?

or as this commenter observes:

. . . they just send a notice, “Your writing violates the election law and therefore it will be deleted.”…. I have doubts about whether Korea is a democratic nation or not.

If you follow this link you can find the full discussion and some more detailed information.

I just came across this today while I was trying to figure out a way to get on the ESPN website. Yeah, my school or district has a block on that site, along with the NBA site, Rolling Stone, and even the login page to my blog.

I can understand blocking sites that students may be trying to access in the computer labs, but come on, blocking a sports news site that is in English! How many kids at my school are trying to access that?

So in my quest for sports news, I’ve stumbled across government corruption related to elections. Interesting isn’t it?

Oh, just got word that it isn’t my school blocking these sites, it is the district server. I have two options here. I can bring it up to my principal who loves me. He told me yesterday, right after he told me how handsome I looked, that if I have any problems, even something completely minor, I should tell him and he will fix it. My second option is to write a letter to the district and tell them I’m not a baby and I’d appreciate the “freedom” to be able to check sports scores during my lunch break (or during all of the time I sit around doing nothing!).

Man, I hate being oppressed…

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