imaqtpie

Killing the sparrows made it worse

the famine would have happened under the Kuomintang had the nationalists won the civil war

Pure, unfettered cope. It's amazing that you know how events would have unfolded in an alternative timeline where the CCP didn't exterminate billions of sparrows. Your mastery of ecological science must be exceptional, I'm sure you've run the numbers on this and come up with a data-driven model that demonstrates the truth of your argument. Surely you wouldn't make such a claim without having copious amounts of statistical/historical/ecological evidence to support said claim.

Secondly, nobody is siding with you here. Imagine this neutral party all you want, they don’t exist at the moment.

Smartest thing you've said all day, neutrals don't really exist on this platform. I'm aware of that, discussions such as these are more useful for me to develop and work through my own positions and rhetorical techniques for exposing sophists and ideologues.

Life expectancy still managed to double under Mao, that’s how horribly underdeveloped China was, and a famine under those circumstances of underdevelopment was something common prior to the communists. It was the work of the communists that stopped famine for good in China.

Holy copium batman 😂

A famine on the scale of the Great Famine, largely self inflicted by the federal government, was an entirely singular and unprecedented event. To attempt to portray the Great Famine as a common historical event or anything other than a tremendous black mark against the government which presided over it is clear evidence of bias on your part. Everybody makes mistakes, but the anatomy of the Great Famine was clearly the direct result of decisions made by the CCP that would never have been made under a different, less authoritarian political system.

I'd have to imagine that any neutral party reading through these comments will have gotten plenty of confirmation that my assessment of you is correct, in that your blind adherence to communism as a panacea prevents you from understanding or engaging with reality in objective, rational terms. Good day sir.

You didn’t back up that claim with anything other than vibes, though.

I don't need to, I'm not the one focusing all my energy on converting people to communism without having any evidence of whether my methods are actually effective, or indeed, whether communism itself is effective.

Hahaha it's like when the CCP exterminated all the sparrows in China to protect the crops. It wasn't until millions of people started dying from starvation that they realized sparrows actually play a major role in controlling insect populations, and their idiotic extermination campaign had the opposite effect of what they intended. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree I guess. Shoot first ask questions later mindset.

Oh, or it's also like when the CCP instituted the one-child policy, only to belatedly realize decades later that they had inadvertently created a massive demographic crisis that has only begun to unfold recently. It's almost like blind adherence to ideology to the exclusion of one's ability to dispassionately examine the available evidence causes one to make bad, self-destructive decisions. Who knew? Certainly not communists.

The fact that the absolute number of comrades has risen due to my interactions means it’s a net positive.

Citation needed

You haven't even responded to my point that you're actively pushing more people away from communism than vice versa.

How can you think it's important and necessary if you can't even define what it is?

it has useful benefits and consistent practical knowledge developed by past communists and socialists to aid in reaching this end.

Does it? Can you give some examples of these benefits and this practical knowledge?

I'll go first. It is necessary to eliminate opposing political parties and ideologies to ensure the viability of any communist state.

It's not a strawman, it's a realistic appraisal of your position based on the evidence of your actions. Just because you prefer to deny it verbally when it's laid out in front of you like that doesn't make it any less true.

If you don't believe communism is anything special or noteworthy, then you wouldn't spend your entire life on a fringe online forum attempting to convert a few dozen edgy teenagers.

You have a remarkable capacity for doublethink, which partially explains why you find communism so attractive as an ideology.

Thank you for calling my language flowery though, it's nice to be appreciated 🙃

I would just block and move on if I were you. Although I don't hold myself to that same standard because sometimes I can't resist interacting either, so I guess I can't really criticize you too much.

Usually I try to just speak my piece and dip though, whereas you tend to get fully drawn into discussions with extremists much more frequently and extensively than myself, and indeed seem to seek such interactions out. Just seems like a waste of energy and not particularly beneficial for your mental well-being.

Communism isn't a deus ex machina that would make all human beings instantaneously happy if they were to simply accept it unquestioningly. For that matter, communism isn't a comprehensive ideology at all, it's more of a collection of theorems regarding the socioeconomic development and structure of society, many of which contradict one another.

It's like a Christian who thinks they are inherently doing good by converting others to Christianity. You are taking a handful of decent theoretical ideas and imbuing them with the significance of divine revelation. Furthermore, you are arrogantly presuming that your flawed understanding of communism is the real communism, and discounting the possibility that other "communists" can easily interpret the ideology in such a way as to justify killing you due to your flawed understanding of communism. It's an incredibly naive position that doesn't withstand the most basic scrutiny.

Think about it like liberalism. The American and French revolutionaries claimed moral authority because they were overthrowing the hierarchical structures of feudalism and replacing them with republicanism, democracy, free trade, etc.

In retrospect, we can easily observe that these ideas and political movements, despite nominally being constructed to protect and enhance the freedom and equitability of human beings, have in reality created conditions which have massively infringed on the self-declared natural rights of human beings in ways that a feudal hierarchy could never have dreamed of accomplishing.

Likewise, even if society were to globally transition to communism, that would simply raise new problems and abuses of power that would need to be combated. In conclusion, "creating more comrades" is a futile and naive goal.

Additionally, there is a very convincing argument to be made that you have potentially pushed more people away from communism than drawn people towards communism, and you would obviously have no way of knowing whether or not that is true. From where I'm sitting, I see a lot more users who have blocked you and your ilk than those who have joined you, and my personal opinion of communism has grown significantly less favorable since I began encountering you people on Lemmy a few years back. But what do I know, I'm a dirty non-communist so therefore all of my thoughts and actions are clearly incorrect and evil in comparison to the enlightened and ethical behaviors of any individual who happens to adopt the moniker of communist.

God, ignorance really is bliss. What I would give to be simple-minded enough that I could ascribe a positive ethical value to something as utterly meaningless as "creating more comrades".

I like to comfort myself by imagining that both of you are paid actors who make a living sowing discontent on Lemmy to prevent any chance of mainstream success for the platform.

Sadly, my rational assessment of the human condition compels me to believe that you are both entirely genuine, and just extremely confused and solipsistic. If you are indeed engaging in good faith, then I would pose the question of what you hope to accomplish by engaging in these idiotic, endless faux-debates.

Realistically, there is no arbitrator here; you are both entirely able to move the goalposts, recruit spurious evidence, ignore counterpoints, and generally make a mockery of a legitimate debate. Furthermore, you have a miniscule audience on this platform, greatly limiting the possibility of influencing third parties. Therefore, the only possible outcome of this interaction would be the outcome which has already been repeated ad infinitum on Lemmy and social media in general, namely the mutual exchange of insults, poorly constructed arguments, and badly sourced data.

What an interesting way to spend one's life. As I said initially, it would be less painful to witness if I believed that you were accomplishing something such as the general suppression of Lemmy as a social media platform by creating a climate of negativity and conflict (even though I oppose that goal).

But realistically you are probably like the vast majority of people in that you are hopelessly incapable of judging the impact of your actions on the world and/or yourself, and you simply prefer to follow your baser instincts rather than take a step back and consider if there might be a more efficacious method of achieving your purported goals. Gives major punching a brick wall energy.