How two men survived a prison where 12,000 were killed | Hacker News Reader

How two men survived a prison where 12,000 were killed

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36 pointsLibertatea63 comments

Without the help from China at that time, no way Polpot could get that far. After Vietnamese troops helped capture Phnom Penh (and gave back to Kampuchean United Front), China decided to invaded the Vietnam-China border in order to "punish" Vietnam. Yet so far, only Cambodia publicly supports China in their claim of almost the whole East Sea. Disclaimer: I am Vietnamese!

This post is somewhat misleading. China invaded Vietnam (1979) AFTER Vietnam invaded Cambodia (1978). The genocide was pretty much done by that point. Polpot was on friendly term with North Vietnam during the Vietnam war, so it is unfair to blame China for the raise of polpot on China and make Vietnam the good guy in the whole mass.

> An estimated 90% of artists, intellectuals and teachers were killed

This is having the longest-lasting reverberation through the country - Pol Pot all but eliminated the local human capital.

50% of Cambodians are under 22 years old. There aren't enough teachers for this population boom. Kids go to school part-time in shifts - half in the morning, half in the afternoon. There are no jobs waiting for them after their schooling is completed. They have a wave of people getting older who they can't educate and can't employ.

I visited Tuol Sleng in 2007. It was very disquieting to walk past row after row and room after room filled with boards holding thousands upon thousands of pictures, and realize that every single one of those people was murdered right there, in that building.

it is interesting that when such things happen, the society at the time thinks it is ok, while later it comes to understanding that it was evil. Which begs the question - which things happening today will be considered evil tomorrow, and we or our descendants will be appalled at our implicit or explicit approval of those things today.

I suspect eating meat will someday be viewed in this way. I say this as someone who eats anything that moves... ;-)

Perhaps far future, but I don't see this happening in < 100 years.

Expanding...

meat:vegetarianism :: gas:electric cars

Meat is a dense carrier of protein and other nutrients (energy) and we need to build up infrastructure, break down inertial barriers, and have some technological breakthroughs before the current things secedes to the better thing.

It will take exactly as long as it takes for lab grown meat to become viable. When that happens it becomes very easy for the general population to view eating meat from animals as evil.

Morally speaking, I don't see a difference between eating plants and animals. Both are alive. Just because plants express their distress in ways that don't trigger an emotional response in humans doesn't make it morally superior.

Environmentally speaking, yes I agree, eating plants is a more sustainable practice /rant

>Morally speaking, I don't see a difference between eating plants and animals. Both are alive.

Really? I mean, people are alive as well. Is that on the same moral level as well? This just seems like a very specious argument...

You made it specious, putting words in their mouth. They claim that, of the things they eat, plants and animals are morally equivalent. You added "but People!"

There is a HitchHikers Guide restaurant that doesn't server vegetables - because intelligent vegetable people outlawed it. They just eat sentient meat animals that offer themselves to the patrons. They even kill themselves.

The argument was that because both are alive they are morally equivalent. This is specious because humans are also alive, and are clearly not equivalent to either unless you accept that it would be acceptable to kill and eat humans. It's not as stupid an argument as "but People!", it's pointing out that they are neglecting other variables, such as the capacity for experience.

> They just eat sentient meat animals that offer themselves to the patrons. They even kill themselves.

If a human were to do this today, we would question their mental health. If it were a sentient cow, most people would see no problem with it. These views seem at odds with each other, no?

That's a good point. Reflecting, my moral compass frowns upon cannibalism, but I haven't fleshed out the reasons why. Hat tip for punching a hole in my argument

Equivalently moral or immoral? Put another way, do you find both to be wrong, or both to be equally acceptable.

Equivalently moral

Plants are vanishingly unlikely to actually feel distress, so you are wrong to characterise animal and plant "distress" as the same. They may have survival mechanisms and reactions to being harvested, but this is different from having a central nervous system. There's also no way to know for sure that any given animal does feel distress, but we can make educated judgments, the same as we do for other humans.

Maybe one day we'll be eating meat grown from trees...or 3D printed meat.

It's already been demonstrated that meat can be grown in vitro, and it's a very active area of research:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat

My guesses in the US: the war on drugs. The incarceration rate. Discriminatory profiling by authority figures (by race, class, etc). Lack of universal health care. Lobbying/the ruling that corporations have the same rights as people.

The treatment of illegal immigrants/refugees by EU, AU, USA etc.

Ignoring genocide and slavery.

Or any private property at all. I mean why does someone have the right to say I can or can't go somewhere.

Why do you have the right to say you can or can't do something? Where do you get the right to go or stay? Why would your right to go wherever you want... override someone else's right to have a private space that excludes you?

Because on the whole we (culture/country/city) all agree that it's more important to keep strangers and unwanted people/property out of our private areas (and back it up with the righteous use of the state's monopoly on violence) than it is to give everyone free reign. It's a matter of sovereignty and community and fear really. It would be great if everyone could be trusted to have good intentions, but we've had to learn the hard way that that strategy doesn't pan out when you have hundreds of millions of people all crammed together.

In my home country, which isn't cram packed with hundreds of millions people though, everyone has the right to go/travel/camp anywhere on private property as long as that area is designated as wilderness (meaning pretty much anywhere that isn't a developed or agriculture area). - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

While that sounds lovely, it will never fly in a Protestant flavored bureaucracy, sadly... Too much need for an expectation of control and submission. Too much uncomfortable feelings around uncertainty and leisure.

I recently bought Proudhon's "What is Property?". I'm sure it's going to be an interesting read.

Is property theft or is property liberty? Proudhon's nineteenth century opinion is itself conflicted.

I think any attempt to logically deduce absolute arguments for or against property is doomed. It's just a convention made by a society or any other group of people. You could just put everything including the things everyone produces in a public pool and everyone can use or consume bits and pieces probably according to some rules. Or you assign an owner to everything by some rules who then has special rights to decide about what happens to the things he owns. Or any combination of both extremes.

I guess we ended up with property because it is the system that was easier to realize or caused less issues but I see no way in which there could be any fundamental truth behind the concept of property.

Regardless of your concepts of property someone has to be the arbiter of disputes, which leads back to the need for a formal system for dealing with property.

You can of course always widen the definition of a word to capture anything. Let's for example say all cars are in a public pool. If you sit in the driver's seat you can use the car until you leave the seat. You could now say that the car is your property while you are sitting in the driver's seat or you could say that all people own all the cars. Neither matches the common usages of property well. But you are of course right, it is a resource allocation problem and it will only work well if there are commonly accepted and enforced rules, but there is no need for this system to resemble our current system and understanding of property.

I think yours is an interesting point, though of course it's been voteslammed.

There is a difference though between private property and freedom of movement--you might want to clarify that.

It makes sense, for example, that the bicycle I'm currently riding can't be commandeered by somebody else...at the same time, if somebody cuts across my lawn, it shouldn't be trespassing.

Don't forget gay marriage and climate change.

And opposition to polygamy. If love is about ignoring race,class,gender, shouldn't it be about ignoring numbers, too?

Opposition to polygamy can have some logical reasoning behind it though. Unlike something like gay marriage.

Explain please

How you prevent the situation where wealthy/powerful men begin to monopolize the pool of available women? What happens to the men that now have a harder time finding long term relationships?

To me, it seems it would accelerate the wealth gap we already see today.

Edit: Here is a good summary of some of the concerns I would personally see with a system. From the Supreme Court in British Columbia.

http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/11/15/2011BCSC1588.ht...

Edit2: And frankly, I think I don't see the big upside that makes all those risks worth it.

It is a interesting question whether you have a right to a relationship or if it is at least desirable to have a policy that makes it more likely that everyone can find one. I never thought about it.

My views regarding wealth distribution and the like would easily be associated with socialism and communism by many (Americans at least). But here my first reaction is more like sorry for you if you can not find a partner because of your social status. This worries me a bit because you could easily argue that a relationship and having children is in some sense more important for humans than being wealthy. I really have to think about it for some time.

The only thing I am already pretty sure is that there is nothing that justifies a right to have a relationship, i.e. there is no justification to force someone into a relationship with someone if for example this person is simply a really unpleasant person. But is it desirable to level the playing field as good as possible? I can't say ad hoc, but my intuition is no.

I'm interested in hearing the arguments. Care to expand?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9708158

What would that reasoning be? Who cares with how many other people I have what kind of relationship if everyone involved is okay with the situation? I never seriously thought about it but I think it would be a nonissue if I lived together with several women. Maybe the neighbors raising eyebrows and the state would not allow to officially marry several women but how cares? I would say for all practical purposes polygamy would be just fine.

> Who cares with how many other people I have what kind of relationship if everyone involved is okay with the situation?

Perhaps other people from who is taken opportunity to have a relationship (and perceptive to have a family)?

I wouldn't and couldn't prevent them from talking to one of my women and convincing her that it would be a better choice to leave me and enter a relationship with them. And you could of course make the same argument for a monogamous relationship, you are still removing one potential partner for everyone else from the pool of potential partners - but you are of course not really doing this, at best temporarily. And what a single person thinks or feels never really matters anyway because a relationship is a mutual thing between at least two people.

Ask the many Mormon male youths forced out of Fundamentalist Mormon societies where polygamy still is practiced (e.g., Colorado City, AZ); the older male hegemony wants a monopoly on the "upcoming crop" of coming-of-age young women. (My statement reflects that hegemony's commodification of women, not my own.)

You might object that marriage in itself is an outdated/outmoded, and we should all live polyamorous lives. Marriage has been a relatively stable social/legal contract for millenia, and I think attempts to make it irrelevant or obsolete will always fail.

While you might have meant that in jest. I think it's a reasonable standpoint. There are reasonable arguments that there is often coercion involved, but if a 30 year old wants to become a 3nd husband then I don’t see the problem.

PS: Though any man who wants a 2nd wife at the same time is clearly insane ;O

Or, in a more dismal future: that people had as many rights as corporations do.

Certainly Gitmo -- I mean we know it's evil now and yet it is still on going.

Thankfully, while awful, the scale isn't too staggering.

We don't know the full scale of such things because it is considered a state secret.

Not sure why you were downvoted because you're absolutely right. People forget that Gitmo isn't the only place the US keeps prisoners extrajudicially. The CIA operates numerous "secret sites" around the world where all kinds of terrible shit happens.

Most countries are too weak to oppose the US so you can't really expect them to protest death camps on their soil.

Including Cuba.

And Poland. Who else? Germany?

My prediction, based on personal interest: Unregulated machine learning implementations and AI R&D will one day be viewed the same as human and animal testing of yore. That is, crude and potentially very dangerous. Elon feels the same way. I'm basing my startup on this notion.

Also this line of hypothesizing reminds me of this old HN link: http://kk.org/thetechnium/2019-unthinkabl

One could be the we treat the homeless. I just walk by them, in a first world country, everyday knowing they are living in horrible conditions and I am aware that many of them are mentally handicapped, therefore unable to take advantage of the society in which they live.

The modern notion of work. Only a notch away from the feudal system and slavery that we look down on.

Capitalism based on the idea that "Profits go up; shit goes down.", in which those doing the hardest work and taking the biggest risks get the smallest reward.

The society at the time was appalled. Just not the bits of it in power.

I'll be downvoted ... abortion. Most precipitating causes for the procedure are now completely avoidable. The other small portion of uses of the procedure are excusable.

To 2010-era ears, to many this sounds like heresy. In 100 years, who knows?

Abortion could be framed as a side-effect of the healthcare system not providing sufficient access to birth control. This actually sounds very reasonable especially if there were a few more birth control options: any kind of male birth control that doesn't require surgery; female birth control with fewer/different adverse side effects.

Birth control and related education are pretty much accessible and relatively cheap for everyone today, at least in the U.S. The costs of prevention are so much cheaper than the eventual end-user cost of an (even subsidized) abortion.

I'd say the spread of democracy.

Viewing it as superior to fundamentalism, or whateverism, and going to other nations, changing their way to be, maybe even just supporting the change... It's colonialism, revisited.

It could well be that putting an end to Pol Pot was evil in itself... Maybe his utopia would have succeeded, but we'll never know. I'm going to make people angry, but it's the way it is. Maybe it would have been more viable, long term, than our free capitalism. Maybe, for him, it was for the greater good.

Actually, I know little about the story, or politics, I'm just thinking out loud, and inciting people to think. His utopia reminds me of the Unabomber's manifesto. Anyway, I don't believe in utopias. It's all black and white, and it's all trade-offs.

All I know is that we're very careful not to contaminate Mars, when we send a robot, but when it comes to other nations, it seems we contaminate as much as we can.

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