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Comment by cdiamand | Hacker News Reader

Can someone familiar with South Korean politics give us some context for what is happening here?

1. Very low trust in politicians after it was revealed former president Park Geun-hye was secretly a crypto-Christian cult member despite claiming to be atheist.

2. South Korea has a bizarre large-scale "gender war" going on that extents into mainstream society. Imagine the Western online MRA/redpill/incel vs. radfem circles but as core identities in national politics.

For some reason a high-trust society has decided to become an ultra-low-trust society where trust is being eradicated all the way down to the nuclear family.

crypto-Christian cult

Had to look that up and wasn’t disappointed…

Seemingly nothing to do with Bitcoin either :-)

I was disappointed b/c it was not clear. OP could have instead stated:

"...former president Park Geun-hye was secretly a religious cult member."

which is shorter and clearer.

But "crypto" is Greek, everybody loves subrosa communication.

> Imagine the Western online MRA/redpill/incel vs. radfem circles but as core identities in national politics.

I have zero idea about SK, but ... "woke vs not woke" has become very much a core identity part in Western politics. The last US election has proven that, and what's going on here in Germany especially with Markus Söder isn't funny any more either [1], we got elections looming in about three months.

[1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2024-11/markus-soede...

In the context of western politics, "woke vs not woke" is just today's name for progressive (or even status quo) vs reactionary politics. What's being referred to in SK is somewhat more specific to incels and the 4B movement (which is more radical than how westerners have been using it).

I've read in multiple places that 4B is just an online thing, maybe a couple of thousand women, that has blown up in western news media and not a real life thing in Korea.

you are correct. Western news media wants it to be bigger than it is right now, because if you check the last month or so, the only people ever talking about 4B movement are western liberals and hmm i wonder why Western Media outlets are obsessed with talking about 4B since trump became into power. Dubious motives.

Trump hasn't come into power yet. He doesn't take office until near the end of January.

Trump would've won even if his platform had "lets add fluoride to the water to turn the frogs gay".

Pretty much every "Western" election voted out the incumbent due to their either poor economy or poor messaging about the economy. The swing-PA voter didn't vote out Biden because their daughter was dominating trans-kids in sports; they want grocery prices down.

It was the religious thing and not all the other scandals that caused the low trust? That's fascinating!

Koreans don't do things by halves.

Is there anywhere good I could read about that "gender war"? I've heard about it before, but usually only narrativized as one-sided (e.g. discussing feminist policies)

Re: 2. The "gender war" is greatly exaggerated and much astroturfed. Marriage rates have been dropping for decades because Koreans in their 20s and 30s cannot maintain the economic expectations of their parents. (Korean norms require a condo before marriage, when the going rate for condos is 30x median salary. Young people usually start their careers at below-median salaries.)

The way the "gender war" appeared was that Yoon was more popular among men, and this was reported in the international news, then Korean news reporters reported on the international news, legitimizing the story of a gender gap.

This primed Korean journalists to look for further signs of conflict between the genders, which were then amplified out of proportion by international journalists looking for a story. Korean journalists see the international stories as more trustworthy, and now they report as if there is a gender war.

There is a heavy selection bias among journalists to look for spicy gender stories, where the actual participants are the fringe of an online "movement". The Korean press club doesn't seem to understand or account for these biases. In real life there isn't much "war".

Corruption probe, a weird cult, and now apparently a coup d’etat in the making.

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