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Turns out South Korea was a brutal military dictatorship under the backing of the US way longer than you'd think
USA and brutal dictatorships, name a more iconic duo!
Russia and brutal dictatorships? They're both up there
Lets just say “superpowers and brutal dictatorships”.
Whoevers dominating in a period in history generally didn’t get there by advocating for peace and self determination.
North Korea and brutal dictatorship
The Kims never killed 30 thousand people in a few days
How many regimes did NK install themselves?
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So few opportunities to use the word "decimate" literally. And now, one fewer.
Most people don't know the historical definition of decimate, so using here it would be confusing or redundant.
It would be neither. It would be appropriate.
Can you define the word redundant for me?
If it were phrased "they decimated the population" most would assume from the phrasing that it mean that you're saying that a large proportion was killed, because that's how that word is actually used in the English language. If it were phrased "they decimated 10 percent of the population" you're either using the word as people understand it wrong or your saying they killed 10 percent of the population twice right next to each other, which is you know, redundant.
The definition of words reflect how we use them. An interesting fact is that scientists use Latin for scientific names of things because no one speaks Latin so the meanings of those words will not change with time. It's the same in courts, you'll find that a lot of old English words that aren't commonly used in everyday conversation are used and that's so that the meaning of things stay consistent over time.
If you replace "wiped out" in the title of the OP with decimate then it'd be exactly as wasteful, would use the word as it's understood in modern English properly, and you'd get to use the original meaning too. Sure, it's redundant (sort of) but it doesn't take any extra time or space than what's already written.
Actually, after some further thought I've realised I was wrong actually. If you were to use the phrasing "decimated 10 percent of the population", it wouldn't be redundant it would just be straight up wrong. To decimate 10 percent of a population would mean either you killed 10 percent of 10 percent of the population (i.e. 1 percent), or it would mean you've killed a large proportion of that 10 percent of the population.
And of course my point about how using the phrase "decimating the population" on its own would lead to confusion for most people because when people think of "a large proportion of", people generally think that it's more than 10 percent.
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Asking for the term decimate would have been more appropriate here.
I think you're right.
hol up, Jeju island is a real place and a real massacre took place there? Doesn't that make it kinda fucked up that the manga Solo Leveling used it as a location and set a different, wholly unrelated massacre there? I just naively assumed they made up an island. There wasn't even a mention of the labor struggle in either the manga or the anime.
Seems more lile an explicit political statement, but yeah.
I've been trying to go through and see if there are any other allusions that would make it a political statement, but can't really find anything. Maybe that ants were chosen as the enemies who inhabited the island? but the "moral" of that arc was "hell yeah kill everything, even the kids" so I really hope that wasn't meant as an allusion. It's not like the manga makes any political statements in general, it's your typical generic shonen "helping people is good" and "get strong" kinda themes. I guess there's a bit talking about people trying to forget Jeju Island, but it's played entirely in-universe. Seems too strange to be coincidence though.
Jeju Island is basically the Kenny of South Korean novels and webcomics. Place gets cooked pretty often.
The anti-socialist views of the southern government and worry about losing control to the north played more into it than the strike.
I live near one of the uncovered mass graves. They put a hauntingly beautiful memorial over it.
This is the kind of shit that either gives you a raging authoritarian boner or like in my case, radicalises you toward anarchism, because fuck the state, fuck absolute power.
Coming to NYC soon
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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