Live data from Hacker News

South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

theguardian.com

41–50 of 175 posts

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#41

One of the bedrocks of a startup economy is that the rule of law applies equally to the powerful and to the less powerful. We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law. I applaud South Korea for pursuing this conviction and achieving a suitable penalty for the breakdown of law at the highest levels. It's quite admirable, as admirable as the UK charging the Kin…

>One of the bedrocks of a startup economy is that the rule of law applies equally to the powerful and to the less powerful.

Yes, as the saying goes, the law equally forbids and punishes the poor and the rich if they sleep in the park or under a bridge.

>We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law.

US has nowhere near "equal application of law", and yet it has these companies.

In fact, if it did have "equal application of law", those companies would have dead, as they get away with things that, if a smaller company or private business did, they'd have the book thrown at them.

We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#42

South Korea is a very young democracy with fresh memories of what it was like under dictatorships. The people very much understand the price it took to get to that point and is not complacent in stomping out wannabe autocrats.

Okay at the same time they had the daughter of one of those autocrats fairly recently as PM, who then resigned due to influence peddling by a religious advisor (and did crazy things like her daughter didn’t go to class yet got amazing grades because her teachers were made to do her work, which she posted about on social media.)

They’re very much not over those players.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#43

South Korea is a very young democracy with fresh memories of what it was like under dictatorships. The people very much understand the price it took to get to that point and is not complacent in stomping out wannabe autocrats.

Why is his favorability rating so high?

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#44
post #33
post #3

This is the correct way to handle a former president who tries to mount an anti-democratic insurrection.

He'll eventually get pardoned like presideng Park and the Samsung crown prince , Lee Jae-yong. But he'll probably do 10 or 15 years anyway.

He's 65, so that might be long enough to be for life (based on life expectancy).

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#45

This is how justice actually works. Meanwhile, the US is comparable to a banana republic where you can count on lying and injustice, also a mockery of real justice, being the things that work.

[flagged]

It depends whether the jailing and imprisonment is arbitrary or for cause. Any attempt of mounting an insurrection, however harebrained, 100% qualifies as valid reason for a lifetime sentence.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#46
One interesting firestorm that he started was over doctors.

Yoon Suk Yeol did the basic math of “if our population isn’t having babies and people are getting older, how much medical capacity will we need?”

The results—due to artificial caps on medical students (like the AMA does in the US)—mathed out to: “oh, shit.”

He decided to raise the caps by a lot. The medical establishment freaked out, since that would lower salaries, and went on strike. Doctors, residents, and medical students didn’t show up for months. He had to call in doctors from the army to fill in.

Was a hostile takeover and subversion the right response to frustration over political obstacles? No. But he ran into some very real and frustrating realities (or collective refusal to admit to them.)

Not sure he needed to table-flip into full autocrat, though.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#47

[flagged]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(essay)

"In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should prioritize their conscience over compliance with unjust laws, asserting that passive submission to government authority enables injustice."

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#48
post #3

This is the correct way to handle a former president who tries to mount an anti-democratic insurrection.

It also illustrates what a real insurrection attempt looks like. [1] He declared martial law, suspended and prevented their Congress equivalent from meeting (and directed the military to enforce such), ordered the immediate arrest of numerous high level politicians with a goal of arresting hundreds, issued a declaration that all media and publications had to be approved before publication, ordered the power+water for…

How did they stop him?

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#50

This is how justice actually works. Meanwhile, the US is comparable to a banana republic where you can count on lying and injustice, also a mockery of real justice, being the things that work.

Depends on what you mean by justice. In the US, the law is now merely a tool used to give privileges to the in-group at the cost of the out-group. For the in-group it protects them from harm but never constrains their actions. For the out-group the law never protects them from harm, but constrains them. In the US, federal prosecutions are ordered by the in-group via public social media posts, rather than by professio…

This era we'd like to return to, when did it end?
Post reply on HN