Kim Il Jong - hottie or hideous?

[ForrestGump]

Poll question: Kim Il Jong - hottie or hideous?

http://www.heute.t-online.de/ZDFheute/img/29/0,1369,2101629,00.jpg

[freetobegay]

1. I voted other, I like the guy on top of the car!

He gets my vote!

[ForrestGump]

2. Why, thank you! We can all be friends

on the hood of NSMA's car... :D

[SOteric]

3. He's not really my type of guy...

But since you're a lesbian, maybe you wouldn't recognise a hot guy...?

:shrug:

[Bunny]

12. Forrest is a lesbian?

Can a guy be a lesbian? I thought Forrest was a guy...

[SOteric]

13. Yes, Forrest is a militant lesbian feminist.

Forrest is also a guy. Thus the phrase, lesbian trapped in a man's body.

[Bunny]

14. Okay. Gotcha.

Thanks for the clarification. :)

[ForrestGump]

17. Though I was once trapped in a woman's body

Really embarrassing, sitting out there in the ER corridor like that, the two of us...

[ForrestGump]

16. That's a good point

I've just never felt that certain 'tingle' when it comes to men (though Ronny the K's infernal Hypno-Judy could change that with prolonged exposure). It all makes such perfect sense now. :D

[DS1]

4. He's like a sexy cross between Han from Enter the Dragon, and a

pork chop. Deee-lish!!!

:bounce:

[ForrestGump]

18. You're right!

It's uncanny!

[THUNDER HANDS]

5. he definately has the most interesting haircut of any dictator

:D

[ForrestGump]

19. I think it's Lyle Lovett's old haircut

Better than Trump's, at least.

[peekaloo]

6. Dang it, how can I make an informed decision when you won't

post a full length pic? The man sports some seriously sexy heels!

:o

[ForrestGump]

20. Sorry

Here you go...foot shot...

[blondeatlast]

7. Forrest! OhmiGOD! It's Forrest again!

Yippee!

:bounce:

:bounce:

:bounce:

Edit: I've exceeded you post count!

[ForrestGump]

21. Congratulations on your post count!

All far more noteworthy than mine, I might add. :hug:

Hiya, Ms atlast!

[Amaya]

8. Hey Forrest!

Good to see ya :hi: :)

[ForrestGump]

22. Hey, Amaya

Good to be seen.

:D

And great to see you, red lingerie or no red lingerie. :o

[Spirochete]

9. Was he in

Revenge of the Nerds?

[ForrestGump]

24. Ha!

But the answer's no -- he's in the upcoming Revenge of the Vertically-Challenged Megalomaniac III.

[buddhamama]

10. in the last pic

he looks like a very unattractive women.

he doesn't do a thing for me :shrug:

you, on the hand Forrest, do much for me.
nice to see returning again and again.

[ForrestGump]

25. Thanks, buddhamama!

Nice to see you again and again! Always a most benevolent pleasure... :hug:

[chenGOD]

11. It's actually Kim Jeong Il

...and he's been sporting that hairstyle for a long long time.

[Snow]

15. My wife passes on a rumor that the weird texture of the hair

is a result of serious illness (typhoid?) when he was a child. chenGOD, I'll bicker with you about spelling, 'cuz I fell strongly Koreans shouldn't use some weird arbitrary system cooked up by a bunch of foreign missionaries or a bunch of non-English speaking linguistics professors either - they should spell it so your average English speaker has some chance of pronouncing it correctly. Otherwise you get people with the last name of
Choi (pronounced, you guessed it: Tcheh)
or the pleasant southern province of
Jeon Ra Bug Do (pronounced, maybe you didn't get it, choh-lah-pook-doh)

Sorry to jump on you - pet peeve.

[chenGOD]

33. Regardless of romanization...

The original poster had it as Kim Il Jeong.

Jeolla buk do is how it's done over here these days.

and Hangul romanized just looks awful.

Annyong.

[ForrestGump]

26. Either way, I say that an appropriate reference would be f*** Kim...

Really interesting, though, how he's got North Korea with the hold that he's (supposedly) got. He sounds more like a cult leader than a political leader.

Malaysian-Chinese friends of mine long ago told me that most other Asian people don't trust Koreans -- I'm passing their broad prejudice on, I must say, not presenting it as my own -- because they're seen as "the French of Asia" (i.e., they've somehow engendered the same animosity that Angophiles have for so long held toward Frenchpersons and have a history generously endowed with political and other backstabbing and empty, grandiose claims). I don't know anything much of Korean history, or of why (or even, in fact, if) ethnic Chinese people generally have a problem with their peninsular neighbors, but I've always found it interesting that so many exported cults seem to have Korean leaders. The most obvious is Moon's bunch of lunatics, but there are plenty more, even without including the entirety of North Korea.

Examples that have been of particular interest to me are those in the martial arts. There're not many, but all of those that I can think of are of Korean origin, and I know of at least a couple of other schools in which the head honcho has many of the traits common to leaders of personality cults. Asian martial arts, as traditionally taught (or even in a modified form thereof), are practiced in an environment that's radically different at heart than is any other venue or activity in an American life...part of that dynamic between student and teacher and among students does tend to resemble the interactions between subjects and leaders in a personality cult, but only a few Korean schools (to my knowledge) have crossed that line, and usually with a leader whose martial background is bogus or less than advertised.

Again, I stress that this is not at all intended as a slam on Koreans as people -- I can't make the clichéd claim that "some of my best friends are Korean" but I have and do know some Most Excellent people who are Korean or of Korean heritage -- but an observation that's occurred me for a while. Is there some aspect of Korean culture that makes it amenable to manipulation by cultish leaders? Some mutant form of Confucianism? Anyone have a clue? Or is Kim Il Jong (or whatever name you apply to the sumbitch) Just Another Strongman?

[Snow]

28. Hmmm. Well, from my perspective as a cultural insider,

I think I could say that the cult thing is a fairly recent development. Korea has suffered a surfeit of western missionaries, most of them from evangelical christian outfits. This began in the late 1800's and really accelerated after the Korean War. Therefore most Korean christians lean towards the fundamentalist side. There's a wonderful book, been around for ages, "Korean Works and Days", by Richard Rutt, who was an anglican bishop/missonary to Korea, and he states that Korea constantly has odd little religions bubbling up and then going away again, even in the pre-christian missionary times. I think the same thing happens in Japan; no idea about China or Manchuria.

I think your martial art example is probably less legitimate, in that we don't really see personality-centered martial art styles in Korea - it's mostly the guys who come to the US who do that. They tend to overblow their credentials here in the US so they can compete with the guy across town for customers. You wouldn't want to go to Master Pak, who's a lousy 4th dan, when you could be going to Master Kim, who is a lofty 8th dan, right?

I have some good friends from Peace Corps/graduate school days who majored in geography, and one of them holds with the idea of geographic determinism as a shaping influence on culture. Thus you get the Japanese being very much like the English, and China being very much like Europe (as a sidenote, the only reason China is still one nation is because its written language is not phonetic, and therefore doesn't diverge dialectically). The Koreans are something like Italians (even have their own version of Sicily, volcano & all) and something like Ireland. I con't explain your Chinese-malay friends' distrust, although I bet they have even more distrust of the Japanese. The history over the long term is one of solid, worthy accomplishments - fine paper, beautiful pottery, printing presses with movable type centuries before Gutenberg, a phonetic alphabet invented by a king expressly to increase literacy. They've a lot to be proud of (and they usually are), and the west really knows very little about a very short part of their history. Really leads to some severe diplomatic gaffes!

[ForrestGump]

30. Thanks a lot

I learned somethingn on DU!! :-)

You're right about those few (three, that I can think of) hard-core martial-arts cults...all in the US, with predominantly American 'disciples.' So then the question, of course, could become why does the US seem to harbor and generate so many self-destructive personality cults? Too much of a good thing (religious freedom)? Big bucks for international spiritual entrepreneurs? It'd be easy to lay blame at an uneducated American public being suckered into something, but I seem to recall the profile for most cult members being one that featured above-average intelligence.

That aside, I hope that several someones at Langley and elsewhere are right now brushing up on Korean history and its culture(s).

And, yeah, I'd go along with my Chinese-Malaysian friends not being huge fans of the sons of Nippon, if only for immediately-apparent historical reasons. Of course, little things like the Boxer Rebellion and occupation by European powers didn't exactly speed up the process of Chinese communities opening up to westerners, either.

[smirkymonkey]

35. Isn't Korean in a completely different language family

than the other Asian tongues? I thought it was similar in structure to Finnish/Hungarian or something like that - if so, could it be that, according to some experts, linguistics shape culture (and vice/versa) and therefore the Koreans percieve themselves as uniquely separate from their neighbors.

Just conjecture, I don't really know much about it.

[Snow]

42. From Chinese? Yup, completely different, although

they think very highly of China, and use Chinese-derived words like we use Latin/Greek derivatives - for all the most literate, poetic language. But the language itself is in the Altaic family, related to Goldi, Urgic, and other obscure Siberian tongues. And there's some people on some islands nearby, basically a bunch of (typically) drunk Korean fisherman who got lost a millenium or two ago, and still speak a rough dialect of Korean - they call it nee-bone-aw - you might've heard of it as Japanese.

The Finnish connection is kinda cool - here's how I heard the story. Ghenghis Khan (see the lounge thread about evil men for more info) decided to conquer everything in sight. At the time, he was living northwest of the current north korean border, but well withing the bounds of some of the ancient Korean boundaries. He figured with just the mongols he didn't have quite enough people to do the job - they were a smallish tribe - so he enlisted the Turks, a more numerous local tribe, and off they went. Down into China, across the top of India, up through mesopotamia (to the distress of Saddam's ancestors) into Turkey - where the Truks who had made it so far decided to drop off and take up farming - okay, only some of them dropped off, & they took up herding, which was all they knew how to do. The rest of the Horde swept into Europe, minus Ghenghis by this time but that didn't slow them down much. And up they went, into Hungary, and, some say, as far as Spain, leaving the Basque language (I don't think I believe that). But anyway, the Turkis, Hungarian, and Finnish languages are all part of that history. I had a good friend who was Finnish & married a Japanese woman. He learned Japanese in nothing flat! Said it was just like Finnish; much easier than English, for example.

[smirkymonkey]

46. Thanks for the history!

I have always noticed that many Finnish names do indeed sound Japanese. Very interesting story! :)

[drumwolf]

40. "Koreans == the Irish/Italians of Asia"

That's the analogy I've heard the most often.

Korea is also probably the single most Christianized country in East Asia (well, OK, maybe also the Philippines as well). It's been traditionally a Buddhist-based culture, but for some reason Koreans took to Christianity far more than any other East Asian nation, and now about half the population in Christian. That may be at least part of the reason that a lot of people of Korean descent fit in with Freeper wingnuts in this country.

[Snow]

44. Hmmm, a thought on the cult thing just occurred to me, although

I would argue that both Japan and China have had more serious problems with cults (Hirohito, Mao Tsetung). This was because of your remark about Korea being buddhist. They are and they aren't. Asian religions aren't exclusionary; you can follow beliefs of all of them if it pleases you. SO there're a lot of buddhists in Korea, and a lot of animists and confucianists as well. SOme of the buddhists even do christianity, although they don't tell their minister/priest about it.

In another sense they aren't buddhist; they're principally confucian. Partly this is historical - the current dynasty, the Yi or Chosun dynasty, overthrew the previous dynasty some 500 years or so ago. That previous dynasty was buddhist, and part of the reason for the overthrow was the sense that the buddhist priests & temples were getting way too much land and power. So they were overthrown, the royals & nobles were sent off in disgrace to the Cholla provinces and the confucians took over. Now, Korea is really confucian. And a solid foundation of confucian thought is relationships, which are always hierarchical - student-teacher, subject-monarch, son-father, younger brother-older brother. You get the idea. So a hierarchical christian church tends to get a lot of this confucian thought going on as well, and the leaders of these churches generally get followed unquestioningly, even if they sound kinda goofy (although your neighbors will certainly be willing to tell you it all sounds goofy - Korean neighbors are helpful that way). So there's my take on where the cult thing comes from. And the reason there's so much in the way of christian religion going on is simply that Korea was unable to keep the missionaries out, unlike Japan or China.

[smirkymonkey]

23. He's looking at Pickles with

won-ton lust. Hmmmm....I think they must have the same stylist. :evilgrin:

[ForrestGump]

27. How gauche

to show up at the same affair wearing the same outift. :-)

[smirkymonkey]

36. His and Hers Leisure Suits

The 70's are BACK!!

[gpandas]

29. kim2 and golf

about fifteen years(or so) ago i read in usa today that korea had opened their first golf course. kim2 was honored to be the first player. he scored nineteen on the 18 hole layout and had a plaque posted in the clubhouse as course record holder. quite an accomplishment, since i recall the article said he never played gof prior to that day. my numbers may be a little off, but i remember enjoying quite a laugh

[ForrestGump]

31. He's a natural!

Kinda hard to mess up on a litle thing like golf when you're a god, I guess. Did he walk across the water traps?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

32. Looks like a petulant brat

A perfect little friend for Bushboy

[ForrestGump]

34. They'll need to get a bigger bed...

[Deja Q]

37. What is the fembot doing in the middle pic? More amusingly,

Look at his expression toward her!! ROTFLMAO!!!

[ForrestGump]

39. "Hey, bay-bee...hey, bay-bee..."

Man, that cat Kim is one bad mother...(shut your mouth)





He's a complicated man, and noone understands him but his woman

[drumwolf]

38. Jesus! You know, I think I actually might know his son...

:P

[SarahB]

41. The man's got some issues I think.

I'd have to say that if I was going to go for a dictatorial sociopath, he probably would not be my first choice.

[FDRrocks]

43. Yoko Ono's long lost brother.

The fondness of tacky glasses runs in the genes.

[Blue_Chill]

45. Other - Murderous bastard that should be dragged in the street and shot.

heh.