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.
> ... 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 :)
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> I’m not familiar with the situation you’re referring to
While HN guidelines ask for assumption of good faith, you're making it impossible to do so. For the American readers, this is comparable to someone writing an article saying that they DM'd Trump, ended up personally chatting with him and building his core campaign, then claiming they're unfamiliar with the "grab them by the pussy" affair and with his (at the time) friendship with Musk. Impossible to believe. You built the core campaign for a presidential candidate whose wiki article you've never read, and whose viewpoints you don't know? Sure.
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.
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.
> ... 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 :)
[dead]
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!
Then it's not for you. Doesn't mean only unemployed people find something like this not just desirable, but actually rewarding.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Great technical work, horrible candidate
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...
Neat. I have volunteered for political campaigns in the US before, but didnt find it rewarding.
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.
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!
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 :)
Man that’s a dope experience for sure! Congrats!
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.
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 :)
Soon to be a Netflix series
I’m deeply honored. Thank you.
That was a great read!
Thanks a lot! Glad you enjoyed it!
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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.
@mananaysiempre I completely agree with your point.
> I’m not familiar with the situation you’re referring to
While HN guidelines ask for assumption of good faith, you're making it impossible to do so. For the American readers, this is comparable to someone writing an article saying that they DM'd Trump, ended up personally chatting with him and building his core campaign, then claiming they're unfamiliar with the "grab them by the pussy" affair and with his (at the time) friendship with Musk. Impossible to believe. You built the core campaign for a presidential candidate whose wiki article you've never read, and whose viewpoints you don't know? Sure.
I can't find anything on his Wikipedia article for "English" or "lawyer." Can't we assume good faith?
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.
By the sounds of it you're sharing the only perspective with any validity so far.
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.
[flagged]
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.