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Opinion

Columnists

Hell Joseon comes home to roost

This past week, Lee Jun-seok, 36, became the youngest ever to take the leadership of a main political party. Lee will now lead the conservative main opposition People Power Party (PPP), as it tries to win back the presidency next year. While Lee's been around for about 10 years ever since he was recruited by former President Park Geun-hye basically as window dressing for her appeal to younger voters, he has held his own since then against much more experienced and well-heeled politicians. Nevertheless, nobody expected a Lee victory this time around, especially against two well-entrenched vet...

2021-06-13 17:08

Les Miserables Coreennes

If you think I am talking about the famous novel by Victor Hugo, you are wrong. Rather, I am channeling another famous French man in Nostradamus by predicting the future state of Korea circa 2050: a country filled with a bunch of miserable, lonely old people surviving on alternative facts and conspiracy theories.

2021-05-30 17:05

Metastasis of moral judgment

In northern Virginia, where I live, everything was normal on Tuesday. Coming back from a quick errand on Tuesday afternoon, my wife stopped by a local gas station to fill up. Nothing was amiss. By Tuesday evening, however, cars were lining up around the block to fill up not only their cars, but all manners of tanks, drums, and other creative storage vessels. Within hours, most of the gas stations near my neighborhood had hastily handwritten notes taped on their pumps, apologetically informing customers that they had run out of gasoline.

2021-05-16 17:20

Academic wokeness, Korean style

In a 2008 article titled, “Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills,” the New York Times wrote about how successful specialized South Korean high schools had been in developing high-performing students geared to getting accepted into top Ivy League schools in the U.S. How successful were they? If SAT scores are a key performance indicator, then, “Their (Daewon) average combined SAT score was 2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the average combined score at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school, is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math scores.”

2021-05-02 17:27

Raging helplessness of Sewol

My social media page was covered with remembrances and self-condolences about the Sewol tragedy that happened seven years ago this week. I am sure that I am not an exception. Sewol occupies an outsized place in recent Korean history. It's only a slight exaggeration that the spectacular downfall of President Park Geun-hye's administration began with the sinking of the Sewol ferry and the recriminations following the government's botched and opaque response to the sinking. Who can forget the questions about the seven hours that Park was absent in the immediate aftermath?

2021-04-18 17:13

'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter'

This is the movie that came to mind when I first heard about the whole brouhaha surrounding the cancellation of “Joseon Exorcist,” a K-drama that took extensive liberties with historical figures in the early decades of the 1392-1910 Joseon Kingdom. While I understand that King Sejong is one of the most revered figures in Korean history, Abraham Lincoln is probably not too far behind in the annals of American history. Yet, the movie about Abraham Lincoln hunting down and killing vampires was panned by the poor execution of the movie and not by the patently false premise. How is Sejong killing...

2021-04-04 17:56

Fabulous (not) in Seoul

I always found the hundredth monkey phenomenon interesting. It's this theory that there is a critical tipping point (i.e. 100th monkey) that would trigger a new behavior or idea that would spread almost instantaneously throughout the population. It also reminds me of the popular saying that Korea has a “Pot Characteristic.” No, I don't mean the green stuff that you smoke. It means that the Korean public opinion heats up quickly, just like a cooking pot does, only to cool down just as quickly. In other words, it speaks to the tendency of Korea to collectively jump on a trend or issue really q...

2021-03-21 18:51

Bend it toward justice

In his “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” speech given at the National Cathedral on March 31, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King uttered the famous words, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

2021-03-07 17:56

The resentment trap

In his talk, “Inequality and hierarchy give life its purpose,” Jordan Peterson asserts that hierarchy is a state that allows people to set goals so that they can climb up to the next rung in the system. Further, hierarchy is necessarily unequal since you can't have an upper-trajectory achievement journey unless there is inherent inequality between one achievement milestone and another. As an analogy, ladders can only exist if there are gaps in between the rungs.

2021-02-21 15:51

GameStop populism

Remember when everyone invested in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies a few years back as bitcoin was rising rapidly towards $10K and above? If it was an investment craze for the rest of the world, it was a veritable social phenomenon in Korea driven by tech savvy young people subscribing to a popular narrative of sudden wealth and prosperity they could call their own.

2021-02-07 17:49

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