Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: current affairs

  • Emperor Titters

    The news that Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and Space X, has recently become the largest shareholder of Twitter Inc. is grist to the mill of the media with hoots and huhs. Musk has ascended to the throne and begun to wield his power to shake the Twitter Empire from inside and out. He expressed a design of converting the Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter while contemplating changing the name Twitter to Titter, egged on by a popular vote of consent he instigated a while ago on the portal. So the question is, has Musk already gone mad in the fury of retaliation against the Twitter Senate? Or is it out of his pure, unscrupulous intention drenched in the wine of humanity?

    My perception of Elon Musk may be an illustration of heuristics and biases to form a systematic judgment of error and make a decision based on resemblance shaped by intuitive preference. But such a design of machinery of cognition is also complemented by System 2 of slow thinking requiring analytical reasoning. Were it not for Tesla’s lawsuits brought by racism in the work environment and Musk’s nonchalant attitudes toward them adorned with his flamboyant gestures, I would applaud him to the end of the earth riding on a Tesla flying on a Space X. Perhaps, such acrid regard of him is akin to accusing a socially estranged woman of being a witch without a preponderance of the evidence. But Musk is anything but a pitiful figure deserving our pity with his immense universal wealth, doing businesses on earth and heaven. Although, as the saying goes, “A tree is known by its fruits,” the racially-motivated lawsuits betoken the dispiriting work environment of Tesla tells something about Musk’s personality. I find it very hard to regard Musk’s declaration of converting the Twitter HQ into homeless housing. It seems an adrenaline-driven uppercut blow to the foe as sweet vindication with Tittering.

    I read that Jeff Bezos, the executive chairman of Amazon and the owner of a private galactical tourist company, consented to Musk’s profound charitable remark. Nowadays, celebrities have all negative heuristics and biases against social media. Nevertheless, they feed on attention and thrive in it, so any such uttering of disaffection with the media is a sign of entrepreneurial solidarity. Not that I have the same sentiment toward Bezos, who is more intelligent and reticent than his slightly younger rival, but that they are astronomically rich and universally famous. It’s called class consciousness, by which the members of the same class share the same social statuses and cultures to guard themselves against those of another class. Musk’s sensational promise to give housing largess to the homeless and change the world’s famous media platform reminds me of Emperor Nero. Truth or false, he was said to play the cithara singing while Rome was burning and then distributed stipends to the homeless due to the great fire.

  • Isn’t this irony?

    Our post-modernist culture is nuanced with anti-establishment of anything traditional and proper, such as decorum, mores, and codes of chivalry. The result of degradation of the values under the pretext of establishing a New Brave World is illustrated  in the following cases of Manifest Grand Irony of Liberalism that is supposed to be synonymous with altruism and niceness.

    ima
    A Nazi sympathizer? Are you kidding?

    According to this week’s edition of The Spectator, an anonymous former British Prime Minister revealed his hatred toward Theresa May by saying that she should be stabbed or done harmed in the most despicably atrocious fashion that reminds me of the gruesome murder of women by the Reaper of Whitechapel in the late Victorian period. Then there is a British conservative party leader named Esther McVey, who was maliciously excoriated by John McDonnell, a British Labor party politician instigating the mass in public to “lynch” her. Also, the First Lady of the U.S. Melania Trump was criticized for her supposedly apocryphal colonial fashion in Egypt by the media which also prompted the subsequent rebukes from the public. And this does not stop in the West. The first female president of Republic of Korea, Keun Hae Park was preposterously ousted by her radical left-wing contender Jae in Moon on the count of accepting bribery from a prominent business conglomerate based on unfounded grounds. Besides, Moon’s myrmidons maligned her reputation with indecent computer-generated photo-ops of her to destroy her political career as well as her personal life in prison because she was a leader of a conservative party.

    What the aforesaid ladies have in common is not only their conservative affiliations but also their social defenestration from their societies that show neither sympathy nor solidarity among the members of the parties and of the humanity in general. But then, woe betides anyone declaiming against the faults of the demagogues! Criticism of a political rival on different stances with courtesy is countenanced and actually encouraged in democracy, but contextualizing it in the egregiously violent words toward the women amounts to terrorism and therefore should be publicly deplored in full force and effect. Besides, however strong-willed and imperturbable the aforesaid women might seem in public, they are “ladies” deserving being treated with courtesy, for none other than being women because they are women. Where has all the honorable, respectful chivalry gone? It’s a code of honor, civility, respect toward womanhood that is transcendent of geographical, cultural, and racial boundaries. Just because they are conservative does not give anyone a license to harass them with malicious verbal remarks or gestures marshaling a mass prompting for the behoof of their political hegemony.

    To top it all off, the aforesaid betrays the usual faux-pas of declining against their contenders ad hominem, not on the ground of substantive factors or evidence, as Shakespeare corroborated thus: “Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it?” So it’s not altogether based on the standard of Reason but the manifestation of appetites, the raw emotions, the unbridled egos. Sounds antiquated, abstract, or even priggish? – Maybe so, but the men speaking about the women in the aforesaid manner are beyond the pale because it IS a violence of men in power against their women peers in a form of sordid verbal harassment. And it makes me wonder why #MeToo tweeters seem to connive at it, doing nothing to mobilize the supporters for pillorying the guilty men as usual.

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