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The gradual extinction of softness

hippocampusmagazine.com

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Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#61

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#62

Post by emodendroket »

> I’ve often wondered why, in a poor country where women work as hard as men to feed their children, feminine softness is so highly prized. As for me, I no longer consider it a valuable attribute.

Isn't this its own answer? It's prized precisely because it is unattainable for most.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#63

Post by hirenj »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #4

Such a good read. Gonna have to keep an eye out for her memoir. There's starting to be a flourishing of SE Asian voices with Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ocean Vuong. I hope more come, especially more women. Hopefully more cinema too; it'd be wonderful to have responses to the America centric and sympathetic portrayals of Vietnam.

Coincidentally, I read this amusing story about Ocean Vuong responding to students who were perplexed by his writing this very morning:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/11/what-...

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#64

Post by senderista »

romwell wrote: post #45
pphysch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much like the Iraq War created the Islamic State.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#65

Post by telesilla »

romwell wrote: post #37
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…

It's remarkable how nearly everything you just wrote applies to Belarus (with small changes): >Pol Pot and his government were responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries. Adolf Hitler and his government were responsible for the death of 1/4 Belarussian population (a third of them Jews) in a short span of time, not counting deaths fro…

Come and See remains the most horrific film I've seen. Critically important how it shows the brutality of that war.

The Act of Killing is the most brutal documentary I've seen and in fact could not finish it. On Indonesia's executioners of communists.

For a take on the Cambodian travesty see The Killing Fields.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#66

Post by idontwantthis »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #58
idontwantthis wrote: post #46

I’m an American who’s lived in Cambodia for 3 years. Feel free to AMA.

Were you working in Cambodia on their wages (as opposed to remotely for more money), and if so how is that like?

Working remotely for American wages. Local software devs might make $600/month. Won’t get more than $2000/month as a foreigner either.

There’s some tech NGOs that probably pay more, but I don’t know how much more.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#67

Post by anticodon »

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…

Pol Pot came to power due to USA backed coup. USA spies tried to kill king of Cambodia multiple times but failed. So, they taught and financed guerillas to oust the king by means of military coup and install a pro-USA government.

Pro-USA government didn't last long, and Pol Pot took its place.

And, BTW, the most well hidden secret is that USA supported Pol Pot and even provided financial support to his government.

USA: making a better world through revolutions, coups and military invasions for more than a century!

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#68

Post by anticodon »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #43
gunfighthacksaw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious.

How many exactly? West operate lies of notorious propagandists like Solzhenitsyn (which never had access to any statistics).

E.g. in the books published on the west you can find absurd numbers like "Stalin sent two millions to the camp X", and later historians prove that you can't place more than 1200 persons in camp X, and there weren't enough houses even for the guards for such absurd amount of people and there weren't roads or waterways to transport that many people, and there're no even you know payment sheets for the number of guards required to guard two millions prisoners.

But the West continue to regurgitate the same old lies over and over because who would want to know the truth? The best truth is that USSR was evil, so every tiny piece of evidence saying otherwise should be well hidden from public.

It's not like in the contemporary Russia there are powers willing to open that truth either.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#69

Post by ogma »

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.

Indeed, and as usual the truth on HN is at the bottom.

The average age of a Khmer Rouge soldier was 17 years old and they were radicalized by what had happened to their villages during the American bombing campaign under the Lon Nol government, and then they were supplied with weapons by the Chinese. At least 100,000 Cambodians died from American bombings with many estimates being even higher. Many Cambodians starved during this period.

Add to that the level of regional instability with what had happened in Vietnam and Laos, and it's easy to see how some sort of catastrophe was very likely. Before this Cambodia was relatively developed and stable, and Phnom Penh especially was a phenomenal city, but the conflict incited huge tensions between the established powers and those residing in relatively poor areas near the border and in the center of the country.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#70

Post by anticodon »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #43
gunfighthacksaw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, one closely guarded secret nobody cares about: currently amount of people in prisons in USA is almost equal to the number of people sent to prisons and camps by Stalin.

So, who's more evil?

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