edit: GUYS fuck stalin and fuck tankies, period. i understand that this community is more sensitive than most to pro-stalinist vibes, and i apologize for unintentionally twinging that nerve, but you need stop calling each other (and me) slurs
good heavens, happy new year, fuck incarceration and murder in all forms
(mods pls also do your job and help with the slurs thing)
edit2: big thank u 2 da mods for helping with the slurs thing u guys rock 😎 💕
Yes those prisoners sadly still have rights and we can’t mulch them up to enrich our soil or anything.
Here’s a fun article on Survivorship Bias
Nah instead Stalin just killed 6 million+ Russians, in Soviet Russia you don’t need gulag when you have bullet.
The US has killed dozens of times that through social murder.
I’m not saying that Stalin wasn’t an autocratic dickhead, but if you’re gonna compare him unfavorably to present day US, number of own citizens killed is a bad choice of metric 🤷
Famously no one died in the USSR due to social issues
Fair.
To be even more fair, though, extreme poverty and shortages of (nutritious) food are as severe if not worse in present day US and the richest 1% are hoarding much more than the party fat cats were too.
extreme poverty and shortages of (nutritious) food are as severe if not worse in present day US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–1922
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930–1933
Your comparison is straight-up deranged, I have no softer words.
Multiply how many people die of starvation or malnutrition a year by 29 (the length of Stalin’s reign) and you’ll see that I’m right.
Just because the two Soviet famines were faster and got more press doesn’t mean they killed more people over a 29 year period than the US “food is for profits and poor people are for exploiting” politics.
I find it very, very hard to believe that there could be two catastrophic famines in the SSSR, and yet that there were no deaths or food issues outside of those two periods (there absolutely were). I only used them as examples, not as a list of all food issues in the Union, while you’re implying the latter.
Multiply how many people die of starvation or malnutrition a year by 29 (the length of Stalin’s reign) and you’ll see that I’m right.
I take it you mean in the US? Ok, let’s see.
The same trend occurred nationwide, with malnutrition deaths more than doubling, from about 9,300 deaths in 2018 to roughly 20,500 in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Let’s take the second, significantly bigger number, for the sake of the argument. If the number of malnutrition deaths is multiplied by Stalin’s reign, it gets us 595k deaths. At the time, SSSR had (very roughly) half the population of current USA, so to keep the numbers proportional and meaningful to compare, we should halve the US deaths: 300k. Stalin did not actually rule during the first famine I linked, only the second one. The second famine killed at least 5.7 million people (again, taking the lower number, in favour of your position).
300k is clearly a smaller number than 5.7 mil. Since the numbers are only relative, we should judge by the ratio: the 1930-1933 famine was 19 times worse death-wise than the current food issues in the USA.
If you have some different, better numbers (though I tried to pick those that are in favour in your claim), or if I miscalculated something, let me know.
TIL Stalin was slightly worse than Biden
Are you suggesting the us gov killed at minimum 6*12 million of it’s own citizens? 72 million? At the low end? You said “dozens” plural so 144million or more? Bullshit.
ACAB, injustice is alive and well, and extrajudicial killings are a serious serious issue in America, but your scales are just fantasy
Ok, so maybe not dozens, but regulatory capture and other facets of the US system of laissez-faire for the already rich and powerful coupled with brutal oppression of those already hurting the most directly kills at LEAST a million people a year, maybe double that indirectly or as a major but not sole factor. Multiply that with 29 (the length of Stalin’s reign) and you get a hell of a lot more than 6.
Systemic failings are so fucking far from extrajudicial or even judicial killings.
You’ve ruined your decent concerns with absurd numbers.
People being failed by a system is not a political killing, gulag style. They shouldn’t be compared.
Systemic failings are so fucking far from extrajudicial or even judicial killings.
Are the victims any less dead? Are the politicians that knowingly created and uphold that system any less culpable for their murder just because they were less direct?
People being failed by a system is not a political killing
They are when the people making the rules are aware of the consequences of their actions and choose to cause the premature and preventable death of citizens anyway. Which is the vast majority of the deaths.
gulag style
Gulags were awful, yes, but only a few of them were worse than the worst present day US prisons.
You’re letting red scare propaganda cloud your judgment.
Yawn.
I have serious issues with America, but I’m done comparing it to Stalin’s ussr. It is simply comical to do so, especially on the topics of incarceration, rights, and killings.
You’ve moved the goalpost backwards and forwards multiple times, and are therefore generally without merit.
Cya
I have serious issues with America
As well you should
but I’m done comparing it to Stalin’s ussr
Good idea, since you’re very bad at it
It is simply comical to do so, especially on the topics of incarceration, rights, and killings.
When you’re significantly biased by red scare propaganda exaggerations as well as the paucity of reporting on US atrocities, I can see how you’d think so. You’re not right, but you’re wrong in a somewhat understandable way.
You’ve moved the goalpost backwards and forwards multiple times, and are therefore generally without merit.
I got the multiplicator wrong by mistake once and corrected it when you called me on it. Maybe don’t just blatantly lie when accusing others of arguing in bad faith?
Cya
Yeah, have a good one, I guess 🤷
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Yeah, because pointing out the fact that underregulated capitalism is even worse than the failed communism of the Soviet Union makes me a tankie who loves Stalin. The same Stalin who I called an autocratic dickhead on this very post 🙄
The world isn’t a binary where something stops being awful once something else is even worse. That unfettered capitalism is even worse doesn’t mean that the USSR wasn’t a shitshow in many ways.
While it’s true that “bashing Stalin” (something that I engage in myself) isn’t red scare propaganda, dramatically exaggerating the many faults of the USSR while simultaneously greatly minimizing those of US capitalism very much IS.
So if you can stop foaming at the mouth over me being a communist (I’m not. I vary wildly between a European style Social Democrat and an anarchist depending on the subject matter but never ultra-authoritarian like a tankie) and take off your binary goggles for a second, you might actually learn something rather than having a hissy fit.
“any and all of my country’s actions are beyond criticism because at least we didnt kill them”
An important part of critical thinking is the ability to see flaws in comparisons and arguments even when they point towards conclusions you agree with. It’s telling that you interpreted their comment the way you did.
It’s telling, the way you’re talking about this. Unless OP is defending Stalin, something I’ve not seen evidence of. It’s pointing out how hypocritical most criticisms of Stalin are. The whole point of it, whether it’s 100% accurate. Is to bait hypocrites out into “but Stalin” bullshit. If their gulags are wrong. Maybe we should reevaluate our own similarly troubling practices.
Don’t get me wrong, despite being libertarian Marxist. I’m wildly against Lenin, Stalin, Mao, hell Engles for that matter etc. But Americans general hypocrisy make our criticism pointless and largely mute. Making you and the other person ironically, the ones likely failing at critical thinking
You are probably the first libertarian marxist I have seen. It’s an idea I played around with at one point.
my response was sarcasm and an intentional fallacy in the form of an appeal to incredulity for the sake of rhetoric ❤️
if you think that counts as an interpretation thats on u bestie
my response was sarcasm and an intentional fallacy in the form of an appeal to incredulity for the sake of rhetoric
My bullshit-english translator is a bit rusty, but all I’m getting out of this is “I intentionally wrote a wildly incorrect comment just for funsies” in which case fuck off
If you run it through the translator a second time, you get “lulz u got trolled”.
And if you run it through a third time, you get a recipe for an excellent strawberry pie, somehow.
you’re welcome yall 🥰🥧🍓
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You kiss your sistermother with that mouth? 😛
Hey, hey. Come on, now. The United States doesn’t just lock up brown people. We execute many on the spot, without provocation or probable cause. Credit where credit is due.
For profit prisons need to be abolished for sure But any downplaying of the horrendous gulags is just wrong https://youtu.be/dBjcT0QxSS0?si=jIvtvNe6j7lUiFxy
For profit prisons are a problem, but they only represent 8% of the prison population in the US. They only tell part of the story.
Oh, is it revisionist fantasy day?
Insert ‘always has been’ meme.
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Prison population
Yep, I reread the image after and realised my fuck up, hence why I deleted it.
Still not sure how you managed to reply and read it several hours after I deleted it
Ig perks of federation? I think my instance still had your comment or something.
The US constitution permits slavery as punishment for crimes. So they made a whole set of laws to criminalize black lives and optimize enslaving them.
There original SEO
My favorite jokes is the “Look how bad it is in North Korea/Russia/China…” Then the ol “sike that’s America”.
My second favorite thing is all the whataboutism replies because butthurt folks don’t like reality. Rather than address the problem, they’d rather go into finger pointing.
I think it’s because the meme itself is the wrong way to try to make that argument. Instead of just saying “the US has 22% of the world’s aggregate prisoner population and that’s a problem”, it’s making that argument by directly comparing it to a MUCH WORSE regime for that exact violation of rights.
The whataboutisms tend to be bristling at the bad comparisons more than a direct refutation of the underlying point being made. I think complaining about the whataboutisms misses the point of those replies, which is valid.
As the other poster said, why not compare with Scandinavian countries that genuinely do have better justice systems rather than comparing with USSR or CCP which have much worse justice systems?
i think sometimes it’s worth critiquing memes for the rhetorical impact rather than raw arguing power
if you wanted a watertight meme that perfectly describes your argument, you’re right, this isn’t it.
but if you want an emotionally jarring meme that encourages debate and spreads awareness of the disturbing nature of american justice, i’d say this has acheived that goal looking at these comments :)
i’m still working this position as a shitposter but i’d say this is at least an A- tier meme in that a) it’s factual (not outright false), and b) it encourages active discussion and awareness of issues in the comments.
This would have been a good point if lemmy wasn’t packed with idiots praising USSR as heaven on Earth.
point taken, you changed my perspective 😅 have a great rest of your day
To be fair, it’s been a lot better lately. Not sure if defederations happened or they just became less brazen when they saw most people don’t care for their bullshit. Probably both.
I hate the US as much as the next person but the meme itself is basically whataboutism.
I just want to know the story behind your username. Did a tuber betray you somehow?
It’s always “if you don’t like it, go live in Somalia” and never “if you don’t like it, go live in Denmark”. It’s saying “it could be worse” instead of “it could be better”.
Well the Somalia people actually want a Somalia style government and are free to go there. The Denmark people want a Danish style government but can’t go there.
this is such a beautiful way to put it, thank you
Pretty much. “Could be worse” is for when you’re recovering from the flu, not the “There is 1.2 million people in prison right now”.
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Prison population. As in, 22% of all people imprisoned in the world are imprisoned in the US.
22% of the world’s prison population. They hold a fifth of all of the prisoners in the world.
(I don’t have a source for this, I’m just clarifying the meme.)
Don’t forget to factor in all the Uyghurs in camps in china and basically the entire population of North Korea to those numbers
Given official numbers it’s about right. What constitutes ‘prison’ population in certain South East Asian country, would change the ratio considerably.
The meme is pretty unclear tho. Ig you use the gulags and the ussr as a general point of evil and compare other evil(the us) to it?
why do people bring up other countries when USA is criticized, just admit you’re in a shithole country
Because, you know, Soviet union (other country) in post himself
Because tankies love tu-quoque-arguments. That way they don’t have to put all states in question
i’m saYING lmao.
This has got to be one of the most stupid memes ever.
The percentage of Soviet citizens that were put into prisons/gulag camps/colonies will have far exceeded the percentage of us citizens currently incarcerated in the usa, and in far more inhumane circumstances.
Unless the op is trying to deflect from the problems of the USA penal system by drawing attention to a far worse system, I don’t get the point of this meme.
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I did some googling out of curiosity, turns out Wikipedia has a whole ass article on it: The US prison rate as of 2021 is 531 per 100000 (peaked in 08 with 755 after a huge spike in the 80s and 90s, I wonder why). In the Soviet Union during the high of the gulag system, it was estimated (by actual historians, not the soviets) to be 714 to 892.
Apartheid South Africa was 851. Saudi Arabia has 200.
You’re counting the percentage of population, in the meme it’s the percentage of all incarcerated people.
I don’t want to search for stats, but it may be so that with a higher incarceration rate the USSR still held less of the total.
Then it’s a pretty stupid metric. A small country could imprison and torture half its population and still be a tiny fraction of total people in prison.
That being said, there’s obviously way too many people in prison in the US right now.
What’s your source for the gulag numbers? The wiki lists 18M though the system with a population of 180M, with something like 1.5M deaths. That would seem to indicate a number higher than 1%.
The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
It’s in the “more comparisons” section of the article I posted. I should’ve specified all those numbers come from that Wikipedia article.
I find back about that it peaked at 1.4% or 1.5% in 1950 in a few sources: 2.5m to 2.7m prisoners for about 180m citizens. So significantly higher than what you found.
On Quora a Russian posted a nice graph, but I don’t see a source for the data : https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Soviet-citizens-were-incarcerated-at-any-given-time-The-US-has-0-7-of-its-population-in-prison-and-I-was-wondering-how-that-compares-to-the-old-USSR
Having read testimonies of the nazino island gulag and a few Russian prisoner novels, the Soviet prison system really shouldn’t be compared to the USA one. Those percentages might not be far off (“only” 2x more at the worst), but numbers don’t tell everything. Stalin’s reign of terror was so much worse than the modern day USA dystopia. Compare the USA to modern day Canada or western Europe and it will highlight much better how bad it is doing.
Hexbear is leaking.
Why’s it at +157/-3 after 3hr:
The US stat is so bad you easily believe it when attributed to stereotypical evil regime.
Then you’re reminded that same evil thing is actually something the US is currently doing.
I’m glad we don’t just kill everyone we arrest, I’m glad we’re not ruled by a dictator… still, I wish the average person viewing a meme weren’t able to easily believe something we do was actually done by someone we vaguely recall learning was the worst.
Why’s it at +157/-3 after 3hr:
Because blahaj.zone doesn’t count the downvotes. The -3 downvotes that you see are only those that are counted by the instance you’re viewing from (given out by the users of that instance only). Right now, on lemmy.world it has 28 downvotes, on dbzer0 it has 2.
And -12 here now… interesting!
Is Blahaj unique in that respect? Thus our instances likely sum all downvotes when posts are made to them?
Thanks :)
Hexbear also does the same.
based
LOL. the myth. like gulag or uigur camps easily exceed those numbers.
lol hexbear is leaking again
I have a full instance block and it still isn’t enough. Every day more braindead tankie takes make it through the filter.
“everything the USSR/CCP/DPRK did wrong is actually capitalist state intelligence propaganda” is so exhausting.
“Capitalism is bad” apparently no longer includes state capitalism or the political capital exploitation of the vanguard class that preceeds it.
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Market socialism is good. Syndicalism is good. Pretty much every form of socialism that starts without “maybe we should build a dictatorship, what’s the worst that could happen” is going to be better than capitalism.
ive yet to see anything other than reactionary posting from hb
I’m editing over my old comment and deleting my replies bc it was me assuming op was a tankie and being an asshole to them about it. It’s a good meme, I’m just a lot more sensitive to tankie looking stuff on a place like lemmy, and this isn’t an excuse but I’ve been in a pretty shit place mentally and looking for fights where there shouldn’t be any. I’m really sorry op, you didn’t deserve any of the shit I originally said to you, I hope you have a good day :3
I thought it was a safe assumption as well, but you’re showing strength and good will by changing your comment. Take it easy pal!
yo homie just wanted to let you know i see this and i’m sending love and support to you telepathically. we love a good character arc and i definitely could have picked a less inflammatory meme to post on my bi-daily excursion here—my sincere apologies that my post incurred a negative emotional toll on you. have an excellent day :3
There’s something (🤷♂️) I don’t get here.
Are you thinking OP is pro-Stalin?
It’s a reasonable assumption to make, considering this is basically a hexbear meme
So totally unnecessary. This sort of bait and switch factoid is what brought me left in the first place.
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