i do actually think a communist revolution in Japan or Australia would increase life expectancy-
oh fuck me
I… I just… Japan has one of the highest life expectancies on Earth. Communist revolution generally tends not to be so great. How does someone even reach this level of misunderstanding?
I was bored so I wanted to do a ballpark estimate for the excess deaths resulting from the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, assuming that a counterfactual Nationalist China would have the crude death rates of Taiwan rather than the crude death rates of China between 1953 and 1979.
It’s about 158 to 161 million.
Now, that isn’t appropriate or fair. It’s not appropriate because CDRs aren’t comparable across populations with different age structures – once you get to the 1980s It’s unfair because Taiwan had lower CDRs than Mainland China when the comparison started.
We can also ask the question of how rapidly the Nationalists and Communists reduced its mortality from the same starting point. Because the Nationalists had 18 deaths per 1,000 in 1947, we might as well start there; the Communists had the same death rate a decade later, in 1957. So what happens if we start the clock running in 1957? How does that look?
Not great for the Communists. The Communists still have about 80 million excess deaths between 1957 and 1979, of which about 39 million are from period between 1958 and 1961.
Well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.
hey you can’t make an omelette without killing fifty million people
Like others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels” attribute to “Communism” (whatever that is, but let us use the conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.
Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He attributed the India-China difference to India’s “political system of adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a serious response, and there was “little political pressure” from opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).
The example stands as a dramatic “criminal indictment” of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India” (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).
In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.
Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.
That’s Noam Chomsky’s point.
xhxhxhx: right, but Taiwan seems to have managed it without the surplus corpses
Do you think that’s because it’s a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it maybe?
Or, just gonna put this out here,
The cultural starting conditions between China and India are not the same.
We’re supposed to consider that irrelevant because all cultures are equal and human beings are just economybots, but… have you observed the records for overseas Chinese as compared to other populations?
Yeah, you could probably get away with that until some proposal came up regarding abortion, immigration, or some other wedge issue.
On a side note, I remember reading something once about a Republican mayor who, as a partial solution for homelessness, gave every homeless person who wanted one an above-minimum-wage job cleaning parks or picking up garbage on the highway and painted it as a program in line with the conservative emphasis on work ethic. Like, that’s literally just a universal job guarantee painted as a conservative program. It’d probably be pretty surprising what you could get a lot of conservatives to approve if you frame it right
You know what’s going to happen the instant that becomes widespread is that they’re going to try to prove that the government is paying for people to slack off.
Universal Basic Income as the Liberal/Leftist threat/Overton shifter, Employee Wage Subsidies as the Conservative-compatible Compromise for a post-trucking world.
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism
I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
It’s certainly possible to try avoiding these bugs, or dramatically improve the current social order, or to try and build some other system entirely, but then/instead you get people like @redbloodedamerica openly celebrating fucked up shit because capitalism is good and cool and therefore bonded labor is good and cool also, hence, tankies but for capitalism.
Anarchists say they’re against it, but I’ve never seen them lay out how they would prevent it from happening except to claim they wouldn’t have a state - but Catalonia had death squads, perhaps not Stalin-tier death squads, but apparently it did have them. I think the way to socialism now, the way to actually convince people, is to stop telling people to embrace a Communist revolution and instead buy up a huge tract of land in a country with a weak central government and demonstrate a real, working, unoppressive, prosperous model.
I don’t actually think they have that model, so I don’t see myself supporting Communism over Boring Welfare Capitalism any time soon.
> 2058
> arguing with Commies on minicom
> point out that the GDP per capita of the DSAZ is 8x that of Seattle
> point out no lines for antirejection drugs in DSAZ
> mfw “the Free Peoples’ Republic of Seattle isn’t real Socialism”
> mfw “Detroit Special Autonomous Zone is Fascist Dictatorship”
> mfw receiving these messages at coffee shop w/in DSAZ
Seriously though, the amount of inherent ways I capitalism is garbage.
So, when bananas are regulated to the point where bananas are discarded for failing to meet arbitrary requirements, you blame capitalism. Brilliant.
I doubt it’s regulation. Probably people just don’t want to buy misshapen bananas when there are prettier ones right next to them.
I’d like to see OP’s proposed solution here. Tell grown adults, “You’re going to eat this ugly banana whether you like it or not!” and send government thugs to beat them up if they disobey?
I mean a simple solution is have companies buy them for a reduced price, have them sell for a reduced price Then people who are poorer can eat more fruits and veggies and others who dont care how they look can get a deal 👍👍 and companies can make some profit too
That’s exactly what you’d expect to happen. For some reason, it didn’t. I was speculating that there might be some weird psychological effect making it impossible to sell ugly bananas in the same room as pretty bananas for a profitable price.
But fortunately, @americansylveon came back with a source. Apparently EU regulations require that bananas be “free of malformation or abnormal curvature”, but then specifies that class 1 or class 2 bananas are allowed to have “slight defects of shape”, or “defects of shape”. Presumably that’s interpreted as a relaxation of the minimum standards? IDK how much of a defect is allowed.
Then they go so far as to regulate the number of bananas in a bunch. To which I can only say, “I hate the fuck government.”
@oktavia-von-gwwcendorff this is your sort of thing I think.
Keep in mind that in this case the cost of transportation may not make it economical to even ship the malformed bananas if flooding the supermarket results in a really high price reduction.
What I’m perplexed about is why no one builds a processing plant close to the growers and uses it to process the excess bananas into various banana products that don’t care about presentation. Banana flavoring, banana puree, etc. As I understand it this is what happens to second-grade fruit in most industries. Why not here?
Wasn’t there a post about how processed goods are taxed differently than raw goods, keeping e.g. Africa out of certain markets?
Speaking of governments and Africa and development, this presents an opportunity for a government or NGO to buy the misshappen bananas and distribute them to poor people in other countries who won’t give a damn about the shape, bringing money into the source nation’s economy. EA might want to look at this.
Today I saw this
http://khn.org/news/tab-for-single-payer-proposal-in-california-could-run-400-billion/
I’m working on a higher quality blog post for the main site on this, but for right now I’d like to point out a novel idea. Consider this quote from the article
A single-payer system likely “would be more efficient in delivering health care,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (California Healthline is produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)
But the proposal expands coverage to all and eliminates premiums, copayments and deductibles for enrollees, and that would cost more money, Levitt said. “You can bet that opponents will highlight the 15 percent tax, even though there are also big premium savings for employers and individuals,” he added.
We always hear this. “Single payer health care will save so much money because of all the efficiencies that you can get from central management”
Is this true? Well it just so happens we have a real-world example: HMOs. For example, Kaiser Permanente, the entity referenced in the above quote.
(an aside for non-US readers: in the US, health care is generally privately provisioned, and fee-for-service. That is, if you want a doctor to do a thing, you give them money, and they do the thing. Most people have some kind of health insurance, and this tends to take one of two forms: HMO or PPO.
PPOs are standard, and flexible. In a PPO, the insurance company develops a “network of providers”, a set of doctors who have agreed to work with the insurance company. You are strongly encouraged to go see one of these doctors. If you choose to see a different doctor, “out of network”, your insurance will cover a smaller fraction of the cost. This remains fee-for-service, it’s just that insurance pays.
HMOs, on the other hand, take a very centralized approach. They are one large company responsible for catering to your health needs. In an HMO, you can only go to doctors at facilities run by the HMO. If you need a specialist, you must get a referral to a specialist who works for the HMO. Since everything is integrated, it’s easier for multiple doctors to coordinate and work together. However, your choice of doctor is severely limited. With a PPO, if you don’t like your doctor you can get a new one. Under HMOs, your choices are limited)
The description of HMOs sound a lot like single-payer health care writ small. You give lots of money upfront to an organization like Kaiser (you pay lots of money in taxes to the government to support health care), and in return you go to Kaiser-affiliated facilities (government-funded hospitals) where all of your care is provided to you by one entity. The centralization facilitates efficiencies as bureaucracies are cut, and your needs are taken care of as best they can.
So, approaching the problem from a different point of view: Single-payer government-provided health care is more-or-less the same as if everybody signed up for Kaiser.
This gave me a deliciously trollish idea, an argument to bring out whenever relevant. Let’s say you’re arguing with some commies who insist that single-payer is the best/only solution. Pose to them this hypothetical:
“Would you be in support of a law that gave $HEALTH_INSURANCE_COMPANY a legally-mandated monopoly in health care, at the cost of forcing them to become a non-profit organization?”
Imagine one way to implement single-payer government-provided universal health care:
1) Give Kaiser a legal monopoly on health insurance
2) Legally require Kaiser to be a non-profit.¹
I suspect that most of your commie friends would be incredibly opposed to this idea, and yet it is fundamentally the same thing as a state-run single-payer health, with two caveats
a) You aren’t legally required to opt-in. You can still pay expenses out-of-pocket instead.
b) Instead of the health system being run by whoever is friendliest with our elected representatives, it’s run by people with a proven track record of success in that field.
I suspect this argument generalizes, too. You could apply it to any realm of government service provision that you can think of. It might help a handful of the smarter, more intellectually ethical folks see things from a different perspective.
1. Kaiser IS ALREADY A NON-PROFIT. So much for “greedy health insurance corporations ruining everything in their greedy corrupt quest for more profit”
The way single payer works is that it negotiates prices with providers which it can do because it’s the only buyer. It’s the same way Singapore does it, it’s just there they set legally prices but don’t pay them. Maybe you should look at how this shit works instead of just imagining how it works.
I still laughed. TBH I don’t understand why the Repubs don’t spring for healthcare vouchers. Well, okay, I understand why but …
there is so much going on here.
We want to be tolerant.
But Capitalism.
But restroom materials and service cost money.
The issue is not money to run the restrooms. The marginal cost of extra people using the restrooms is trivial. You already have spent the capital to build it, so anything more is… some more rolls of toilet paper, and a few more hours of minimum wage janitorial staff?
The issue is who would use publicly available, free restrooms. Which is to say randos: homeless people, criminals, passerby’s and tourists who do not have money to spare, etc. Free facilities often attract that kind of people, and store managers are deathly afraid of their consumerist utopia looking like a waystation for riffraff (like our stereotypes of bus stations or public libraries.)
Which is why the exclusion of capitalism is so vital. It’s for everyone who is clean and responsible and will draw more people to want to be a customer at that store. In the new era that includes transgender people and handicap people and racial minorities, which is great progress, but it still relies on the idea that some groups of people are unwanted, and too many of them are a nuisance not a blessing.
Problem: While some people are unwanted for reasons that are griping, others are unwanted for reasons that are valid.
Quite frankly I think restricting it to customers in environments where there are a lot of people that would muck it up is a valid decision, and while I suggested materials and money, I should have included opportunity-cost type stuff as well.
I get that it’s ‘ironic’, but it doesn’t feel particularly deep to me, and the secondary side-effects - either those that brought this situation about, or of whatever solution will be undertaken to ‘fix’ this - are being ignored. (Though less so by you. More in the general case.)
You might just think of it as my having developed an emotional eye-rolling reaction to this type of critique.
Conservatives have so much fucking nerve talking about how “ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ARE OUT OF CONTROL” when absolutely no-one feels inconvenienced by them or has ever even encountered them in their personal lives unless they’re the CEO’s of a megaconglomerate bitter that they couldn’t rip up a national park and buy like their fifth house boat
Yeah, it’s literally the Kochs saying “It’s so UNFAIR that when the oil pipelines we own but don’t maintain bust and flood a town with toxic sludge, that WE have to pay to fix it.” and “An employee we forced to clean chemical storage tanks without the proper gear for 15 years developed cancer, and they’re allowed to sue us over it? TYRANNY!!”
How is it never occurred to me to put it like this before?
this honestly comes off as pretty silly and out-of-touch, because there are of course plenty of people who get laid off in industries that are subject to environmental regulations, and while it’s certainly possible to make an empirical case that, say, coal regulations have little to do with the decline of coal jobs, it’s at least plausible that there is some effect.
of course the solution to this is that you need a full employment economy so that losing any particular job doesn’t mean losing a job, period, but until you do so (and obviously there are general capitalist interests against having a genuinely full employment economy outside of wartime) there will be entirely understandable resistance among certain fractions of labor against things (environmental regulations, immigration, labor-saving machinery) that are extremely good in themselves
I would argue against immigration being a general good in itself, but…
Wage subsidies with low minimum wage would get us pretty close to full employment without harming workers (in terms of net income) or crashing the economy (it has support from economists).
Admittedly I’m kind of a broken record, here, but it seems like something that could actually happen without a revolution and without potentially ruining everything.
how is it that anarchists are down to bloc up and beat the shit out of reactionaries but as soon as there’s a revolution it’s some horrible tankie shit if we throw them behind bars or reeducate them
Don’t you know? Fighting reactionaries is only ever cool if your the underdog.
ur forgetting that the wonders of mutual aid will turn the fascists into Nice Comrades overnight. like the white army and spanish nationalists did.
Don’t think anyone is pretending that overnight fascists would become Nice Comrades but I think it’s ridiculous and authoritarian to put them into “reeducation” camps as if fascists can be reeducated. Locking people up and reeducating them is useless and pointless. Anarchists would rather kick their asses and drive them out rather than brainwash them into “reeducated ” comrades. You can’t respond to fascism with liberal notions of “educating” them to think otherwise. The paranoid mind of a far right-winger can’t be reformed. I’m personally of the opinion that fascists should just be killed.
so you unfollow me for being a tankie but you think we should just go execute them instead
Killing fascists is a bad thing, you’re right. We should “re-educate” them and force them into socialist slavery because they totally won’t hate that and totally won’t just try and organize underground (like they do already). Nice tags, apparently wanting to kill fascists makes me a “reverse tankie”. This is your brain on Leninism. Lmao.
so ur logic is that since prison is so fucked up we should just murder them?? ok lol please explain how ur libertarian death squads would be less authoritarian than a prison system. I’ll wait lmao.
My logic is that fascism must always be stomped out before it is given a chance to take root. Fascism spreads very easily which is why antifa strategy is based around denying them a platform and driving them underground. It fucking works. Unfortunately it doesn’t stop the spread of these ideas, it’s a temporary solution in most cases. Killing them is better than playing antifa whack-a-mole. My argument against re-education and imprisonment is that it’s not effective or even really desirable. Why should fascist lives be protected. Call me a liberal all you want but you’re over here talking about giving literal fascists a second chance because killing them in self-defense is too extreme. Tell me, are you in favor of gun control too?
my point, which u continue to miss, is that it’s funny to me that u advocate death squads yet build ur entire politics around anti-authority lol
Yes because killing in self-defense contradicts my anti-authoritarianism?????????
you called me a tankie for saying fascists should be jailed but somehow don’t think ur a tankie for saying fascists should be killed. consistency lol.
Honestly cultural-kropotkinist is wrong here imo, but so are u. Fascists need to be countered when they organize, threaten, and fight. If a fascist sits on his porch thinking fascist thoughts, I can’t do anything about that. However, the instant that they start doing anything to actuality their aims, they deserve whatever comes to them.
Omg the discourse on the left is literally so we put politics dissidents in “re-education” camps or do we literally kill them….
THOT PATROL MEETS THOUGHT POLICE
I would bet that every person in this thread is unemployed, mentally ill and hates their parents.
If you guys are pro bono on death squads and prison camps for political prisoners, what is it you don’t like about fascism exactly?
It can’t just be repressive, everyone has to be poor as well.
It’s funny because their “revolution” is nust as imaginary as the “Day of the Rope”
With any luck.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
