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The gradual extinction of softness

hippocampusmagazine.com

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Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#41

Post by romwell »

pphysch wrote: post #34
thanhhaimai wrote: post #16

Pol Pot and his government was responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries. A lot of Cambodians migrated to Vietnam (including the author of this wonderful piece). The history about this period is interesting if you're looking for a good read. It's not being widely taught, even during Vietnamese K12 education. https://en.m.wikipedia.o…

Not defending Pol Pot, but attributing mass death solely to his regime is a bit misleading when it corresponded with a hostile foreign power carpet bombing the region with hundreds of millions of bombs, many still unexploded, over a decade or so.

Not defending the US bombing of Cambodia, but it's a bit misleading to bring this up without quantifying that there's at least an order of magnitude difference in fatalities between the two.

What's noteworthy, though, is that the Khmer Rouge was fighting against the puppet government installed by the hostile foreign power; and that the king displaced in the coup sided with Khmer Rouge as a result, which meant quite a bit in terms of support.

That's to say, the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would have not been there, if not for the US meddling. You don't have to take my word - take it directly from them[1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-rouge/khmer-roug...

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#42

Post by nine_k »

eru wrote: post #21
bsanr wrote: post #18

It's frustrating to me that my potential enjoyment of this piece, lauded as it is by several of the comments that are already here, was poisoned by the introduction. I imagine that >I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parents’ house in Battambang, Cambodia. will come off as innocuous to many, but my immediate impression was, "Wait... like a plantation?". I'm not intimately familiar with C…

> It's a sort of anger at the lionization of Western, Capitalist claims and ideals, at the whitewashing of the means by which they were asserted, at the implacable sneers towards anything in opposition to this story of glory. Alas, capitalism isn't all that popular in the west anymore. Perhaps you need to look further afield to find its champions.

Not "in the West" but rather "in Western media and universities, especially outside STEM". By no coincidence, these are the most vocal minorities.

Capitalism is not cool with novelty-seeking intellectual elites anymore. But nothing established is; the purpose of these elites is to look for and research alternative ways. Most if these ways are detrimental or are dead ends. But so are most mutations that drive evolution forward.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#43

Post by jokethrowaway »

gunfighthacksaw wrote: post #35
TeeMassive wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pol Pot and his government was responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time I always found arguments that makes the point that "X is responsible for more deaths than Y" weak and invalid when they fail to mention the time frame.

Yea, I think when comparing the deadliness of ideologies, the true measure should be something like mortality/(time x population) For example, the Nazis killed 11M over 12 years and the German population was about 70M in 1939. Thus, their deadliness is 11/(70x12) ~ 1/70 The USSR killed 40M (a middling estimate) over about 70 years and the Soviet population was 170M in 1939, so their deadliness is 40/(170x80) ~ 1/340…

I wouldn't call deaths in the USSR "accidental". Starving and executing kulaks was no accident, they were punishing the rich. People worked to death in the gulags were not an accident.

They may have killed less people per year compared to Nazis but that doesn't make them less deadly. In terms of sheer human loss for society, they were 4 times worse than the Nazis (according to your estimate). If you consider how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious.

I've always considered Nazis and communists to be in the same bucket: authoritarian killers.

Communists often get a moral pass somehow, unlike Nazi and I wonder if it's because most schools and history teachers are biased; they teach about Nazi concentration camps but don't teach about gulags. I had to read books and books in school about Nazis and I didn't even know Solzhenitsyn existed.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#44

Post by pphysch »

romwell wrote: post #41
pphysch wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not defending Pol Pot, but attributing mass death solely to his regime is a bit misleading when it corresponded with a hostile foreign power carpet bombing the region with hundreds of millions of bombs, many still unexploded, over a decade or so.

Not defending the US bombing of Cambodia, but it's a bit misleading to bring this up without quantifying that there's at least an order of magnitude difference in fatalities between the two. What's noteworthy, though, is that the Khmer Rouge was fighting against the puppet government installed by the hostile foreign power; and that the king displaced in the coup sided with Khmer Rouge as a result, which meant quite a…

They can not be so easily delineated. Carpet bombing = loss of homes and farmland = general socioeconomic crisis = extreme political instability. And very much by design.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#45

Post by romwell »

pphysch wrote: post #44
romwell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not defending the US bombing of Cambodia, but it's a bit misleading to bring this up without quantifying that there's at least an order of magnitude difference in fatalities between the two. What's noteworthy, though, is that the Khmer Rouge was fighting against the puppet government installed by the hostile foreign power; and that the king displaced in the coup sided with Khmer Rouge as a result, which meant quite a…

They can not be so easily delineated. Carpet bombing = loss of homes and farmland = general socioeconomic crisis = extreme political instability. And very much by design.

I agree, I just was pointing out that the death toll from the bombing wasn't even the worst consequence. Pol Pot was, in effect, the largest bomb dropped on Cambodia.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#47

Post by bsanr »

friedman23 wrote: post #39
bsanr wrote: post #18

It's frustrating to me that my potential enjoyment of this piece, lauded as it is by several of the comments that are already here, was poisoned by the introduction. I imagine that >I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parents’ house in Battambang, Cambodia. will come off as innocuous to many, but my immediate impression was, "Wait... like a plantation?". I'm not intimately familiar with C…

Your comment is amazing. You read that article written by someone that narrowly escaped genocide and your mind immediately goes to what is essentially communist propaganda. You don't express anger once at the people involved in orchestrating the killing, you don't assign any blame to the actual ideology that was used to justify mass slaughter. Instead you just spout a programmed response. That definitely scares the s…

You have a curious definition of the words "vicious" and "radicalized". Would you agree or disagree that characterizing Communist regimes as such, within a Communist regime, would have gotten me killed?

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#49

Post by bsanr »

tomlockwood wrote: post #27
bsanr wrote: post #18

It's frustrating to me that my potential enjoyment of this piece, lauded as it is by several of the comments that are already here, was poisoned by the introduction. I imagine that >I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parents’ house in Battambang, Cambodia. will come off as innocuous to many, but my immediate impression was, "Wait... like a plantation?". I'm not intimately familiar with C…

This was at least as beautifully written as the piece itself. Bravo, and a point well made.

Much appreciated.
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