tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post1698873676933263724..comments2019-08-19T08:08:15.016-04:00Comments on Ask a Korean!: Korea's Nine Years of Darkness: Part II - the Lee Myung-bak YearsT.K. (Ask a Korean!)http://www.blogger.com/profile/07663422474464557214noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-71576531707688875422018-04-16T01:53:49.815-04:002018-04-16T01:53:49.815-04:00Thank you for the follow-up.Thank you for the follow-up.feld_doghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01361292441928316232noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-78861494661147186362018-04-15T07:24:23.938-04:002018-04-15T07:24:23.938-04:00(continued) The &#39;beef protests being about be...(continued)<br /><br />The &#39;beef protests being about beef&#39; perspective is in fact a political frame stemming from both the left and right, with different motivations. Even the conservative newspapers at the time correctly recognized that the protests were really about LMB in general, and not just beef. For example Chosun Ilbo called it &#39;대선불복 시위&#39; which means the protesters were out there because they disagreed with the very election of LMB itself - which OC, is a gross and malicious exaggeration. And the majority of the protesters were of the &#39;yuppie&#39; sort - a politically conscious group of young urbanites with good education, not the types that get easily swayed by &#39;fake news&#39; (relatively speaking OC). The problem is, the constant pounding from the conservative media who kept painting the protesters as &#39;commies (which is pretty much a political death sentence in Korea)&#39; made the protesters very defensive, so they ostensibly took an official stance that &quot;we&#39;re here just to protest against meat, we&#39;re not the lawless &#39;election deniers&#39; or &#39;commies&#39; as the conservatives are claiming us to be.&quot; This kind of stance caused a wide variety of disagreement among the protesters and the protests eventually faded off.<br />For the internet right-wing, however, this &#39;protest just for beef&#39; stance became a new political target to undermine the significance of the protests. They didn&#39;t want the underlying anti-authoritarian, pro-welfare, anti-privileged sentiments widely present among the protesters gain traction so they focused their firepower on making this stance the official &#39;internet history&#39;. It also had the side effect of making the protesters appear as irrational and easily riled people. But in reality, what the protests really were about was showing off &quot;people power&quot; against the wannabe dictator as if &quot;let&#39;s show that authoritarian a-hole what happens when you dare cross the people&#39;s will&quot;. I&#39;ve personally been at the protests and know many others who did as well, and few were there mainly for the &#39;beef&#39;.seaofsojuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05321479025582375735noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-2647481183530955732018-04-15T07:23:47.936-04:002018-04-15T07:23:47.936-04:00Sorry for writing quite a late reply, but since th...Sorry for writing quite a late reply, but since this is part of an ongoing series, I&#39;ll put it down anyway since I think it&#39;s a relevant point.<br /><br />Before I start, I&#39;ll state that I agree the reporting was quite overblown, but that was in part because the related protests were getting larger, which again, was already growing big for many different reasons other than beef. So IMO I think both you and I are right: the growing protests was one of the reasons the reportings were becoming more sensational, which in turn contributed to the growth of the protests (again, along with other reasons.)<br /><br />Now to my main point. It&#39;s easy to claim them as pseudo science in hindsight, but a lot of the questions raised at the time were legitimate enough to justify further investigation and reviewing the negotiation terms. Just because you managed to drive home safely without incident doesn&#39;t mean drunk driving isn&#39;t a problem. And LMB&#39;s way of putting business profits above everything else is a great example of political drunk driving.<br />His political drunk driving even wasn&#39;t one without incidents, too; in fact it had aplenty. For example the four rivers project which turned into an environmental disaster and money wasting pit, his relaxing of safety regulations and monitering which later becomes the cause of many horrible accidents and deaths (most notably the sinking of Sewol), his reduction of &#39;upper class&#39; taxes such as corporate and real estate which decreased the budget for welfare (and even then a bulk of this shrunken budget went into the pockets of greedy building contractors like his &#39;four river&#39; cronies) and widened the gap between the rich and poor... the list can go on and on. Seeing these tendencies, which started even before he officially sworn in, is it really that strange people were skeptical when he claimed the beef was perfectly safe? Maybe they were, maybe they weren&#39;t; but honestly I don&#39;t think he really cared.<br /><br />And since you mentioned the protests were a result of yellow journalism. Korean media is notoriously sensational all the time, the right much more so than the left I must add since they can get away with it a lot easier being allies with the power elite. The thing is, protests of this scale simply don&#39;t blow up over a singular peripheral issue like this. Honestly, if the beef negotiations happened under RMH do you think the protests would have grown this big? Even the anti-Korea US FTA or anti-iraq war protests, which was a much bigger deal back then and under even greater media controversy, were nowhere near as big as this one. Countless issues sensationalized by the media had come and gone over the years, but none of them had an effect like this. By your logic there should have been a lot of massive anti-MJI protests since the conservative media was sensationalizing every single possible flaw he may or may not even have for 5 ****ing years.seaofsojuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05321479025582375735noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-86275811376185075792018-04-06T22:23:28.300-04:002018-04-06T22:23:28.300-04:00No mention at all of the absurd pseudo-scientific ...No mention at all of the absurd pseudo-scientific BS about madcow disease either cynically or ignorantly foisted on the public by media and left-wing politicians? I&#39;m no fan of LMB and I agree that the optics of the U.S. beef deal were bad...but let&#39;s call out rabid yellow journalism for what it is. And that stuff played a big role in stoking the protests.feld_doghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01361292441928316232noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-72856961778155747672018-03-31T09:28:52.355-04:002018-03-31T09:28:52.355-04:00Saying the beef protests were about beef is like s...Saying the beef protests were about beef is like saying people at a tea party is there to drink tea. It was merely a title, and people joined them for all sorts of reasons. And LMB certainly gave out plenty to complain about in a very short amount of time. People wanted to protest, and since the &#39;beef&#39; protests happened to be the biggest protest going on at the time, they just jumped on the bandwagan. Otherwise such a relatively &#39;minor&#39; issue wouldn&#39;t have blown out to such a grand scale. <br /><br />There was already a widespread discontent among progressive-leaning people against the LMB administration, who was aggressively pressing a &#39;corporate fascist&#39; agenda right off the bat. You can&#39;t discuss the events leading up to the beef protests without mentioning ‘강부자 정권 (&#39;Government of rich Gangnam residents&#39; ; a coined word to show the general nature of LMB administration)&#39; - pretty much all of his policies - e.g. reducing corporate taxes (and raising indirect taxes in return), raising exchange rates, all sorts of tricks to stimulate real estate prices, etc... were consistently about benefitting the rich, and this was when polarization of wealth was already one of the biggest concerns of society. And of course, he was pushing all of these things in style - authoritarian style. His desire to control the media was blatant even before he was elected president (he was a Chaebol CEO after all, and Chaebols has always wielded a huge influence over the Korean press), he repetitively displayed contempt against political negotiations as a waste of time (an attitude which will become the biggest source of public resentment regarding the beef negotiations), and heck, the very first thing he did after his election was changing the title of president-elect to 당선인(當選人) from 당선자(當選者), for a ridiculous reason that &#39;者&#39; has a disparaging meaning in the dictionary (where in everyday usage it just means &#39;person&#39;.) <br /><br />There&#39;s a reason the most popular song at the protests was “Constitution Article 1 : Korea is a Democratic Republic”. People joined the beef protests largely because they were concerned about the direction LMB was heading into - he was seen as an authoritarian figure leading the country towards a libertarian paradise - or in other words, corporate fascism. seaofsojuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05321479025582375735noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-71966767924152471202018-03-30T20:13:59.467-04:002018-03-30T20:13:59.467-04:001. LHC is not a liberal. He was the conservative p...1. LHC is not a liberal. He was the conservative presidential candidate twice in a row (and lost twice.)<br /><br />2. Farmers were adamantly against the FTA to begin with, because they had the most to lose. LMB admin could have assigned a special liaison for the farmers&#39; group to keep offering them alternatives to prepare for the market opening. That&#39;s one of the several ways.T.K. (Ask a Korean!)https://www.blogger.com/profile/07663422474464557214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36405856.post-33799258309640314922018-03-30T08:13:53.890-04:002018-03-30T08:13:53.890-04:00A couple of (hopefully quick) questions. First, I...A couple of (hopefully quick) questions.<br /><br />First, I&#39;m probably missing something obvious here, but why would you assume that the margin of loss would be worse without Lee Hoi-chang? Both LHC and Chung come from the liberal side, so unless more than half of LHC&#39;s supporters stayed home or crossed sides it seems the magin should have shrunk if LHC had not run. (Probably not all LHC supporters would have voted for Chung, but if they had the margin would have shrunk to 7%.)<br /><br />Second, obviously the Lee Myung-bak&#39;s administration obviously handled the mad cow protests all wrong. But what should they have done differently? IOW, what would a competent and caring administration have done to resolve the May 2008 protests before they grew any further?FarFromKoreahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04435256769410051796noreply@blogger.com