Master of Reality
It’s a deep-seated combination of homophobia and machismo. Singing along to pop music is a very female or queer coded activity in American culture, even though most straight cis men feel exactly the same emotional connections with the song and the desire to sing along. It’s only in very accepting and safe situations that we let loose (and even then, it’s usually a “tee hee I wouldn’t normally do this” sort of situation). I think a lot of men listen to and sing along to pop music while driving, because it’s a private place where they can make a lot of noise without being overheard.
It’s an awkward thing. IP law is bullshit, creating scarcity where none exists… but because the entire enterprise of creation of art is happening within that framework, a lot of them have to participate within a system where they can only create a livelihood by selling art as an artificial commodity that they have monopoly rights over. And it’s not fair to expect all artists to be revolutionaries who are fighting against that system.
Just the February 28 incident might have had 3x that many murdered. There were mass executions of suspected communists in Taiwan after the fall of Hainan in 1950, in which lots of communist cells helped the PLA during their invasion. The ROC didn’t want a repeat of that in Taiwan, so they went on a years long campaign of repression against the locals to pull out the roots of any communist infiltration. The 10k figure is probably closer to just the internal purges of the KMT than of the locals. The whole island was basically an open air prison and garrison state for decades, and the ROC was not shy about using capital punishment.
I hate how the horizon doesn’t line up in that picture