Ahahaha, this is probably the most the most reasonable take here!

could reply that eating food falls well within a communist system, therefore you can’t blame communism for famines.

Try again when you’re sober, that’s not a particular cogent argument.

Are you… You’re trying to compare a people under a military blockade to the victims of communist governments?

Like, the Right accuses us of using palestineans as props but goddamn, in this case I’m inclined to agree.

At best, that’s a silly comparison. At worst, that’s just callous, ghoulish and ridiculous. Just… wow.

The Irish potato famine was more an exogenous factor (a blight) not the direct result of mismanagement, which is generally a feature of communism. So that’s a pretty poor comparison.

Bengal was a mostly agrarian state so not really an advanced capitalist society. Again, not a particularly good comparison.

A carbon tax falls well within a capitalist system (much the same as any other tax or method of dealing with externalities) so I’d put that as a failure of democratic systems more than anything.

I’m also not convinced communism would actually solve the problem. Communists have historically been pretty reluctant to share bad news, from letting folks know about mass starvations to, oh, most of the world news in China.

I’m morbidly curious. There are a lot of folks advocating communism who seem to lack any historical context. I’m curious as to whether it’s sort of like lemmys instinctive downvoting of anything negative about biden/upvoting of anything negative of trump, or maybe it’s genuine ignorance (I don’t imagine tik tok communist enthusiasts talk all that much about the tens of millions dead) or if there is actually some sort of group rationalization.

And under capitalism, capital and labour are generally in conflict. Same way most capital owners are in conflict with each other (that’s basically the engine of growth.)

Saying that labour battled for these advancements is no more an indictment of capitalism than the fact that McDonalds battles with Wendys for revenue.

You are confusing capital with capitalism.

What? Wait… So when parents were burying most of their children back in the day and now don’t, that is somehow despite capitalism giving us the goods, services, hospitals, nurses, doctors, ample nutritional supplements etc?

What services do you think people had for free earlier?

And you misunderstanding how capitalism works doesn’t mean a carbon tax is against a free market any more than rules againat pouring nuclear waste into rivers goes against a free market. A free market had all sorts of rules to protect us from the excesses of capitalism, that’s literally the entire point of anti-trust law, because the correct capitalist move for a company is to become a monopoly, which would be bad for consumers. Thus, we tame the excesses of capitalism.

Ahhh yes, who can forget the glorious communist food sciences that led to the mass starvations of millions?!?

(Heck, have you ever seen that photo of Gorbachev in a supermarket, stunned by the variety and availability of food?)

Yeah, science tends to advance more quickly under capitalism. It’s not a coincidence that the scientific revolution and capitalism advanced hand in hand.

Capitalism. For all the awfulness goodness gracious, quality of life has skyrocketed as we’ve figured it out. Parents almost never bury their children anymore, disabled folks who aren’t royalty have better lives than almost ever before, if you break a bone you can get it taken care of rather than have it heal poorly and cause pain for the rest of your life, almost no one gets literally crucified and most have access to clean drinking water in their house!!!

Yeah, we maybe don’t have it as good as our parents generation but goddamn we have it so much better than their parents and grandparents etc.

(I’d argue climate change is more a political problem than capitalism. A sane society would’ve put a carbon tax in place decades ago and let the free market sort it out. But we get into stupid political fights and the youth, who are most affected, don’t vote in primaries when it really matters.)

Can’t wait for the Republicans to hold the Senate, block every part of this budget and have everyone blame Biden because politics are too complicated.

Except that definition had an absence of evidence.

My cynical answer is that much of the public doesn’t want a multi hour intellectual exercise. Same reason books don’t sell particularly well.

Came to make sure someone had posted Pratchett.

I think it particularly suits OP as the prose is astoundingly good. I’d never been impressed by sentence structure until reading Pratchett.

Also, for someone into non-fiction, there’s so much real world brilliance that it crosses over pretty well. (Sociology, science, politics, religion, damnit, everything. The whole human experience can be found in Pratchett’s writing.)

It’d be weird after half a century of tv, if suddenly in the 2010s it somehow escalated all the self harm/suicide stats.

I’ve read they’ve been dropped, haven’t seen a response from Silver. Is this a social media thing?

Edit: Though if your trying to argue that polling is inaccurate because Nate Silver has an issue with what his former outfit is doing, ooooooooh boy.

That’d be as dumb as saying rockets don’t actually wor because, most of the scientists who did the pioneering work were working for the literal Nazis!

You should try stomping around the room and yelling at the screen.

?

Polls are shit. Only one poll counts.

If Clinton had paid attention to them, trump might not have won.

Even the article you posted has a self-inserted bias.

With what part do you disagree? They post all the methodology and results. Or are you just “this person works in polling so I can’t trust them despite them laying out everything for me to see!”

You haven’t presented a logical thought just “I DISLIKE POLLS” which is pretty silly.

You may not like what the polls say but that doesn’t mean they aren’t valid kiddo. As you grow up, you’ll realize that lots of things that are unpleasant are still true no matter how much we wish otherwise. Throwing a tantrum doesn’t change the validity of polling.

This sounds like a you problem.

If you got your news from non social media and looked at polls, not punditry, you’d have known the most likely outcome was pretty much what happened, the Republicans won a narrow majority.

Don’t blame polling for your ignorance.

Edit: If you want an interesting (okay, interesting to nerds like me) recounting of the polling in 2022:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-election-polling-accuracy/