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yogthos OP ,
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indeed

yogthos ,
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What people who lived in the Soviet union and other socialist states have to say:

This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.

yogthos ,
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This is a silly argument because actual real world communism has to be compared to other real world alternative we have available which is capitalism. By every measure capitalism has created far more horrors than communism has.

yogthos ,
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The trajectory Hungary took after transition to capitalism mirrors what happened in most post USSR states. This just further supports the point that the communist system was better.

yogthos ,
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What happened in countries like Hungary and Poland is a direct result of the transition to capitalism however. What’s more this transition happened under the best possible conditions. The transition happened largely democratically without any violent revolutions, and these countries got support from the west to soften economic impact of the transition. Yet, despite all that we see that majority of post Soviet countries end up going in a similar direction under capitalism. Again, Hungary isn’t an outlier here.

yogthos ,
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Thing is that bad management, corruption, and so on, have happened in every human society that has ever existed. A political system isn’t magically going to change that. What a political system can do however is create different selection pressures for behavior. Capitalist system selects for different kinds of behaviors than a communist one. As we see with the case of transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe, the selection pressures of capitalism result in far worse things happening than under communism.

yogthos ,
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Unfortunately, I expect that things are going to get worse before they get better. I don’t think people who are in power now will simply let it go the way communists did.

yogthos ,
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Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement. Open source ecosystem primarily run by volunteers has produces some of the most interesting and innovative technologies that we’ve seen. The reality is that people make interesting things because they’re curious and they enjoy making stuff. Pretty much nobody makes anything interesting with profit being the primary motive.

yogthos ,
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That tends to be the case for vast majority of anti-communists out there.

yogthos ,
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Because they confuse the history of the soviet union with the propaganda they’ve been fed about it.

fixed that for you

yogthos ,
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That’s just straw manning I’m afraid.

yogthos ,
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What’s more is that corporate driven research is necessarily biased towards whatever is profitable which is often at odds with what’s socially useful. For example, it’s more profitable to research drugs that help maintain disease and can be sold over a long time than drugs that cure it. Profit motive here ends up being completely at odds with what’s beneficial for people who get sick.

And of course, any research that doesn’t have a clear path towards monetization isn’t going to be pursued. This is precisely why pretty much all fundamental research comes out of the public sector.

yogthos ,
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Indeed, the corps did a whole campaign lobbying for permissive licenses precisely so they could plunder open source work. Hard copyleft should be used for any serious project.

yogthos ,
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Open source has existed long before companies started getting involved with it. Meanwhile, people having to eat has nothing to do with the argument being made which is that capitalism and profit motive are not required for creativity and technological progress.

yogthos ,
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No, people just call out your made up criticisms made in bad faith.

yogthos ,
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87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. Seems like communism is plenty popular outside the westoid cesspool.

yogthos ,
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Biggest and most popular projects are attractive to companies as well as individuals for the same reasons. However, the original point was that companies are not needed for open source to exist or for innovation to happen.

yogthos ,
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🤡

yogthos ,
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project much?

yogthos ,
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this you? lemmy.ml/comment/4226229

yogthos ,
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You’re not criticizing the government, you’re removing agency from people living in China and claiming that they’re not capable of making their own decisions. Thinking that you know better than they do is peak chauvinism. The fact that you confuse your racism with legitimate criticism says a lot about you.

yogthos , (edited )
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The fact that you don’t even see just how absurd this line of argument is really shows just how far off the reservation you’ve wandered.

Every single survey that comes out of China done by domestically as well as by western organizations consistently shows that people in China overwhelmingly support their government and see it as democratic. The only people who say what you say are invariably westerners who have never been to China or talked to anyone actually living there.

Thinking that it’s somehow controversial that people living in a communist country who overwhelmingly support their government identify as communists is laughably absurd.

yogthos ,
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The idea that these things wouldn’t exist without commercial analogs is silly. You do realize that things like BBS boards and IRC existed long before commercial social media platforms right? In fact, we might’ve seen things like social media evolve in completely different directions if not for commercial platforms setting standards based on attracting clicks, and monetizing users.

yogthos ,
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No, I didn’t change the subject at all. I provided you with background evidence supporting my point. Communism and socialism are very clearly popular in places like China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. You’d know this if you actually interacted with people from these countries.

Meanwhile, the reason it’s not popular in the western shithole countries is because colonizers live like parasites off the backs of the rest of the world, and majority of westerners are perfectly happy with the arrangement.

A country with almost as much wealth disparity between the poor and wealth as the US?

A country that’s seen biggest poverty reduction in human history, where practically everyone owns their home, and people see their lives improve dramatically each and every year. The fact that you ignore all that just shows how intellectually dishonest you really are.

yogthos ,
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Pretty funny of you to go on a big rant regarding not trusting state propaganda then post a link to British state propaganda without a hint of irony. Why don’t we look at what the World Bank has to say instead worldbank.org/…/lifting-800-million-people-out-of…

Also, you’re clearly not familiar with the concept of PPP, so might want to educate yourself on that as well …worldbank.org/…/tracking-gdp-ppp-terms-shows-rap…

yogthos ,
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What you appear to be utterly oblivious to is the change over time that’s happening in China. The standard of living is rapidly improving for the regular people living in China with each and every decade. It’s not a static situation of people making 2 dollars a day as you try to paint it.

Meanwhile, China has to exist within the global capitalist system created by the west after WW2. That means having to participate within the global economy and engage with capitalism. The thing anarchists invariably aren’t able to wrap their heads around is the fact that transition from capitalism to communism is a process, and that countries led by communists still have to exist within the larger capitalist world.

Pointing at the fact that there are 500 billionaires in China as some sort of a gotcha while ignoring the larger trends really highlights how superficial your understanding of the subject you’re attempting to debate really is.

yogthos ,
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Exactly, most of the bloat on commercial sites isn’t there for the benefit of the user, but rather in order to monetize them. It’s ads, trackers, metrics, and all the other garbage that you don’t actually want.

yogthos ,
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So China is speedrunning late-state Capitalism with private mega-corps like Tencent and exploiting its own cheap labor by giving them out to western capitalists so they can enrich their own billionaires. Of course, your excuse, as I already said it would be much earlier in the thread, “it’s the West’s fault”.

If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:

If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.

The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.

It’s pretty dishonest to claim ChInA Is DoInG StAtE CaPiTALiSM when it’s pretty clear that China is basically the only place in the world where standard of living is going up significantly. If China was doing what you claim it’s doing then we’d see the same results as we see under actual capitalism. It’d look like India today.

What is the point of communism?

Point of communism is to have an equal society, but the question is how you get there from where we are now. Apparently anarchists believe that magic happens as opposed to this being a process the way things work in the real world.

yogthos ,
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Circular reasoning: communism increases standard of living, China’s standard of living is going up, therefore China is communist, therefore communism increases standard of living. This is a logical fallacy.

You don’t understand what circular reasoning is. What I actually said is that the standard of living is going up in China while it’s not going up in capitalist countries. If China was capitalist then you’d expect the same thing to happen as it does everywhere else where there is capitalism. China would look something like India right now.

China’s economic boom correlates to its involvement in the capitalist world economy. It’s very easy to argue that the more China does capitalism, the more wealthier it gets, the better off the Chinese citizens.

Oh weird, why aren’t we seeing this economic boom in eastern Europe, Russia, India, and other parts of former USSR that transitioned to capitalism. According to your “logic” we should see exact same standard of living improvements there too.

India is not doing quite as well as China, but it’s still seem a very dramatic decrease in poverty, especially if you go by the “$1.90/day” mark, which is not enough imho, but it’s the one you choose to go by

Not even remotely comparable to poverty reduction in China.

So the path to communism is paved with mega-corps and billionaires? What do you expect them to do, voluntarily give up all their wealth and possessions when it’s time for the communism to begin?

Once you show me somebody doing it better than China then we’ll talk. And nobody is expecting them to voluntarily give up wealth, taking the wealth away and nationalizing things is the job of the government. Of course, you refuse to accept the fact that working class holds power in China and that’s what your fallacious view of China is premised on.

yogthos ,
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These numbeo rankings of yours are just another great example of how western propagandists like to play with numbers. It’s pretty funny how you’re very vary of numbers coming out of China because you don’t trust them, but quickly lap up whatever numbers fit with your prejudices.

Here’s the reality of poverty in India …org.in/…/just-how-poor-is-india-10-per-cent-says…

China is notable for having a recent rapid increase. It’s easier to have a big delta number, when your starting number is so low.

Why is India not having the same kind of rapid increase, why is it getting worse there, why did capitalism create the same problems in post Soviet countries? I love how you keep dodging these questions here.

Working class holds what power? Tencent and Alibaba aren’t owned by its workers. Why would the government ever decide to give up its joint wealth and power with the billionaire class? What could the workers possibly do to hold them accountable?

This illustrates grade school understanding of what the working class holding power means. What that means is that the government is consists of predominantly working class, which it does, and makes decisions in the interest of the working class which it also demonstrably does. The fact that you have private companies in China doesn’t make it any more capitalist than having free healthcare in Canada make it communist.

Why would the government ever decide to give up its joint wealth and power with the billionaire class? What could the workers possibly do to hold them accountable?

Here’s an entire book you can read on the subject if you were genuinely interested in this question redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red

yogthos ,
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think you confused communism for capitalism there champ www.cnn.com/2020/07/31/us/…/index.html

yogthos ,
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Does anybody seriously believe this is a blow to Russia, if anything the west is helping prevent capital flight from Russia here.

yogthos ,
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Can’t wait till US gets sanctioned by China to hold its public accountable for the crimes against humanity its government is committing.

yogthos ,
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here you go little buddy, as reported by CNN, NPR, and HRW

yogthos ,
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Given that Russian economy is growing while Europe is in a deep recession, maybe it’s the west that needs to do a special operation to fix its finances.

yogthos ,
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Either Putin propagandists have now infiltrated mainstream liberal media or you have no clue regarding the state of the war, I’m going to go with the latter here

yogthos ,
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Hmm, let’s just see what an actual war historian has to say about that agonmag.com/…/vlahos-ukraine-shares-same-fate-as

yogthos ,
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The only actual progress being made is in destroying the equipment NATO managed to cobble together and losing trained manpower. Even if a miracle happened and Ukraine managed to make some breakthrough, what exactly is it going to be consolidated with given that they spent past three and a half months beating their head against a wall. They’ve already thrown in all the reserve brigades that were originally meant to come in and consolidate the gains now.

yogthos ,
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That’s because you don’t understand what the outcome on the battlefield will be, but you’ll see soon enough.

yogthos ,
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Seems like the opposite is happening

yogthos ,
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It’s been pretty surreal to watch this unfold over the past year and a half. Every single prediction the west made about the direction of the war was proven to be completely wrong. Russian economy did not collapse, Russian military isn’t falling apart, Russia isn’t running out of weapons. Western weapons aren’t game changers, stingers, HIMARS, tanks, and missiles that the west sent were all proven to be useless in changing the direction of the war.

Yet, as we see in this thread, plenty of people in the west are refusing to do any reflection on the fact that the narrative we’re being sold is demonstrably false. They just latch on to whatever new hopium story western media puts out and just keep doubling down.

yogthos ,
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Right, we have a very narrow window of accepted viewpoints right now, and anybody who voices points that that don’t fit with the narrative ends up being sidelined. This creates an echo chamber where people just repeat the same talking points to each other even if they don’t agree with them because saying anything contrary would be career ending. A great example of this is how people like Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer are now only found on substack and random youtube channels. It’s impossible to make sound decisions without honest debate and without accepting facts as they actually are as opposed to as you want them to be.

It’s deeply ironic that the west prides itself on diversity of opinions that are considered. This is supposed to be one of the core strengths of the western system compared to “authoritarian” regimes like China. The reality turns out to be quite different.

yogthos ,
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These people are dangerously unhinged and they’ve brought us to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. The fact that so many people in the west continue to cheer this on is frankly disturbing.

yogthos OP ,
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I personally find ((f) 1) easier to read. You just go inside out, evaluate f, then pass 1 as the argument to the output of f. There’s no ambiguity regarding order of evaluation there.

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