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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)D
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11 mo. ago

  • Well, true. In the case of the great Chinese famine, and arguably the famine in Ukraine & Western Russia, this is a basically accurate description.

    But what I'm saying is that this isn't a useful discussion because it can easily be spun different ways. For example someone might point out that a huge number of famine and malnution deaths have also occurred under capitalism, and they may even find a source saying it's higher per capita. It's an incredibly nebulous thing to quantify, but a suitably motivated person can make statistics say anything they want. Are the people dying now in Sudan being killed by 'capitalism' because they're caught in a tug-of-war between capitalist blocs? How many other deaths in all the pointless wars do we add to the total?

    You can also easily get lost in the numbers of what deaths count as being caused by the ideology; people are currently dying in Cuba as a more-or-less direct result of Trump's fuel and trade blockade, but many would (quite disingenuously) argue that this is the fault of the Cuban government. If even a small number of deaths are included in the count which have a dubious claim to be caused by ideology, these can be seized upon to delegitimise the claim of all of them. The 100M figure including the deaths of Nazi soldiers on the eastern front is an example of this.

    All of this distracts from why these people died. As you said, famines are not natural and are almost always caused by human activity, whether that's poor agricultural policy, social conflict, mismanagement of natural resources, poor trade policy, or deliberate starvation. Usually, this is combined with natural events such as drought, floods, earthquakes etc. which push things to breaking point.

    Famines that occured in communist and capitalist systems had a range of causes, and blanketing political attempts to attribute them to leftwing or rightwing ideas are unhelpful and will not help prevent them from happening again. It's just a big unproductive pissing match with no conclusion and no respect for the people who died.

  • Sounds like that could lead to loss. Of life.

  • Trying to count up the number of people killed by any ideology is, essentially, a nonsense game which can be spun any number of ways and doesn't tell us anything meaningful.

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    Romanes eunt domus

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  • Just watched a peep show episode and I read this in Mark Corrigan's voice

  • Keep enjoying the benefits of connectivity.

  • Well Seymour, I must say, you are an odd fellow

  • His greed sickens me

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  • Please people don't fuck about with oxygen displacement 😭

  • They mention a "350 foot gash" in the liner. I'd be interested to learn how and why someone managed to cut that far, underwater, without being seen

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  • Eh. Yeah. But maybe that's just what a lot of people are like on the internet. I'd say a lot of social media sites used to be the same, before they were swamped with AI to the point of unusability.

  • I thlammed my penith in the car door

  • The face of a man who is absolutely sick of this shit

  • MAMAAAAAAAAA

  • rhowch

    When scooby burns his tail

  • Physically possibility is one thing. Materials and engineering constraints are another thing entirely.

    Physically possible =/= Feasible.

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  • Unfortunately doing this will just get the protections for those species revoked

  • Gibberish

  • Not the case with modern USB-C ports

  • Exactly! This is what I always say. If a book introduces elves or tentacled aliens, then you basically know what you're dealing with as they have an established cultural narrative. But FH's worldbuilding is so fanrasitcally different to everything else, yet fits together so neatly, that it's really compelling despite the weirdly paced plot.