Random thoughts thread

General Discussion
1612

As a non-Korean person living in Korea, I can tell you that Oli is absolutely causing harm through his antics.

First of all, as Zeus said, his ridiculous attention-seeking behavior is typical of mental illness that goes untreated because people milk him for the lolz. He is a lolcow, pure and simple. Being white and rich also makes it tacitly okay and funny, because we all love watching trainwrecks that can afford to wreck themselves over and over again. If Oli was poorer or nonwhite, I can GUARANTEE that the response to him would be exponentially nastier because he gets a privilege pass for his behavior. He’s obviously mentally ill. Milking a lolcow isn’t cool in my book, but when there’s money to milk, people won’t stop.

Second, he is a literal embodiment of a Korea fetish, which is a serious issue that needs to stop. Fetishizing anyone needs to stop. He doesn’t know shit about Korea at all except for the Koreaboo fantasyland, but that’s what he’s reduced Korea to. That’s insane and wildly disrespectful to the culture. A lot of Koreans will certainly be happy to see that outsiders are interested in Korea at all, but not in this superficial way. If he likes K-pop and some aspects of Korea, great! But he doesn’t know shit about actual Korea and can’t tell the difference.

Third, Korea already has a xenophobia problem without people like him making foreigners look even more unhinged. It’s already difficult enough to be respected as a foreigner living here without the steady stream of willfully ignorant Koreaboos coming in from abroad and acting like clowns. Literally any dumb shit a foreigner does will end up in the news as “FOREIGNER DOES_______!” “FOREIGN MAN/WOMAN IS ______!” Whatever money he spent here while traveling doesn’t compare even slightly to the amount that other foreigners contribute to Korea’s economy while still being treated like garbage (ie other Asian migrant workers in factories and farms).

TL;DR Oli London deserves to get the mental health support he CLEARLY needs instead of being brushed aside as a harmless eccentric, and he can stay the fuck away from Korea until he develops some self-awareness.

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1613

@zeus

I obviously can’t speak for the future side of things - society, particularly heavily online part of it, develops much faster than it starts making sense for me, and there’s very little organic behavior vs for-profit social engineering that current iteration of web social apps does,

with that in mind -

he has body dysmorphia, it’s a mental disorder (which, by the way, a large number of detransitioned transgenders report having once they realize what actually was going on in their head which is amplified by the internet trend of explaining everything as a trans thing, if we’re to draw parallels.)

I’m not going to speculate where this will go, in his case he does not invent anything radically new, and he doesn’t have any visible underlying malicious intent (unlike - - - cough-cough) - every plastic surgery office has a portfolio of people who come to get a Tom Cruise nose, Pamela Anderson boobs, Khloe Kardashian face etc, you start breaking this down and typically arrive at a snowball of lifetime issues with self-esteem and self-hatred, and the cosmetic/entertainment industries’ revenue-driven willingness to deepen those.

in my opinion - this is based on how long he’s been at this and purely on the financial side of his transformation, since I had a totally different perception of him several iterations of that face back - he tries to get validation of what he wants to be in his head (I’m pretty sure the 95 % hate rate in his twitter @s is not helping with the underlying dysphoria), and he has means to go with this act.

1614

@gilnyangi

how does it harm other people?

so you admit that weird or mentally unwell people are an easy bullying target unless there’s a class insulation factor, but you make it their own fault and frame them as responsible for the “harm” they allegedly do?

he is a wealthy member of k-pop fanbase, which is created around export-driven cultural product, have Koreans tried exporting something else except for pop-cultural garbage if you find direct consequences of producing one-dimensional pop culture problematic? I can name more fine artists from South Korea than k-pop singers due to specifics of what I do and where I’ve been in my life, but I don’t see them as an export priority for the state (one of them studied art in Japan, for what it’s worth.)

so how have you personally challenged it in your daily life over there?

interesting that Oli considers korean culture welcoming and kind, but you, another white expat, find the experience of living there difficult, maybe korea has a problem with sexism that you haven’t been warned about?

like if we are going to talk about race, I’m white, but with this whiteness in mind I’ll never step my foot out in the beautiful based Wasplandia of the north american continent tourism aside because of a shit ton of local factors, and xenophobia and sexism would be holding their hands at top-2, I’m not equipped to deal with this shit and don’t want to change my legal name, my presentation, everything else to blend in. I’m not saying americans or their northern neighbours are to blame, I’m just more used to the way europeans and asians operate, and I don’t want to fight the current that I find anti-intellectual, hostile and violent.

if Korean economy could survive without overpaid expats and underpaid 3rd world SEA workers it would have found a way to balance itself, don’t make it Oli London’s problem to solve that, thanks <,3

you make it sound even more like the tyrannic corporate mob-owned racist shithole I always perceived South Korea as, by the way, not a good look for your argument.

1615

Give second how you join DISCORD :thinking:…
I have account ready no understand.

I join couple year other group lot arrogant people he use DISCORD…

Almost have discussion that group when I found like 2 member look like good friend to me.

Believe me like Discord dislike arrogant people that all.

:thinking: Try understand why people still using app like Facebook

I used Twitter

Dislike many app this days many rediculous meme and spam ect.

I have double personality is bad for me :sweat_smile:

I am friendly

I talking lot no sense word because I am hungry :crazy_face:

You guys always the best Zeus other guys awesome Forums by alway :sunglasses::+1:

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1616

girl i know your thing is having spicy takes and being sarcastic and all, but you basically just admitted that you’re massively ignorant and/or didn’t actually read what i wrote.

yes, mentally ill people can be harmful

no, it is not always their fault, it might the fault of those preventing them from getting help or of those endorsing or encouraging their harmful behavior, or just things unrelated to their mental illness! being stupid or ignorant is not a mental illness.

yes, kpop is an exported product

no, kpop or tourism in korea do not give an accurate reflection of what daily life is like as a korean, let alone a foreigner

yes, there are many nice people in korea who are kind to foreigners

no, korea is not full of only nice people who love foreigners

If you dont like korea, thats fine and dandy! but damn girl, defending this mans over a whole country is a disappointing hill to die on

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1617

Body dysmorphia might be exactly what he has, but I don’t think humoring his compulsions is the answer. I don’t think that others using his compulsions as a springboard to push an agenda is ethical either.

And my concerns stem far beyond Oli London. I’m more concerned that Oli will hurt himself before others. I don’t think he has any malicious intent behind it all either. I just respect the power of a figurehead and I know that people with social media presence are treated as digital aristocrats these days. The stuff he says will be picked up by more impressionable people who treat arguments that pass face validity as fact.

When I think of “trans-racial” figureheads, I think of him first and Rachel Dolezal second. I think it’s telling that a white woman was laughed into obscurity when she came out as living as black and serving as NAACCP chapter president, but somehow a white man living as a Korean is acceptable? That could be called “progress”, but I think it’s a lot more prejudiced and biased than that. Dolezal is also known for welfare fraud, falsely representing herself as a professor, accused of plagiarism in the art field, known for lying about being Native American, living in South Africa, living in a teepee when she was young, and identifies as “trans-black” even though she took a genetic test and is of 100% European descent. So obviously she has a track record of believing that something becomes true if she says it enough and clicks her heels together three times.

I think Oli is in a very similar boat. He didn’t commit welfare fraud or lie about his origins, but I think he believes that he’ll become Korean if he has enough surgery. We live in a time where it’s controversial to say “but that’s not how it works”. I hesitate to draw conclusions between gender and race because they are different. You can’t appropriate transgender arguments, replace gender with race, and think it holds water. It doesn’t. It willfully misses the nuance of what “race” is, and how race and gender are different, because that’s a conversation that takes us into a direction that’s opposite of where Oli wants to go. Oli doesn’t want to hear that he cannot be Korean no matter how many surgeries he has. He wants to look like Jimin and like you said he has the means to do it, so as long as he can pay up he’ll find someone to help him inch closer to his goal.

Like I said in one of my earlier replies to you, I think the fact that he wants to look like Jimin is more problematic than the fact that he wants to “switch race”. That’s an easy tactic to deflect from another, more problematic, and less debatable issue. We can pick positive aspects out of his entire journey, but I do not think that Oli is being true to himself. I would even argue that he suppresses any concepts, conversations, or ideas that would cause him to define himself in a way that would become inconsistent with his idea of who Jimin is. It’s so bad that I guarantee you will get a violent and emotional reaction if you push him far enough. I joked about it earlier, but if this occurred to you or me with some random stranger who idolized us in their head over a few pictures and videos on the internet, I think we would be certifiably creeped the fuck out, doubly so if they got irate and angry when we told them not to.

It’s simply not normal behavior to want to be someone else this badly. It should not be treated as normal, rationalized as normal, or chopped up in any way to try to salvage what’s good and what’s not. Even simply ignoring or tolerating its existence is allowing a toehold into rationalization and normalcy. He needs help not cosmetic surgery, but our capacity to address mental issues in any of our societies are so crippled I don’t even know where to begin. You mentioned body dysmorphia, but I believe that’s just one of the threads tangled up in his mind. I believe getting to the core of his issues requires a level of honesty with himself that he isn’t capable of brandishing yet, and I don’t see him allowing anyone in close enough to get to that point.

4 Likes
1618

you haven’t answered any of my direct questions, so do take an L here,

on the direct assumptions you’re making about me, girl, I used to hang out with korean international students in Canada and I did not like what I saw in there, specifically in their males, based on their everyday manners and the lack of the most basic etiquette - this was before your pastel-haired pop boys exploded in the west, and before kpop fandom swallowed the worst out of visual kei weebs, so I had no reference point except for my own eyes,

my second assumption - why I think Oli gets preferential treatment for acting a fool, why you aren’t taken seriously based off the difference in gender - comes from this -

and other, less than favorable examples of koreans being actually culturally korean, for example, a shopping mall owner who skimped on construction expenses leaving his daughter in law to die in a building crash -

there’s not respecting your infatuation with the culture you weren’t born at, and there’s eating human beings if there’s profit to be had in it and they aren’t males, this is what corporate capitalism when you distill it is.

if you are blaming Oli London for the problems with Korean racism, try living there as black (I won’t beat this point anymore at this point, you won’t address my points in any coherent manner anyway.)

1619

@zeus

I was thinking about self-harm in his case - it is more or less on the surface with most BD people; he looks happy and content with what he has now.

I wouldn’t compare him to Dolezal - if anything she has a Karen grifter disorder and a lofty dose of Munchausen syndrome, they are similar in a way they are craving attention and they are given generous amounts of media coverage for what both of them are… again, I see no harm in what he does. Dolezal started off more or less okay, and I had no idea of her fraud history because she wasn’t otherwise interesting. that’s shitty behavior, but, still, far from being the worst in the trans-everything realm we live in. she does make it shittier for black people with the sum of everything that she does and will do potentially though.

let’s just say… I have spent some time on korean surgery internet a few years ago, I was thinking about flying there and doing some surface-level cosmetic shit that is more advanced for less $$ compared to what we’re having here, there are korean men who come in looking like chiseled fucking samurais and come out looking like Jimin with a little pastel bob haircut, I think that factor is much more problematic than one weird Brit flying there to get a chin shave and eyelid reshaping. it is so prevalent, it is present and celebrated in their current culture. they created that monster, and somewhere down the line it met the social justice/postmodernist twitter discourse halfway.

1620

Guys, please. Oli London is not worth the fight, is he?

7 Likes
1621

I am kinda baffled by that one attack on him, honestly.

it has started as a good kii, and there’s always like place to talk about tangential things, but yeah Oli is polarizing.

1622

Man I don’t want to go to work today :sob: I just want to goof off and play video games all day but instead I’ve gotta pull myself together and go stand at a register for 8 hours in the slowest part of the store.
It’s so boring down there that I started learning Japanese with duolingo to pass the time and now I’ve tweeted in Japanese twice (and didn’t get called a weaboo LMAO)

2 Likes
1623

They are more different than alike, but my original point is still that they are most known for being “trans-racial” advocates and that they are setting the stage for someone else to inch a different, potentially harmful agenda forward. Oli is only continuing a conversation Dolezal started. He is not a threat but he can be the catalyst.

I also agree with this. The problems are very related, but I do see a difference between a Korean getting surgery to improve some aspect of themselves and a Brit getting surgery to resemble a Korean pop star. I have never been to South Korea, and I know nothing about South Korean culture, but I do not think that a society pitted that deep in the plastic surgery hole is equipped to help someone like Oli.

No one in South Korea will be able to convince him that enough is enough. He can’t even stop himself. How many times has he had a cosmetic surgery and said “this is the last one for real this time!”, only to schedule another one a few years down the line? It will never end. He will never reach his goal because the more times he goes under the knife, the less he will resemble Jimin, and the more he will desire to touch a few things up. Being immersed in a society that amplifies these terrible beauty standards and body images is the last thing someone suffering from body dysmorphia needs, yet he’s in the thick of it all and seeing a problem with any of it is varying degrees of controversial depending on what circles you float in.

The Overton window of society keeps shifting more and more into the realm of absurdity. Pretty soon it will go over the horizon and I won’t see it anymore. I blame a lot of this on rapid technological advancement taking a wrecking ball to the axioms of society before we have the vocabulary or tools to repair the damage. This is just a tiny, tiny offshoot of a bigger problem humanity isn’t ready to deal with.

4 Likes
1624

I promised the mods that i will sit back and not continue the spicy train, my good NON-GENDER-SPECIFIC HUMAN, so i will be happy to entertain you in DMs if you muchly desire to (๑>◡<๑)

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1625

don’t.

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1626

I’ll be glad to text the bitch of a hr lady I’m not coming back whenever I get a new job.

Apparently some guy told her he quit and she replied “no, you don’t.”

Shes fucking nuts and I hate her.

1 Like
1627

Screenshot_20220127-140324_Chrome
Screenshot_20220127-140324_Chrome1080×990 90.2 KB

this Certified Reddit Moment™ has been living in my head for days now

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1628

I saw that post too :joy:

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1629

Twitter ?

1630

Have you really been far even as decided to use even go want to look more like? I further and even more decided to use. Others can really be far as decided twice as much to go use and wish for it, even.

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1631

This has been on my mind.