When I was about 9 years old this guy came to our school and showed us a slide show of pictures from this country that used to be Zaire 
back then, under the Mobutu regime. Some of them were of shops with the windows busted out and stuff. He explained that the army came and stole everything. I think to myself "WTF do you do when the army is stealing? You can't call the cops." That's the moment when baby Redactor started trying to understand this stuff.
Related situation in Korea today. I have no idea what the frick is going to happen here. Who do you call when the Secret Service is fighting the cops? Nobody wants to talk about this but it could be like boomer times (I mean "boomer" in the sense of me, the 1980s this time) where the army decides it. They refused to follow Yun's totally psycho order for martial law but after that the opposition went into full psycho mode too reminding everyone that they're all extremely corrupt, Communist, and probably from Jeolla-do. Seriouspost: My guess is that the army won't get involved but the threat of the army getting involved will get one side or the other to back down before it comes to that. And it probably won't be mentioned in the media because that would be embarrassing.
So what's gonna happen?
The ROK army is a conscript army. Every male in the nation is supposed to serve. (In practice these days half of them are draft dodgers, but that's not relevant here except it pisses me off.) If you're an r-slur (virtually certain since you're reading these words right now) you might think "conscript" is a bad thing. You're imagining hordes of ziggers charging through an open field because somebody said there's vodka on the other side. That's not what it's like. It's a normal part of growing up that everyone does. Everyone has done this since 1950s. Your dad did this. Your grandfather was in the war. The entire national identity is about the boy in the army and his mother caring about him. Forget the "Independence Fighters" and Yi Sun Sin and turtle ships and whatever. This is what Korea is about and the fact that some white guy is saying this so brazenly proves it must be true. What I'm trying to say is that the ROK Army basically embodies the nation of Korea. (Note that I've repeatedly said stuff to draw out any Korean lurkers to get pissed off at me and possibly share with us..)
Anyway there's a bunch of old generals making decisions now. They're constrained because if they give an illegal order, zoomer Korean troops will just frick off and play Starcraft. But the leftoids are basically trying to bite defeat out of the jaws of victory here. They're really really overplaying their hand, acting like the right-wing butthole being in trouble somehow makes people like the left-wing butthole. Incredibly stupid, but that's everything the Korean left has done my entire life.
Redactor prediction: I think something will happen this week. No idea which side. This is gonna be decided by a bunch of 60-year old ajussis in smoke-filled rooms playing 3-dimensional chess. That kind of thing is totally opaque to a person who is far from fluent in Korean.
Anyway, Korean bros and sisters I'll be praying for you.
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Isn't a huge part of their social
issues caused by the conscript 
army? The boys go off for a couple 
years then come back to benefits the girls 
didn't have. Then the girls 
helped make sure those benefits were removed and the guys are now 2 years behind 
due to conscription so they're pissed.
Or something
of that nature 
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Some lurker out there could probably answer this question easily.
As an outsider:
That was more of an issue in the past. They aren't getting sent to Vietnam these days.
Keep in mind that this is a really small country. Very different from the US military. They're going back home and visiting their parents on a regular basis.
The thing about losing years of your life: Yeah. This is the key point that the old man was pissed off about, not getting shot at by commies.
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Sure what I was discussing were business
benefits after serving
To my knowledge
men were fast tracked to leadership (besides the typical connections and whatnot) because it was a kind of off the table 
benefit of being ex military 
Women obviously thought
they were being overlooked when they've got 2 years seniority on these guys that're now their boss. This lead to mutual resentment in the business 
world 
that spilled over into the personal lives
All of this is a huge oversimplification but you get the gist
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In the generation after the war there wasn't any Confucian bullshit like Malcom Gladwell made a million dollars orientalizing. Your social status was what rank you had in the war. I don't know the right term but basically you can tell people wtf to do and they do it.
Korean women in the 1960s-1970s: In their culture the woman is the one spends money so women were doing real estate deals.
Not sure what timeframe we're talking about. In most of the 20th Century men and women weren't competing for jobs. There were jobs for men and jobs for women. And the kind of labor people are doing in Korea is changing really fast.
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