I really thought we'd emerge from covid with an appreciation of the frailty of life. But Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan... the causal dehumanization of refugees... it's hard not to feel like we're all just bodies for the elite meat grinder.

Yeah lol this is one of the big issues with sg currently: housing is still terrifyingly expensive despite subsidies and stuff, and that's in spite of the increasing building that's going on

Something something love or hate deng for his economic reforms but in 1989 he sent troops into Beijing from outside of Beijing because he knew they would be less Likely to side with the people of Beijing
The people's liberation army, friends

"god damn we fucked up the land reform in the 50s" I think you need to accept that a communist state is still a state and a state is still capable of horrendous violence
Mind you this isn't some like anarchist this is vo Nguyen giap there

In any case I don't really want to hand it to Chiang Kai fucking shek for bleeding the IJA out during world war 2, but it's the historical fact that the kmt did the lions share of the fighting lol

Engage with the thing and not simply "it's good but if you say it's not good who cares we live in the present you are stupid for making it a thing"

I suppose being of this time and being SGrean has made me much more skeptical of a Left Wing Golden Age in some ways. Was the MCP like good lol (commenters note: it failed at some pretty important things!)
I agree it doesn't matter but that needs a sort of Jose Sison-esque ability to try and

But I think idk Americans or Europeans have this very weird thing going on, and if you don't care about cults of personality from a million years ago, then it's a weird thing to not be able to confront this ambiguity in the people in history themselves no?