135 quotes found
"I often liken the process of physics research to solving a jigsaw puzzle. As we put together pieces to form patches, a certain image of the overall picture emerges, but until the game is sufficiently progressed, we are not quite sure. I feel much the same way about the wealth of signs for new particles. We have patches that have been put together, but we are not quite sure how all pieces will fit together into a coherent whole. There are also certain pieces which do not seem to fit into any patches at all. For the most part, the experimental findings have not been completely unexpected, but there have been certain surprises that I, for one, had not foreseen. This is what makes particle physics exciting and tantalizing. At moments of despair and frustration, I feel as though somebody has scrambled two boxes of jigsaw puzzles for me to put together."
"Lee's involvement with gauge theories dated back to 1964. He was concerned about the fact that superconductors appear to provide a counterexample to the general theorem, which requires that spontaneous symmetry breaking is always accompanied with massless spin-zero bosons. With Klein, he wrote an article suggesting that the same might occur in relativistic theories. It was soon realized that this is indeed the case, provided the broken symmetry is a gauge symmetry, as it is in a superconductor."
"Democracy has failed to dampen the right/left ideological schism, which is historically rooted in the early years of separate state creation. And neither the right nor the left is fully able to provide a convincing alternative vision of how democracy in Korean society can robustly develop and thereby enhance its quality. The rightists/conservatives, who continue to retain their predominant power and influence over the state and civil society, still cling to an old-fashioned, outmoded black-and-white ideology derived from the Cold War period. That ideology can no longer provide a political vision and values and norms pertinent to the post-Cold War era as well as a democratized, highly modernized and globalized social environment. Thereby they have failed to play a leading role in enhancing autonomy of civil society vis-à-vis the state, respecting rule of law, and contributing to bringing social integration and inclusiveness. On the other hand, the leftists have disappointed many people who expected that the entirely new generations which appeared on the political center stage in the course of democratization could play a decisive role in changing Korean politics. In recent years we have witnessed a growing disillusionment with the radical discourses and ideas as well as with their inability to develop a new type of party politics, deal with the socio-economic problems and provide a certain substantive model for ethical life."
"The market universe is composed of two types of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today; they are increasingly characterized by intense competition. Blue oceans are all the industries not in existence today; they are untouched and uncontested. To prosper in the future, companies need to go beyond competing; they need to create blue oceans. The issue is how to do so."
"Struggling to stay ahead of your rivals? No need. Instead of trying to match or beat them on cost or quality, make the other players irrelevant--by staking out new market space where competitors haven't ventured."
"In a nutshell, Blue Ocean Strategy proposes that strategy can shape industry structure, whereas competitive strategy sees strategy as choosing the right position under given structural constraints. The field of strategy has been long dominated by a structuralist view; in other words, the idea that the industry’s structure is fixed. Strategy, as commonly practiced, tees off with industry analysis and is conventionally about matching a company’s strengths and weaknesses to the opportunities and threats present in the existing industry. Here, strategy becomes a zero-sum game where one company’s gain is another company’s loss, as firms are bound by existing market space."
"The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition."
"Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space."
"Value innovation is created in the region where a company's actions favorably affect both its cost structure and its value proposition to buyers. Cost saving are made by eliminating and reducing the factors an industry competes on. Buyer value is lifted by raising and creating elements the industry has never offered. Over time, costs are reduced further as scale economics kick in due to the high sales volumes that superior value generates."
"Value innovation requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a leap in value for both buyers. The simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost."
"The document normally kicks off with a lengthy description of current industry conditions and the competitive situation. Next is a discussion of how to increase market share, capture new segments, or cut costs, followed by an outline of numerous goals and initiatives. A full budget is almost invariably attached, as are lavish graphs and a surfeit of spreadsheets. The process usually culminates in the preparation of a large document culled from a mishmash of data provided by people from various parts of the organization who often have conflicting agendas... Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is."
"Their recent publication, Blue Ocean Strategy (2005), is a summation of a decade of articles on value innovation, including one in the Harvard Business Review. Kim and Mauborgne have presented themselves as unashamed strategic iconoclasts. The thinking behind most business strategy sees the agents as either individual companies or industries as a whole. The scene for strategic activity is essentially fixed and finite. Analogies were often made with the field of battle or the theater of war. Some strategists went further in borrowing military symbols. They talked about headquarters rather than the corporate head office. The battlefield was fixed in area; no new land could be added to it or created. Any struggles that took place were zero-sum games. These conflicts were intense and bloody (in figurative terms), staining red the ground on which they were fought."
"One persistent misperception about North Korea is that its provocative international behavior is unpredictable. (...) In fact, Pyongyang's methods have been remarkably consistent since the early 1960s.(...) Its strategy has been to lash out at its enemies when it perceives them to be weak or distracted, up the ante in the face of international condemnation (while blaming external scapegoats), and then negotiate for concessions in return for an illusory promise of peace. Incapable of competing with economically flourishing South Korea, the North can rely only on military and political brinkmanship to make up ground. This has been a stunningly successful game plan for the isolated, impoverished nation that sits amidst the world’s most powerful status quo states, including China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States."
"At the very least, the ill-advised rush to "peace" is a likely candidate for the historical annals of self-destructive appeasement. The great sacrifices made by Americans in the Korean War, the legacy of the close US-South Korea relationship over the past 60 years, and future US strategic interests in and around the Korean Peninsula should not be sacrificed at the altar of diplomatic peace. Real peace is won by resolve and sacrifice, while ephemeral peace is all too often concocted only by vowels and consonants. (talking about a potential peace treaty between North Korea and the U.S., to replace the decades-long armistice signed in 1953)"
"For many South Koreans today, the Korean War is little more than a tragedy of the past or a tale in abstraction. For others, it is a trauma best forgotten. But on Memorial Day, the South Koreans, as a nation, must not forget the suffering and sacrifice in their national historical experience. The lessons of the most traumatic past must be learned and continually relearned, not only to prevent such a tragedy from repeating itself, but also to honor, as one nation, those who made our freedom possible, and to remember that freedom is certainly never free."
"A power vacuum in Pyongyang will require the immediate dispatch of South Korean and U.S. troops. Next will come other regional powers — Chinese peacekeeping forces securing the northern areas, followed by the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force transporting people and supplies along the Korean coastlines. In the short term, a multiparty international presence north of the 38th parallel under the nominal banner of the United Nations will enforce order and provide aid. But even when the dust from the flurry of human activity and balance-of-power politics settles, the task will not be done."
"En route to Tokyo in 1945 to embark on the occupation of Japan, U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur laid out his goals for Japan to his aide, Maj. Gen. Courtney Whitney: "First destroy the military power, then build up representative government, enfranchise women, free political prisoners, liberate farmers, establish free labor, destroy monopolies, abolish police repression, liberate the press, liberalize education, and decentralize political power." The transformation of North Korea will require nothing less."
"The presence of U.S. troops in South Korea has been and remains the greatest deterrent to North Korean adventurism and a disruption of the current and longstanding peace on the Korean peninsula. And to repeat an important point: the absence of a formal peace treaty no more threatens this peace than the absence of a post-World War Two peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo threatens the peace between Russia and Japan."
"It’s also important for Washington to hold quiet consultations with Beijing to prepare jointly for a unified Korea under Seoul’s direction, a new polity that will be free, peaceful, capitalist, pro-U.S. and pro-China."
"The North Korean state is essentially two things: 1) a large money-laundering concern; 2) the world’s largest prison and slave labor camp. Now, however, it is a large money-laundering concern and prison camp that has additionally extorted its way to nuclear weapons. Any U.S. policy should begin and end with the knowledge of what North Korea really is. It is not a state engaged in the normal give-and-take of diplomacy, seeking "security assurances" in return for "denuclearization" or some other such deal conjured up by diplomats whose experience is in dealing with real countries who negotiate in good faith. Rather, North Korea has had a pretty good run with its current approach of extortion, criminality and the deprivation of its own people."
"Development experts and theorists of democratization take note. South Korea has the same culture, historical legacies, and so on as its neighbor to the North. And yet it is an advanced industrial economy and a thriving democracy that has just, despite its Confucian culture, elected a woman as president. It has managed to reach this high point of prosperity and human dignity because of — to reduce a complex set of phenomena to its minimal essence — different institutions than those in the North: democratic and capitalist ones. (I realize that I may be violating some tenet of doctrinaire realism with this observation. For the less doctrinaire, the contrast between the two Koreas is a useful reminder of why we try and favor and even push for democratic capitalism). Given the stark contrast between the two countries one can safely draw at least one conclusion: There is nothing inherent in culture or history that ipso facto should keep a country poor and enslaved."
"The sum total of such policies is a state that is what can only be described as—grammatical propriety notwithstanding—“uniquely unique.” Allow me to give you some examples: North Korea is the world’s sole communist hereditary dynasty, the world’s only literate-industrialized-urbanized peacetime economy to have suffered a famine, the world’s most cultish totalitarian system, and the world’s most secretive, isolated country—albeit one with the world’s largest military in terms of manpower and defense spending proportional to its population and national income. The result is a most abnormal state, one that is able to exercise disproportionate influence in regional politics despite its relatively small territorial and population size and its exceedingly meager economic, political, and soft power, principally through a strategy of external provocations and internal repression."
"Just imagine if Seoul and Washington vastly increased funding for radio broadcast and other information operations into North Korea, as they well should. In an Orwellian world, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.” In the surreal world of the DPRK, the past 62 years of de facto peace in Korea is war, a life of extreme servitude to the state is freedom, and national strength is preserved by keeping the people ignorant of the outside world. Informing and educating the North Korean people is not only the right thing to do, but also a potentially great leverage vis-à-vis Pyongyang. Moreover, it can save lives, too."
"Since the Kim regime is governed by the need to dominate South Korea by threatening the region with nuclear annihilation, its willingness to use its lethal powers will only grow unless it is confronted by the specter of bankruptcy and the consequent destabilization of its rule."
"South Korea should resume loudspeaker broadcasts into the North along the border. Ask North Korean soldiers and border-town dwellers some pointed questions — for example, why did their “great leader” roll out his daughter and not his older son? Does the boy’s face resemble more Hyon Song Wol, Kim’s old girlfriend, than his wife? Is it true that Hyon was pregnant with Kim’s son in 2012? Do they know that Kim’s late mother was born in Japan, a nation reviled by the Kim dynasty, and that she was a mere mistress to his father, Kim Jong Il? Do they know that Kim Jong Un, as much as he tries to evoke images of his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, never met the original Great Leader because of his illegitimate birth? Do they know that Kim has declined repeated offers of food, vaccines and medicine during the pandemic? Drape the speakers with big photos of Kim Jong Un and North Korean soldiers would not dare shoot at them."
"As Shakespeare’s Hamlet intoned, “The readiness is all.” The essential task of keeping the peace stands not on the triviality of opinion poll numbers or inter-Korean projects but the paramount importance of prescience and planning."
"To patronize the North Korean leadership was fatally to underestimate it."
"Over the past three years, Kim Yo-jong has remained her despotic nation’s chief censor, spokeswoman, mocker and threat-and-malice dispenser. All this makes Kim Yo-jong one of the most powerful leaders in the contemporary world, her nation’s foreign policy at her fingertips, and with unfettered access to her nuclear button-controlling brother."
"Despite South Korean and Western media cooing over Kim Yo Jong charming smile and deportment during her Olympic visit, her gender denotes neither a softer streak nor a propensity towards denuclearization. In fact, to presume this first female co-dictator with her finger on the nuclear button in history – the world’s first ‘nuclear despotess’ – may be more prone to parting ways with nukes by virtue of her gender is at best patronizing. Her youth – the other characteristic that disarms her interlocuters – in reality portends a prolonged reign of repression, as did her brother’s when he took the reins at twenty-seven."
"Among Kim Il Sung’s seven grandchildren by direct hereditary lineage, it is therefore the youngest, Yo Jong, who stands as the sole heir to the throne. At least until well into the 2030s. In the event of such a sudden power transition, whether North Korea’s first female Supreme Leader chooses to settle for the role of regent until her nephew or niece comes of age, or decides to rule for life – the rest of her life and for her own life – is a question to which there is no clear answer."
"People have lost something important they took for granted, and that loss leaves them devastated."
"She is like a great writer, with the power to read people; I was influenced by her. But hers wasn't a life where you could sit indoors with books."
"I was very young, and those events affected me deeply. I feel the time given to me doesn't belong only to me. In everything – my writing, my travelling, my happiness – I live partly on behalf of those who weren't able to survive. I feel I'm living their share of life."
"Even though each country has different cultural backgrounds and social traditions, the word “Mom” can evoke universal emotional responses. Additionally, the behavior of children is very similar across borders. Children’s attitudes toward Mom and their tendency to forget her are similar all around the world…"
"Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power."
"The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.'"
"Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion."
"A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement."
"Often what is absent has more power than what is present."
"When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence."
"Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time."
"Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form."
"Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence."
"Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent."
"An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence."
"Power turns pure being into a having."
"Violence may capture space, but it does not create space."
"Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces."
"An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game."
"Perhaps power is never free from a feeling of lack."
"If life is deprived of any meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time."
"God functions like a stabilizer of time."
"A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence."
"If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place."
"Promising, committment, and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices."
"The haste of day rules over the night as empty form."
"Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration. The world becomes readable, like a picture."
"Historical time knows no lasting present."
"Information has no scent."
"Time begins to emit a scent when it gains duration; when it is given a narrative or deep tension; when it gains depth and breadth, even space."
"Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellshaft]."
"Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers."
"However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation."
"Depression is a narcissistic malady."
"Eros and depression are opposites."
"Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other."
"Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation."
"Eros conquers depression."
"Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. Negativity is essential to vitality."
"Happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity."
"What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all."
"The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery."
"The erotic is never free of secrecy."
"Pornography completes the deritualization of love."
"The inner music of things sounds only when you close your eyes."
"Money, as a matter of principle, makes everything the same."
"The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things, and, above all, beautiful actions, which have a universal value."
"There is no such thing as data-driven thinking."
"Thinking is an expedition into quietness."
"Logos is powerless without the force of eros."
"Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails."
"We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable."
"Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things."
"Rituals are also symbolic practices... in the sense that they bring people together to create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.""
"Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence."
"Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention."
"The 'intense life' advertised by the neoliberal regime is in truth simply a life of intense consumption."
"Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified."
"Today, tattoos lack symbolic power. All they do is point toward the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space."
"Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion."
"When we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine."
"Silent listening unites a people and creates community without communication."
"In contrast to festivals, events do not create community."
"Capitalism lacks narrativity."
"Capitalism dislikes silence."
"Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production."
"It is a sign of sovereignty to risk one's life, that is, to turn life into a game."
"Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing."
"Today, to live means merely to produce."
"Poems are magic ceremonies of language."
"The liturgy of emptiness dispels the capitalist economy of the commodity."
"Ritual society is a society of rules. It is based not on virtues but on a passion for rules."
"In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play."
"It is not honourable to attack an enemy without putting yourself at risk."
"Thinking is more erotic than calculating."
"The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it."
"The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as "sitting unmoveable like an object."
"Haikus allow the whole world to appear within things."
"...Zen Buddhism, this religion of immanence."
"God is nothingness: He is 'beyond all speech.'"
"...I pray to God to make me free of God."
"At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure."
"Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world."
"The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom."
"Enlightenment is an awakening to the everyday."
"Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen."
"Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself."
"The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things."
"To die is to wander."
"When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies."
"Emptiness is not a denial of the proper but an affirmation of it."
"If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving."
"Stories on digital platforms like Facebook or Instagram are not genuine stories. They have no narrative duration. Rather, they are just sequences of momentary impressions that do not tell us anything."
"The smartphone seems to be a playground, but it is a digital panopticon."
"Without narration, life is purely additive."
"The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself."
"A screen bans reality."
"Psychological disorders are symptoms of a blocked story... The patient is cured the moment she narrates herself free."
"Despite China's visibly warm welcome to Park, there was no epoch-making agreement between Park and Xi, just as there was no fundamental change in China's North Korea policy. She attended the mainly to show the change in her government's diplomatic approach, especially to expand [South] Korea's own diplomatic space by resisting US pressure to turn down the Chinese invitation."
"[It's] a big puzzle to many even among her supporters."
"Moon and his party have, so far, put more focus on the issue of unification or peace rather than denuclearization, to the extent of Moon being publicly seen as Kim Jong-un’s top spokesman."
"Abuse of power has become the norm in Moon's South Korea, and Koreans are taking notice."
"Just four months after winning the April 15 general election by a landslide, and securing 176 seats in the 300-seat National Assembly, Moon Jae-in and his governing Democratic Party (DP) are faced with an alarming change in public sentiment. [...] This drastic decline in public support for the president and the government illustrates not only the volatile nature of South Korea's democracy, but also the growing backlash against their attempts to make abuse of power the new norm in the country. Indeed, since their stunning election victory in April, President Moon and his party have repeatedly undermined the rule of law, ignored the procedures put in place to ensure the separation of powers, and made controversial moves to further their populist agenda and help their allies escape accountability."
"After winning the election with a margin unprecedented in South Korea's democratic history, which enabled it to dominate all 17 standing of Parliament, the DP transformed the National Assembly into its own law-passing agency. It rammed through numerous contentious laws, without subcommittee review or any other consultative procedure required under the National Assembly Act. The also railroaded a series of housing laws in an attempt to stabilise skyrocketing real estate prices in the Seoul metropolitan area, where half of the country's population lives. The measures not only failed to bring the housing market under control, but also drew public anger, as they created more hurdles for middle-class first-time-buyers under the age of 40 - the main support group for the government. [...] The revelation caused many to question the sincerity of the government's pledge to resolve the housing crisis, and added weight to the accusations that President Moon and his party are using their dominance over the legislature to further their populist agenda and personal interests. Since the election, the DP government also made several moves to bring the Supreme Prosecutors' Office (SPO) fully under its control."
"The government's attempts to shield its members and supporters from being held accountable for alleged abuses of power are not limited to bringing the SPO under control either. President Moon and the DP's silence on and apparent unwillingness to get to the bottom of the sexual harassment allegations directed at powerful heads of local government, including the highly influential , is yet another example of their desire to make abuse of power and impunity the new norm in South Korea. In light of all this, it is hardly surprising that Koreans are starting to turn their backs on Moon and his party who were elected on a promise to end corruption and abuse of power - ills that have beset Korean governments since the country's successful transition towards democracy in 1987. The alarming decline in the public's support for Moon and the DP is a clear warning that Moon risks becoming a lame duck in the fourth year of his five-year presidency and in the lead-up to the April 2021 by-elections and the 2022 presidential election."