People are knee-jerking at “anti-feminism” part of Lee which I admit would look pretty off-putting to anyone who is not familiar with what’s going in South Korea.
“Feminism” in Korea has taken on a different meaning sadly. I’ve commented in HN before at how abhorrent women’s right has been in Korea, especially up to my mother’s generation. It really has drastically improved last 20 years. However, many young men feel like the pendulum has swung too much to the other direction. Society still expects men to do “manly things” (mandatory army service, physical labour etc) but girls around their age get policy benefits instead. I’m not going to into whether this feeling is justified or not. But wanted to point out most don’t want women’s right to regress to their mom’s generation. They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.
You caution against a knee jerk reaction to Lee’s anti-feminist views but the background you provide does not actually justify your implication that South Korea may be a special case.
A feeling that “the pendulum has swung too much in the other direction” characterizes pretty much any modern reactionary anti-feminist movement in any country. And like in other countries, these feelings aren’t really borne out by the stats [0].
As far as I can tell, the only unique element of the South Korean anti-femenist movement is how mainstream it is. But that doesn’t mean whatever (knee jerk) reaction one might have to an anti-feminist politician at home wouldn’t apply to one in South Korea.
> your implication that South Korea may be a special case
Well, I genuinely think the word "feminism" means different thing in Korea to the places I've lived at. It has much more inflammatory undertone there whereas in NZ, its just a term. When I see "anti-feminism" for Korean politician, I construe it to be "anti radical feminism". That's what I was trying to get at.
> these feelings aren’t really borne out by the stat
Those stats you've linked are pretty controversial: one says 10th and the other says 118th.
> Due to the various methods of calculating and measuring gender inequality, South Korea's gender inequality rankings vary across different reports. While the 2017 UNDP Gender Inequality Index ranks South Korea 10th out of 160 countries, the World Economic Forum ranks South Korea 118th out of 144 countries in its 2017 Global Gender Gap Report
I think there are still gender inequality in Korea. The reason I'm defending them is that I just don't want people to label fair bit of young Korean men to be misogynist and write them off. Their struggles are real and if we keep marginalising them I don't think it would get any better.
It really reads as exactly the evil victim mentality of the people wildly overrepresented at the top that we get in the US. The military service thing is obviously a real issue, though, but I don't know why that wouldn't be solved by forcing women into mandatory public service in the same way a man with a disability would be. Is it just that Korea doesn't have the social services to absorb the manpower?
Military service is also a benefit that women don't get, too. They don't get to make the connections in the military that would help them along in their careers.
> They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.
Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men? I feel like this stuff it bought into by marginal men who are oppressed by other men of a higher class, and average women catch all the flack because they're simultaneously accessible and denying marginal men what they want on a daily basis. They don't see upper-class men as enemies because they don't ever see upper-class men; when they hear about upper-class cruelty, they fantasize about the revenge they would take if they were in power, especially on the women who say no.
In Korea, the anger about conscription just gives them a semi-legitimate gripe that seems like it should be taken away by conscripting women.
> Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men?
Well boss and CEO's generation _were_ heavily discriminated and no one disputes that. For younger generation who are working, they go through 2 years of military service, then sees women in their generation go on a trip to find herself instead, then gets "preferential treatment" at work (e.g. woman police officer goes up 2 rank for giving a person in distress their jacket). Meanwhile, men are expected to financially contribute more for marriages. So now you get this explosive cocktail of resentment: it's hard to get well-paying jobs + have to go to the army + other societal expectation for manhood.
Disclaimer: I don't think it's _that_ bad but I don't live in Korea, and I have lost friends for claiming this.
> I feel like this stuff it bought into by marginal men who are oppressed by other men of a higher class
Yes, there is some truth to this. Korean media is actively fuelling this outrage but I don't think you can't generalize it to everyone who supports it. Funnily enough, latest social discourse is around "Young Forties" (so older men with more social status), so now they are trying to stir up some discourse between generations.
> In Korea, the anger about conscription just gives them a semi-legitimate gripe that seems like it should be taken away by conscripting women.
I do think they should conscript women even for social services and that would quench most of the frustration from young men. But man suggesting this would get mocked for being so petty i.e. "not manly". Politicians also stay well away from this as it would be a political suicide. So where do these marginalised men go? To Lee and anyone who'd listen to them.
Edit: Once you delve deeper into this topic, Korea's abysmal birthrate of 0.68 will really make sense :p
> It really reads as exactly the evil victim mentality of the people wildly overrepresented at the top
The people at the top don't have a victim mentality because they're successful. However, there are a lot of people who aren't at the top, who aren't doing great, but on the basis of their gender are told that they deserve dispreferential treatment because there's more of their gender at the top of society. I don't see how that makes them evil. Perhaps I'm just totally misunderstanding your point though.
> Military service is also a benefit that women don't get, too. They don't get to make the connections in the military that would help them along in their careers.
They can volunteer if they wanted those supposed benefits. Seems weird to try to make conscription sound like it has positives when it's just purely negative.
> Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men?
This is an overly simplistic view of "oppression". Do you think that men as a whole somehow benefit from there being an over representation of their gender at the top of society? That despite struggling to survive, because we share the same gender that we aren't suffering or that we can't be oppressed?
It's like people blame all men for the actions of our ancestors and want to take revenge or something. It's really weird.
> ... and to find out whether things like this happen in other countries as well.
I didn't DM anyone, and I didn't run the campaign, but there happened to be the John Edwards campaign HQ near me so I walked inside and said I could help do their IT, next day I was a full-on volunteer.
They took me to Charleston for a rally (which was cool cuz I never been) and even got me a jacket with my name and the campaign logo on it. Was pretty nifty at the time.
Few months later they hired me and sent me to New Hampshire for the primary.
Wasn't long after that that we were no longer in the running, but was great experience.
Highly recommend more young people attempt cold walk-ins/calls/DMs like this article mentions.
For anyone out of the loop, Edwards was caught in an infidelity scandal and his candidacy collapsed. OP didn’t do such a bad job with IT that the campaign failed lol
> OP didn’t do such a bad job with IT that the campaign failed lol
Some non-tech people tend to think of IT folks as jack of all trades with the ability to fix their faulty printer all the way to hacking email accounts for fun/profit.
I'm sure few of them would have believed that their IT team could have prevented the scandal by some fast & serious typing on the keyboard a.k.a hacking for regular folks :)
Yeah, I undersold it. Cheating on your wife is one thing. Worse if she has cancer. Worse if you deny it. Worse if you try to fake the DNA test and pretend the baby isn’t yours. Worse if you used campaign funds to cover it up. His career is definitely over.
Political campaign staff often keep hours way past what a volunteer with a 9-5 job has. It's a terrible life, terrible profession but it still draws in people that are willing to find meaning in being a workaholic and seen as "politically savvy".
From what I could find, working in a presidential campaign is mostly volunteer-based and pretty much full-time.
It sounded fun and like an incredible experience, but I was already working full-time and didn’t have that kind of availability. So I politely declined.
When did it become cool for full grown adults to start dunking on college kids?
What is that about? Why do they generally always target college kids for that kind of thing instead of, hell I don't know, nursing homes or construction sites?
Colleges are [often] public property unlike all the rest of what they mentioned.
If you go with your own microphone you can shout out and shut down the competition and game your own youtube clips, while the competition can't trespass you from the property.
It's really the ultimate cheap shot.
You basically have to be a moron to debate someone like Charlie Kirk in the first place because the game is rigged; he has the table, the microphone, the editing, the security and if you object to the rules there's nothing you can do but walk away. The moment you get the upper hand he can simply kill the mic, stop recording, and move on to the next guy and all the meanwhile claiming he's doing it on neutral terrain.
It's not like anyone is forcing the students to participate. If someone of voting age wants to engage someone on policy positions, then they accept the consequences. Likewise, if someone wants to engage with voters, then a college campus is a perfectly legitimate location.
The first rule of politics is that you don't want to get into fights with people who can beat you.
The second rule of it is that the right questions (have you stopped beating your wife?) can always be spun to make your opponent look like a complete idiot. Always control the framing of a situation.
The third rule of politics is that while intelligent people can see through charades #1 and #2, and if they aren't your target demographic, you don't need to give a shit about what they think.
Are there any other countries in the world that use a different wiki than Wikipedia as their main wiki, except for those where Wikipedia is banned? Korea seems like the only one.
> He has been noted for his staunch antifeminism and support from South Korean idaenam (young men).
…
> He became popular in the 20s and 30s due to his opposing stance against political correctness such as "faux feminism," introducing reforms supporting meritocracy rather than outright equality of outcome.
I know only a little about Korean politics, enough to know that it’s very dramatic with wild stuff happening, but not really to understand it. From the outside, the politics around feminism there seems rather strange.
> Lee was an early proponent of the finger pinching conspiracy theory, a claim alleging hidden radical feminist messaging in advertisements
Speaking of strange.
> Lee's advocacy of merit-based processes such as exam scores, credentials, and measurable qualifications has been viewed by supporters as aligning with younger voters' expectations of fair competition.
I suppose all the political content was left out of the linked article, but it would be nice to have more context.
Also, looks like he’s at least somewhat technical:
> After graduating from Harvard University in 2007, Lee returned to Korea to perform military duties working as a software developer (alternative military service as industrial technical personnel) at 'Innotive', an image browsing software startup, a subsidiary of Nexon.
> After completing his national service, Lee prepared to start his own venture. He received funding from the venture startup program backed by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups on 5 August 2011 and founded Classe Studio: an ed-tech startup that developed personalized tutoring software and workplace training applications.
Was? Still is. Just two months for iPhone Air release, Apple edited hands out of their marketing images only in Korea, with the same images (including hands) being used in the rest of the world.
Interesting! The article talks mostly about how this all worked, but rarely about what was actually discussed. Which opinions of the party do you like or support?
I’d prefer not to dive into policy positions here — the main focus of my post was the product-building process and what it was like to work behind the scenes.
the technical part was interesting but im not sure this is a candidate I'd want to be associated with publicly....i guess most English speakers just see "oh cool a candidate in a country i have parasocial relationship with through consumer pop culture" and not the horrific ugly side of Korean politics and some of its candidates, Lee in particular.
I don't like that particular presidential candidate but this was an interesting read. Thanks for the insight into the details of a campaign like this. I like your writing style.
With those little takeaways in between like talking to users first to understand their requirements, building an mvp and shipping it as early as possible I was half expecting the article ending with the kind of startup lessons/wisdom you typically see here on HN.
But I'm really glad it wasnt. Not everything has to have a grand lesson or takeaway. I enjoyed reading your once in a lifetime experience.
That isn’t necessarily “different”. Someone with truly horrifying opinions can be genuinely respectful and pleasant to work with, unless you fall into the wrong social group. (I know nothing about this guy’s opinions and don’t have much reason to care, either, I just feel the need to point out how people tend to overestimate the alignment between “nice people” and “people I agree with”. Much as they do the one between “nice people” and “people it’s worthwhile to listen to”, but that’s a story for another day.)
> Someone with truly horrifying opinions can be genuinely respectful and pleasant to work with, unless you fall into the wrong social group.
This is how psychopathic tyranny and bullying works "I'm nice and friendly so long as I get my way." I worked with a manager just like this. Super friendly guy until something doesn't go his way and he'll rip you apart in front of everyone. Also the kind of person who manipulates everyone into doing all his work for him while he spent most of his time looking at sports cars and tattooed women on line. Being overly nice and friendly in a position of power is a HUGE red flag for me because it inevitably is a front for manipulation.
That’s a thing, but not the thing I was talking about.
I was talking about the existence of people who are just nice and pleasant in the normal healthy manner in their ordinary lives, except they hold some opinions that you (or I, and possibly even not both of us) would find horrifying.
(That description actually applies to most people who have ever lived, but that they exist among our contemporaries is both more stark and more important. It makes me much more averse to being $NOTNICE to people who are $WRONG, because I don’t think I would want to live when people habitually were, and perhaps even thought it was virtuous to be, not nice to those they know are in some way morally wrong.)
Thousands of serial rapists, murderers, and abusers also have the ability to be very positive, funny, and genuinely respectful to others when they choose to.
Would you like to share another perspective for them too?
Louis CK and Genghis Khan were both very effective in their respective lines of work and I'll die on that hill. And while I'm at it, Bill Clinton was an alright president (though the surrounding administration would likely be looked at as a bunch of snakes if not for the even worse Bush2 cabinet that followed).
Heck, Lincoln wanted to ship 'em back to Africa and Henry Ford was a moralizing anti-semite. Nobody is clean under a microscope.
OP is Korean, and will be using the Korean wiki article which ranks squarely first when Googling his name in Korea from inside Korea. Would you ask for the same in the US case with the paralles I drew? Of course not.
Well yeah of course it's not hard to get involved in politics, if the involvement is supporting people who are rich and powerful even if it is via the use of a more modest looking young mouthpiece. OP was supporting a conservative party, so basically going with the flow of a bunch of what a bunch of influential and rich people wanted as their pawn. If you have something that is of little consequence to the rich, like mothers against drunk driving or something, sure you can probably get it done as it's a token gesture and the powerful just pull strings to get out of those prosecution anyways.
If you look at actually trying to move the meter away from the status quo of the rich and powerful, rather than just repainting the pieces on the chess board, you see politicians like Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul found the whole thing rigged against them. Bernie was railroaded by the upper echelons of his own party and Ron Paul found his name magically erased from practically all the talks on the high level debates in the press to the point they would just skip over his name in the primary poll rankings.
It's incredibly easy to get involved with people like Mamdani or Seattle's Katie Wilson or so many others, if that's your political angle. The same is true on the other side.
We should be encouraging people to be more involved. That helps shape outcomes.
Katie Wilson's claim to fame is doing the bidding of rich and powerful King County Metro union gang / alias "ATU" for the purposes of using exploitive taxes to take from the population of Seattle (who have infamously been fleeced on massive gouged public transit construction costs) and reshuffle the money to cushy transit union lobby and their benefactors so their precious fiefdom would not be downsized. She then created a payroll tax to enrich rich contractors to create a tiny amount of "affordable housing" (buzz word used to enrich construction contractors at public cost) for a select few. She is basically a shining beacon of a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful as they are all too happy to be the benefactors of her tax policies that largely socialize costs and privatize the earnings albeit under a false flag of helping the poor.
Mamdani has been legally barred from the Presidency, the position we are discussing. He simply cannot. In fact, I suspect that is part of the reason why Trump has been so weirdly chum with him, he's simply not a threat for the presidency and never will be.
I wasn't discussing 'the presidency'. I'm saying it's easy to get involved - especially so for the local races that matter more to most people's lives in any case, where things like zoning and school curriculums are decided, or where money either gets invested to further fossil fuel infrastructure or for cleaner things like bikes, walking and transit.
>Well yeah of course it's not hard to get involved in politics, if the involvement is supporting people who are rich and powerful even if it is via the use of a more modest looking young mouthpiece.
I fail to see how it’d be any more difficult to get involved in politics for candidates that don’t meet this criteria.
We appear to be talking about different topics entirely. Your points seem to be about the effectiveness of political involvement, but the comment you’re replying to and the quote I posted relates to political involvement.
It’s encouraging to hear stories about how people get involved. We can learn about the process, network, and have an impact, even if that impact is incremental.
I see you've disregarded I used past tense in regard to his 'railroading' and then changed the tense, which I find underhanded. To bring it to a more plain level, he , at a prior time, under his more notable POTUS bids, ran on the Democratic ticket.
What's also worth pointing out is that the person Democratic upper echelon nominated, without even a primary, the last election was someone who did so abysmally in the popular primaries that she was at single digit percents yet magically got installed as the POTUS contendor without even a a vote. When you consider our voting system is set up that writing a candidate in is essentially throwing your vote away, a popular primary does not even happen (imperfect as it may be), in practice the two parties are operating as bureaucrats of in-party members who are giving you a choice of two people that represent the in-party elite albeit with some different kinds and volumes of scraps tossed to the general populace.
And for the most part, our founding fathers warned us of exactly this.
The bigger the loon, the more impressive the successes of campaign professionals.
Loons are also useful stepping stones. Use them for career progression and then cast them aside, you could even claim they abused you or took advantage of you and that you're excited to help <X> next who actually cares about the people.
Not entirely sure how conservatism is related to either - DOGE is far removed from conservativsm, and the second topic I talked about is even less related to it.
Both are views by the politician from this politican who this entire article is about, sounds pretty related to me.
Very strange downvotes as well, not used to that here. I guess they'll remain now that above has been flagged.
People are knee-jerking at “anti-feminism” part of Lee which I admit would look pretty off-putting to anyone who is not familiar with what’s going in South Korea.
“Feminism” in Korea has taken on a different meaning sadly. I’ve commented in HN before at how abhorrent women’s right has been in Korea, especially up to my mother’s generation. It really has drastically improved last 20 years. However, many young men feel like the pendulum has swung too much to the other direction. Society still expects men to do “manly things” (mandatory army service, physical labour etc) but girls around their age get policy benefits instead. I’m not going to into whether this feeling is justified or not. But wanted to point out most don’t want women’s right to regress to their mom’s generation. They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.
You caution against a knee jerk reaction to Lee’s anti-feminist views but the background you provide does not actually justify your implication that South Korea may be a special case.
A feeling that “the pendulum has swung too much in the other direction” characterizes pretty much any modern reactionary anti-feminist movement in any country. And like in other countries, these feelings aren’t really borne out by the stats [0].
As far as I can tell, the only unique element of the South Korean anti-femenist movement is how mainstream it is. But that doesn’t mean whatever (knee jerk) reaction one might have to an anti-feminist politician at home wouldn’t apply to one in South Korea.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_South_Kor...
> your implication that South Korea may be a special case
Well, I genuinely think the word "feminism" means different thing in Korea to the places I've lived at. It has much more inflammatory undertone there whereas in NZ, its just a term. When I see "anti-feminism" for Korean politician, I construe it to be "anti radical feminism". That's what I was trying to get at.
> these feelings aren’t really borne out by the stat
Those stats you've linked are pretty controversial: one says 10th and the other says 118th.
> Due to the various methods of calculating and measuring gender inequality, South Korea's gender inequality rankings vary across different reports. While the 2017 UNDP Gender Inequality Index ranks South Korea 10th out of 160 countries, the World Economic Forum ranks South Korea 118th out of 144 countries in its 2017 Global Gender Gap Report
I think there are still gender inequality in Korea. The reason I'm defending them is that I just don't want people to label fair bit of young Korean men to be misogynist and write them off. Their struggles are real and if we keep marginalising them I don't think it would get any better.
[flagged]
It really reads as exactly the evil victim mentality of the people wildly overrepresented at the top that we get in the US. The military service thing is obviously a real issue, though, but I don't know why that wouldn't be solved by forcing women into mandatory public service in the same way a man with a disability would be. Is it just that Korea doesn't have the social services to absorb the manpower?
Military service is also a benefit that women don't get, too. They don't get to make the connections in the military that would help them along in their careers.
> They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.
Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men? I feel like this stuff it bought into by marginal men who are oppressed by other men of a higher class, and average women catch all the flack because they're simultaneously accessible and denying marginal men what they want on a daily basis. They don't see upper-class men as enemies because they don't ever see upper-class men; when they hear about upper-class cruelty, they fantasize about the revenge they would take if they were in power, especially on the women who say no.
In Korea, the anger about conscription just gives them a semi-legitimate gripe that seems like it should be taken away by conscripting women.
> Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men?
Well boss and CEO's generation _were_ heavily discriminated and no one disputes that. For younger generation who are working, they go through 2 years of military service, then sees women in their generation go on a trip to find herself instead, then gets "preferential treatment" at work (e.g. woman police officer goes up 2 rank for giving a person in distress their jacket). Meanwhile, men are expected to financially contribute more for marriages. So now you get this explosive cocktail of resentment: it's hard to get well-paying jobs + have to go to the army + other societal expectation for manhood.
Disclaimer: I don't think it's _that_ bad but I don't live in Korea, and I have lost friends for claiming this.
> I feel like this stuff it bought into by marginal men who are oppressed by other men of a higher class
Yes, there is some truth to this. Korean media is actively fuelling this outrage but I don't think you can't generalize it to everyone who supports it. Funnily enough, latest social discourse is around "Young Forties" (so older men with more social status), so now they are trying to stir up some discourse between generations.
> In Korea, the anger about conscription just gives them a semi-legitimate gripe that seems like it should be taken away by conscripting women.
I do think they should conscript women even for social services and that would quench most of the frustration from young men. But man suggesting this would get mocked for being so petty i.e. "not manly". Politicians also stay well away from this as it would be a political suicide. So where do these marginalised men go? To Lee and anyone who'd listen to them.
Edit: Once you delve deeper into this topic, Korea's abysmal birthrate of 0.68 will really make sense :p
> It really reads as exactly the evil victim mentality of the people wildly overrepresented at the top
The people at the top don't have a victim mentality because they're successful. However, there are a lot of people who aren't at the top, who aren't doing great, but on the basis of their gender are told that they deserve dispreferential treatment because there's more of their gender at the top of society. I don't see how that makes them evil. Perhaps I'm just totally misunderstanding your point though.
> Military service is also a benefit that women don't get, too. They don't get to make the connections in the military that would help them along in their careers.
They can volunteer if they wanted those supposed benefits. Seems weird to try to make conscription sound like it has positives when it's just purely negative.
> Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men?
This is an overly simplistic view of "oppression". Do you think that men as a whole somehow benefit from there being an over representation of their gender at the top of society? That despite struggling to survive, because we share the same gender that we aren't suffering or that we can't be oppressed?
It's like people blame all men for the actions of our ancestors and want to take revenge or something. It's really weird.
[dead]
> ... and to find out whether things like this happen in other countries as well.
I didn't DM anyone, and I didn't run the campaign, but there happened to be the John Edwards campaign HQ near me so I walked inside and said I could help do their IT, next day I was a full-on volunteer.
They took me to Charleston for a rally (which was cool cuz I never been) and even got me a jacket with my name and the campaign logo on it. Was pretty nifty at the time.
Few months later they hired me and sent me to New Hampshire for the primary.
Wasn't long after that that we were no longer in the running, but was great experience.
Highly recommend more young people attempt cold walk-ins/calls/DMs like this article mentions.
For anyone out of the loop, Edwards was caught in an infidelity scandal and his candidacy collapsed. OP didn’t do such a bad job with IT that the campaign failed lol
> OP didn’t do such a bad job with IT that the campaign failed lol
Some non-tech people tend to think of IT folks as jack of all trades with the ability to fix their faulty printer all the way to hacking email accounts for fun/profit.
I'm sure few of them would have believed that their IT team could have prevented the scandal by some fast & serious typing on the keyboard a.k.a hacking for regular folks :)
infidelity, paternity, staffer scandal
Yeah, I undersold it. Cheating on your wife is one thing. Worse if she has cancer. Worse if you deny it. Worse if you try to fake the DNA test and pretend the baby isn’t yours. Worse if you used campaign funds to cover it up. His career is definitely over.
> infidelity scandal
Seems quaint these days.
Thanks for sharing — that sounds like an amazing experience.
It’s interesting how similar opportunities can happen in totally different places.
Glad it turned into something meaningful for you.
Seconded. Political campaigns are fun. And if you're not sure it's for you, start by volunteering for a local campaign.
I can't wait to volunteer after my 8AM-5PM job at a non-paid position, IN POLITICS!
That's just one of many good arguments for shortening the standard work week.
Yeah, I can get behind that. I'm a young guy but in the blink of an eye, I'll be in my 50s if I keep working this schedule...
If only there was a way to get legislation to change in a way that resonates with your beliefs.
Then it's not for you. Doesn't mean only unemployed people find something like this not just desirable, but actually rewarding.
Political campaign staff often keep hours way past what a volunteer with a 9-5 job has. It's a terrible life, terrible profession but it still draws in people that are willing to find meaning in being a workaholic and seen as "politically savvy".
Here is the politician’s Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jun-seok
This politician is basically a Korean knockoff of Charlie Kirk.
In his 40s, touring the country "debating" college kids. Selling middle-school level economic arguments that appeal to online community addicts.
Basically a spokesman for the "I tell it like it is" crowd.
When did it become cool for full grown adults to start dunking on college kids?
What is that about? Why do they generally always target college kids for that kind of thing instead of, hell I don't know, nursing homes or construction sites?
Colleges are full of debating societies, chapters of political parties, and budding social activists. Politicians just go where there's an audience.
Colleges are [often] public property unlike all the rest of what they mentioned.
If you go with your own microphone you can shout out and shut down the competition and game your own youtube clips, while the competition can't trespass you from the property.
It's really the ultimate cheap shot.
You basically have to be a moron to debate someone like Charlie Kirk in the first place because the game is rigged; he has the table, the microphone, the editing, the security and if you object to the rules there's nothing you can do but walk away. The moment you get the upper hand he can simply kill the mic, stop recording, and move on to the next guy and all the meanwhile claiming he's doing it on neutral terrain.
It's not like anyone is forcing the students to participate. If someone of voting age wants to engage someone on policy positions, then they accept the consequences. Likewise, if someone wants to engage with voters, then a college campus is a perfectly legitimate location.
The first rule of politics is that you don't want to get into fights with people who can beat you.
The second rule of it is that the right questions (have you stopped beating your wife?) can always be spun to make your opponent look like a complete idiot. Always control the framing of a situation.
The third rule of politics is that while intelligent people can see through charades #1 and #2, and if they aren't your target demographic, you don't need to give a shit about what they think.
which comes to the fourth rule of politics under democracy, which is that dumb, wrong, ignorant people each have one vote as well.
Koreans barely use Wikipedia so understandably that contains very little. They use Namuwiki, which is the much better link in this case (warning, machine translated): https://en.namu.wiki/w/%EC%9D%B4%EC%A4%80%EC%84%9D/%EB%85%BC...
Are there any other countries in the world that use a different wiki than Wikipedia as their main wiki, except for those where Wikipedia is banned? Korea seems like the only one.
These parts jumped out:
> He has been noted for his staunch antifeminism and support from South Korean idaenam (young men).
…
> He became popular in the 20s and 30s due to his opposing stance against political correctness such as "faux feminism," introducing reforms supporting meritocracy rather than outright equality of outcome.
I know only a little about Korean politics, enough to know that it’s very dramatic with wild stuff happening, but not really to understand it. From the outside, the politics around feminism there seems rather strange.
> Lee was an early proponent of the finger pinching conspiracy theory, a claim alleging hidden radical feminist messaging in advertisements
Speaking of strange.
> Lee's advocacy of merit-based processes such as exam scores, credentials, and measurable qualifications has been viewed by supporters as aligning with younger voters' expectations of fair competition.
I suppose all the political content was left out of the linked article, but it would be nice to have more context.
Also, looks like he’s at least somewhat technical:
> After graduating from Harvard University in 2007, Lee returned to Korea to perform military duties working as a software developer (alternative military service as industrial technical personnel) at 'Innotive', an image browsing software startup, a subsidiary of Nexon.
> After completing his national service, Lee prepared to start his own venture. He received funding from the venture startup program backed by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups on 5 August 2011 and founded Classe Studio: an ed-tech startup that developed personalized tutoring software and workplace training applications.
Whoa, that was an actual thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_pinching_conspiracy_the...
Weird diseases of a chronically online generation.
Was? Still is. Just two months for iPhone Air release, Apple edited hands out of their marketing images only in Korea, with the same images (including hands) being used in the rest of the world.
https://cm.asiae.co.kr/en/article/2025091309343951008
Interesting! The article talks mostly about how this all worked, but rarely about what was actually discussed. Which opinions of the party do you like or support?
Thanks for the question!
I’d prefer not to dive into policy positions here — the main focus of my post was the product-building process and what it was like to work behind the scenes.
You write:
> I want to see what it would look like if someone like this had more power and responsibility.
You were attracted to his campaign because of his policy positions, which most people see as dangerous and offensive.
He won't answer this because he knows it's abhorrent...
Great technical work, horrible candidate
the technical part was interesting but im not sure this is a candidate I'd want to be associated with publicly....i guess most English speakers just see "oh cool a candidate in a country i have parasocial relationship with through consumer pop culture" and not the horrific ugly side of Korean politics and some of its candidates, Lee in particular.
Neat. I have volunteered for political campaigns in the US before, but didnt find it rewarding.
OP, great work.
Commentors here are not from Korea, so maybe we should refrain from commenting about policy of a given candidate?
I really enjoyed your story, about how much tech can achieve. Technology really is a multiplier of effort. Amazing story.
> Commentors here are not from Korea
HN is an international place. Even just Silicon Valley itself is.
I don't like that particular presidential candidate but this was an interesting read. Thanks for the insight into the details of a campaign like this. I like your writing style.
I’m glad the story itself was enjoyable regardless of political alignment.
Thank you.
I thought this was a fascinating story. Also cool to see the technical details like AWS in there.
Thanks a lot! Glad you enjoyed it :)
Enjoyed reading this! Nice job in throwing together something polished in such a short time
Thank you! It was chaotic but fun to build something real under that time pressure.
Glad you enjoyed the read!
Thas was quite fun to read.
Thank you for sharing this short time of your (development) life, including all the reasons and logic on why and how.
Thank you so much for reading it. I’m really glad you enjoyed it.
Thanks for sharing! Really admire your bravery and trying new things.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it.
Man that’s a dope experience for sure! Congrats!
Soon to be a Netflix series
I’m deeply honored. Thank you.
That was a great read!
Thanks a lot! Glad you enjoyed it!
Its an interesting read for sure.
With those little takeaways in between like talking to users first to understand their requirements, building an mvp and shipping it as early as possible I was half expecting the article ending with the kind of startup lessons/wisdom you typically see here on HN.
But I'm really glad it wasnt. Not everything has to have a grand lesson or takeaway. I enjoyed reading your once in a lifetime experience.
Thanks for reading! I wanted to tell the story as it happened, rather than turning it into a set of principles or advice.
Happy to hear you enjoyed the ride :)
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I’m not familiar with the situation you’re referring to, but my experience was different.
From my side, the collaboration was positive and genuinely respectful.
Just wanted to share another perspective.
That isn’t necessarily “different”. Someone with truly horrifying opinions can be genuinely respectful and pleasant to work with, unless you fall into the wrong social group. (I know nothing about this guy’s opinions and don’t have much reason to care, either, I just feel the need to point out how people tend to overestimate the alignment between “nice people” and “people I agree with”. Much as they do the one between “nice people” and “people it’s worthwhile to listen to”, but that’s a story for another day.)
> Someone with truly horrifying opinions can be genuinely respectful and pleasant to work with, unless you fall into the wrong social group.
This is how psychopathic tyranny and bullying works "I'm nice and friendly so long as I get my way." I worked with a manager just like this. Super friendly guy until something doesn't go his way and he'll rip you apart in front of everyone. Also the kind of person who manipulates everyone into doing all his work for him while he spent most of his time looking at sports cars and tattooed women on line. Being overly nice and friendly in a position of power is a HUGE red flag for me because it inevitably is a front for manipulation.
That’s a thing, but not the thing I was talking about.
I was talking about the existence of people who are just nice and pleasant in the normal healthy manner in their ordinary lives, except they hold some opinions that you (or I, and possibly even not both of us) would find horrifying.
(That description actually applies to most people who have ever lived, but that they exist among our contemporaries is both more stark and more important. It makes me much more averse to being $NOTNICE to people who are $WRONG, because I don’t think I would want to live when people habitually were, and perhaps even thought it was virtuous to be, not nice to those they know are in some way morally wrong.)
@mananaysiempre I completely agree with your point.
By the sounds of it you're sharing the only perspective with any validity so far.
Thousands of serial rapists, murderers, and abusers also have the ability to be very positive, funny, and genuinely respectful to others when they choose to.
Would you like to share another perspective for them too?
Louis CK and Genghis Khan were both very effective in their respective lines of work and I'll die on that hill. And while I'm at it, Bill Clinton was an alright president (though the surrounding administration would likely be looked at as a bunch of snakes if not for the even worse Bush2 cabinet that followed).
Heck, Lincoln wanted to ship 'em back to Africa and Henry Ford was a moralizing anti-semite. Nobody is clean under a microscope.
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I can't find anything on his Wikipedia article for "English" or "lawyer." Can't we assume good faith?
OP is Korean, and will be using the Korean wiki article which ranks squarely first when Googling his name in Korea from inside Korea. Would you ask for the same in the US case with the paralles I drew? Of course not.
Who you work with certainly matters, but it does show that it's incredibly easy to get a foot in the door with a lot of political things.
People complain so much about politics as being this completely foreign and detached thing. But it's not if you put a bit of effort into it.
Well yeah of course it's not hard to get involved in politics, if the involvement is supporting people who are rich and powerful even if it is via the use of a more modest looking young mouthpiece. OP was supporting a conservative party, so basically going with the flow of a bunch of what a bunch of influential and rich people wanted as their pawn. If you have something that is of little consequence to the rich, like mothers against drunk driving or something, sure you can probably get it done as it's a token gesture and the powerful just pull strings to get out of those prosecution anyways.
If you look at actually trying to move the meter away from the status quo of the rich and powerful, rather than just repainting the pieces on the chess board, you see politicians like Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul found the whole thing rigged against them. Bernie was railroaded by the upper echelons of his own party and Ron Paul found his name magically erased from practically all the talks on the high level debates in the press to the point they would just skip over his name in the primary poll rankings.
It's incredibly easy to get involved with people like Mamdani or Seattle's Katie Wilson or so many others, if that's your political angle. The same is true on the other side.
We should be encouraging people to be more involved. That helps shape outcomes.
Katie Wilson's claim to fame is doing the bidding of rich and powerful King County Metro union gang / alias "ATU" for the purposes of using exploitive taxes to take from the population of Seattle (who have infamously been fleeced on massive gouged public transit construction costs) and reshuffle the money to cushy transit union lobby and their benefactors so their precious fiefdom would not be downsized. She then created a payroll tax to enrich rich contractors to create a tiny amount of "affordable housing" (buzz word used to enrich construction contractors at public cost) for a select few. She is basically a shining beacon of a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful as they are all too happy to be the benefactors of her tax policies that largely socialize costs and privatize the earnings albeit under a false flag of helping the poor.
Mamdani has been legally barred from the Presidency, the position we are discussing. He simply cannot. In fact, I suspect that is part of the reason why Trump has been so weirdly chum with him, he's simply not a threat for the presidency and never will be.
I wasn't discussing 'the presidency'. I'm saying it's easy to get involved - especially so for the local races that matter more to most people's lives in any case, where things like zoning and school curriculums are decided, or where money either gets invested to further fossil fuel infrastructure or for cleaner things like bikes, walking and transit.
>Well yeah of course it's not hard to get involved in politics, if the involvement is supporting people who are rich and powerful even if it is via the use of a more modest looking young mouthpiece.
I fail to see how it’d be any more difficult to get involved in politics for candidates that don’t meet this criteria.
You've quoted a single sentence then ignored the second paragraph where I explained things even Jon Stewart famously pointed out:
https://youtu.be/SqRt8Lbk5eY?t=387
It's easy to "fail to see" when you do not look.
We appear to be talking about different topics entirely. Your points seem to be about the effectiveness of political involvement, but the comment you’re replying to and the quote I posted relates to political involvement.
It’s encouraging to hear stories about how people get involved. We can learn about the process, network, and have an impact, even if that impact is incremental.
Edit: Clarified, added second paragraph
> Bernie was railroaded by the upper echelons of his own party
Bernie Sanders is an Independent, he doesn't have a party.
I see you've disregarded I used past tense in regard to his 'railroading' and then changed the tense, which I find underhanded. To bring it to a more plain level, he , at a prior time, under his more notable POTUS bids, ran on the Democratic ticket.
What's also worth pointing out is that the person Democratic upper echelon nominated, without even a primary, the last election was someone who did so abysmally in the popular primaries that she was at single digit percents yet magically got installed as the POTUS contendor without even a a vote. When you consider our voting system is set up that writing a candidate in is essentially throwing your vote away, a popular primary does not even happen (imperfect as it may be), in practice the two parties are operating as bureaucrats of in-party members who are giving you a choice of two people that represent the in-party elite albeit with some different kinds and volumes of scraps tossed to the general populace.
And for the most part, our founding fathers warned us of exactly this.
Do you have links to back up your claims?
The only context I have is that the OP helped a right-of-center political candidate in his country of origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jun-seok
Where does it talk about his use of English or his lawyers?
The bigger the loon, the more impressive the successes of campaign professionals.
Loons are also useful stepping stones. Use them for career progression and then cast them aside, you could even claim they abused you or took advantage of you and that you're excited to help <X> next who actually cares about the people.
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Not entirely sure how conservatism is related to either - DOGE is far removed from conservativsm, and the second topic I talked about is even less related to it.
Both are views by the politician from this politican who this entire article is about, sounds pretty related to me.
Very strange downvotes as well, not used to that here. I guess they'll remain now that above has been flagged.
Congrats OP, good story. Don't let any kneejerk negative responses from those who don't like his worldview get you down.