Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history
Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history
All those sources you posted don’t refute what you quoted from the other comment. Seems like a “not as bad as” logical fallacy at play. The other poster didn’t say the US was without fault; even though the US has killed many people doesn’t make the actions of those other regimes any less bad.
The sources I posted are meant to provide context. And what they show is that when you consider what things were like before, communism actually improved lives in a tangible way. While bad things certainly have happened in communist societies, as they do in every human society, overall trajectory is positive. Meanwhile, the atrocities committed in the name of capitalism, and by US in particular, eclipse anything that has happened under communism. US is a blight upon humanity and has brutally repressed progress in every corner of the world.
It’s not about communism or capitalism, it’s about historical mass death events. It’s just a coincidence some of the largest mass deaths happened under communism. For example, I’m sure the lives of Ukrainians were greatly improved sometime after the mass starvations during the holodomor.
I don’t even disagree with what you’re saying about the US but using this to imply that communist regimes of China and Russia were good actually is insane to me. Not as bad as fallacy in full effect.
It’s literally about the question of what types of outcomes each system produces in the long run. And yes, the lives of Ukrainians were massively improved after the revolution.
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
Meanwhile, let’s look at the whole holodomor narrative of yours from a perspective of an actual historian who studied it. During the 1932 famine, the USSR sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:
While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul’chyts’kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food
Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.
Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.
According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest
It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.
Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, its interesting to see that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.
The reality is that famines were common in Tsarist times, and they were a major drive for the revolution in the first place. After the revolution, lives improved dramatically and famines stopped.
Look, I get it, I wouldn’t give a shit if TikTok imploded tomorrow and went out of business. I don’t use it. Actually, I would cheer on TikTok’s implosion. It’s a cesspool. However:
“First they came for the xxx and I didn’t care because I didn’t use or like xxx”…“and then they came for me or the thing I liked or used there was nobody left to defend me”
I knew I shouldn’t have said anything, because I would have become everyone’s enemy. Please don’t generalize my words, because I have this opinion only about tiktok only.
True. Impossible to fully censor. Easy to “censor enough”, force out of app stores, and deem illegal while being cheered on by the left and right because they both somehow think it’s in their interests, having abandoned the idea of free speech somewhere along in their ideological trajectory. Just like with TikTok ban or the Digital Services Act.
They’ll start by saying lemmy is spreading “disinformation” or “foreign influence” or “harming children” or whatever their excuse of the day is. Then legislate lemmy apps out of the app stores and go after lemmy server operators or users.
Not saying lemmy couldn’t survive as a network, the point of the meme is the dangerous precedent set when people support things like a TikTok ban and say the government should be able to regulate speech or access to speech in that manner. The government shouldn’t be able to tell you what you can say or think, who you share those thoughts with, or what media you consume. It’s a human right to think and speak and be able to listen to others speak. And unfortunately, for different reasons, both the left and right are cheering on its erosion.
Centralized platforms are proprietary, brittle, easily targeted. When they are taken down, they stay down.
Lemmy is, effectively, a protocol, not a platform. Anyone can host an instance, and they all talk to each other by default. Any of the big instances get knocked down, and they get replaced by a dozen others. An instance may die, but so long as someone wants to put up another, Lemmy remains.
Bitcoin is not a centralized platform. Tor is not a centralized platform. Government has had little success targeting these protocols.
I visit reddit occasionally and honestly, Reddit is also just reddit recycled content. I’m not on there nearly as much as I used to be and I still see the same fucking posts and videos on popular, many of which are just karma bots.
I think I see more new stuff on Lemmy. Not usually good stuff, but at least it’s novel. Or very very old memes, but that’s not recycled reddit, that’s more recycling icanhascheeseburger or some shit, and I’m down for that.
The government controls it and they use it to gradually decrease the portion of supply your hard-earned money represents. They aim for 2-3% inflation in a “good year”. That’s the nice countries, ask any Argentinean how they feel about who controls that money printer. Monetary inflation mostly impacts the poor and middle class who have more of their net wealth in cash whereas rich people have their money safely stored in assets like stocks or land. So the government controls the money printer.
Unless you use Bitcoin. Then the protocol (nobody) controls it. And it’s controlled to never make more than 21 million BTC. No person, even if they had a trillion dollars, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence, even if they had 1000 guys with AKs, no person could make Bitcoin print an extra BTC it wasn’t intended to print. Or spend money that they didn’t have the private key for. That’s a money printer I can trust. It’s faithfully done this for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or being hacked and has a market cap that places it in the top 20 countries by GDP all while experiencing continual growth and adoption. But it’s a fad right? That has no purpose? A scam? And on year 16 you’ll finally be proven right?
You could actually break bitcoin with enough computing power. Bitcoin works on the fact that most of the miners are honest. Someone with enough processing power could rewrite the Blockchain as they want.
Not really, and miners have fantastic financial incentive to remain honest. It’s not altruism. In terms of the attack you are talking about (51% attack) Nobody can amass that much computing power and certainly not quietly, good luck acquiring enough ASICs to do it, let alone enough energy. You’d need your own fab for them which means designing your own ASICs (specialized devices for mining which are orders of magnitude more efficient than regular computers) or stealing designs for them. You’re already into the billions of dollars right there with having your own fab. You can’t buy even half of the processing power you’d need on the open market. A 51% attack is absolutely insanely expensive to do and logistically impossible at this point. And even if they could, the absolute best they can do is temporarily delay transactions or do a double-spend (spend the same BTC twice). They can’t spend money they don’t have the key for and they can’t print extra Bitcoin as all other nodes would reject those transactions as invalid. Doing a double-spend makes no sense because the only benefit of doing so is getting something else in exchange for that BTC. If I’m going to trade say… 1 billion dollars of oil for your BTC, I’m gonna wait for a few blocks of confirmation, even assuming I could transfer that much value that quickly. And whatever you trade has to be more valuable than the cost of a 51% attack which is probably north of a trillion dollars at this point depending on how you do the math. Plus, you know, the legal/extralegal/diplomatic/etc consequences of your actions depending on what you did the attack for.
The attack isn’t a one time thing, your delay only works if you keep attacking. The second you stop, the chain reverse to the “true main chain”. A 51% attack has never happened successfully against Bitcoin and never will at this point. Even at the nation-state scale, Bitcoin is tied in enough to international markets at this point that attacking it could easily cause an international bank run/financial collapse and massive diplomatic problems. And all you’d prove is that you wasted an inconceivably large amount of money to attack a system that picked back up right where it started a few minuted, hours, or days later. Because unless you intend to continue your attack and energy use forever, that’s exactly what would happen. Meanwhile, you’ve pissed off every voter, hedge fund, state retirement fund, business, bank, national treasury, international organization, charity, and legislator who has any sort of exposure to Bitcoin.
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