Comment on Hrmmmmm

• Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Or did you perhaps mean the Doji bara / Skull Famine

  Hmmm. Fair enough. Now let’s do an exercise: let’s go to lemmy.world search, and look for the words “skull famine”, see how many results we get. Oh, we get exactly 2 results containing the words “skull famine”, two copypastas from 2 years ago which are simply a list of western atrocities. I wonder why a famine in India with 10+ million deaths has only 2 results in lemmy.world… Compare that to the search of the word “holodomor”. My point stands, doesn’t it?

  That’s why meaningless phrases like “Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics” are such an easy thing to parrot - you’re just saying “and then we do statistics, QED” without having to engage with the actual difficult part (the math)

  Good that you’re a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling! Will be interesting. The thing is, you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism, because you can use many metrics: alcohol consumption, violent crime statistics, drug use, deaths from certain diseases, expenditure in healthcare, number of suicides… etc. You can take all of those metrics and see how they all vastly increase in the transition to capitalism. Sure, if it were just one of those metrics, then you maybe would be able to say it’s because of another reason, but when all of these metrics consistently rise sharply during a horrifying economic crisis byproduct of capitalism in several post-soviet republics at the same time, you can quite confidently both calculate numbers, and blame them on capitalism. As a matter of fact, this has been done widely for modern capitalist Russia, with this study talking of 3.5 million probable deaths between 1990 and 1998 alone, and this other study by Paul Cockshott reaching the figure of 12 million excess deaths between 1986 and 2008, though this latter one using much simpler methodology. Similar studies can be carried out for Ukraine, which suffered even harder since the crisis took longer to recover, and either way the numbers point towards the millions. And this is only excess deaths, not including lack of childbirth and economic migrations, both also counting in the millions.

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  • Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Your point was that we don’t use big scary names taken from the native language for other famines like the ones that happened under british indian rule thus “Holodomor” must clearly be a politicized name. Except you were flat wrong and we totally do the exact thing you said we didn’t. Prior to that, your point was that Holodomor sounded like “Holocaust” so clearly it must be a politicized name. And then you were dead wrong, because despite it being obviously true that the two share a common lingusitic root, Holodomor was coined a good twenty years before “The Holocaust” happened, so it can’t have been a reference.

    Now your point is that it must be a politicized name because it’s more talked about than a different famine, one which wasn’t ever punishable with death to be discussed, which there is no active effort to deny it’s severity or cause, which has no relevancy in the broad political climate, on a tiny website, and even using the world’s most arbitrary and cherry-picked metric you got the number wrong (there’s 11 results, including my comment above, but for some reason (possibly related to LW’s search indexing being notoriously unreliable - which is true across pretty much all of lemmy) excluding your comment. So, we can chalk it up to 12 and also question the reliability of the methodology as a whole.

    Here: Yes, the Holodomor is political - it was absolutely the result of political actions, and is the subject of a great many conspiracy theories and weirdo apologist movements today. No, the name Holodomor was not made up just to be scarier by association with The Holocaust to discredit the Soviets who caused it like you’re implying - the word existed twenty years before the coining of the term Holocaust. You’re just plain flat out wrong in the particulars you’re claiming.

    Can you please move on?

    ---

    Okay, new topic:

    Cockshott’s (great name) paper is just pretty awful in general (which is probably why it’s in a magazine and not a journal) and his methodology for calculating excess deaths is, even he acknowledges in the text, extremely dubious (which is fine, he does that to illustrate a tangential concept). but it does make some good points towards the end and I agree with his overall thesis about planned economies (once I figured out what it was). Rosefielde’s (great name) paper is excellent, and breaks down his calculations in an extremely easily digested manner. I might even use it as an example of decent demographic calculation at some point, it’s just a really good overview of the process and details the factors effecting (hehe) the

    However: Both of those papers answer show examples of addressing death rates, and make no attempt the problem of calculating lives saved. Lives saved is the metric in question, not death rate. They’re terrible examples for your point, because they make no attempt to address your point whatsoever.

    If your claim, “you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism”, were actually true, why would you cite these papers, instead of ones that have nothing to do with your point at all?

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    • Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      My claim isn’t that the word Holodomor was coined to make it sound scary, it’s that the word becoming the one to refer to the event in the western world is no coincidence. The etymological origin can be whichever it is.

      Now, why oh why does the Skull Famine not have relevancy on the political climate? That’s exactly my point. Other famines are depoliticized (the article on Wikipedia for example chalks most of it down to climate) but “Holodomor” is made out to be by western anticommunist propaganda an attempt of genocide against Ukrainians. The motivations, followup or precedents are left to guess, though, but that’s fine, nobody will question it because first, questioning genocide is a risky thing to do, and secondly, it’s le evil Russian commies doing it, so ofc we will all believe it in the west.

      Just a small remark: the two search results I referred to after searching “skull famine” came from not just searching those words on lemmy.world, but also from doing a Ctrl+F search for the words to be together. After ignoring our conversation, only two results meet that condition.

      Rosefielde’s (great name) paper is excellent, and breaks down his calculations in an extremely easily digested manner.

      Ok. Funny to me that you hadn’t seen any of this before. Given the proximity to our modern times of this excess mortality numbering the millions in Russia alone, it should be a political hotbed shouldn’t it? Especially now that sensibilities with Ukraine are high, I wonder, why is it that similar studies but regarding the impact of capitalism in Ukraine aren’t constantly discussed? Be honest, were you aware of the scale of death and suffering caused by capitalist restoration in the eastern block? Given your original dismiss when I talked of drug abuse, organized crime, suicide rates, malnutrition and preventable disease, I doubt it. You seem to know so much about Holodomor though, so ask yourself: why is that? Why do you only seem to know about the millions of Ukrainians who died under socialism 90 years ago but you didn’t quite know what happened in the region in terms of life metrics for the past 35?

      However: Both of those papers show examples of addressing death rates, and make no attempt at the problem of calculating lives saved

      Cool, but I addressed that already. I already gave you the Brazil example. Tell me any other underdeveloped country that, between 1930 and 1960, had a doubling of life expectancy from 28 to 60. Comparative economics is a valid method, and there is no country that had this growth at the time, which is even more relevant in the case of the USSR because for equally developed countries, socialist ones consistently give better life metrics. You don’t believe in comparative economics, or in the idea that economic development correlates (especially in socialist societies) with increased life expectancy and reduced mortality?

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      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I hate doing these quote-heavy replies but yeesh, please forgive my lack of narrative structure:

        Now, why oh why does the Skull Famine not have relevancy on the political climate? That’s exactly my point.

        Oh lookit, another version of what your point was. No, other famines aren’t depoliticized - they’re just not particularly relevant to modern discourse.

        Just a small remark:

        Hey look, documenting methodology! I heartily approve!

        Funny to me that you hadn’t seen any of this before

        What? It’s one paper in an obscure journal. Why would

        Especially now that sensibilities with Ukraine are high, I wonder, why is it that similar studies but regarding the impact of capitalism in Ukraine aren’t constantly discussed? […] Given your original dismiss when I talked of drug abuse, organized crime, suicide rates, malnutrition and preventable disease, I doubt it.

        Did you even read either of the papers you linked? Hell, even Cockshott’s pretty rough paper has a couple sections devoted to why this isn’t a straightforward conclusion, and things like alcoholism started prior to the dissolution of the soviet union as a result of things like Khrushchev’s attempt to implement prohibition. Neoliberal ideas were pervasive sure, but it’s not like they were inflicted on the USSR by outside forces - the post-stalin neoliberal movement was aggressively suppressed explicitly because of it’s popularity, which was due to a whole multitude of factors (doubtlessly the CIA fondly wishes to be included in that list)

        Cool, but I addressed that already. I already gave you the Brazil example.

        You made a completely unsupported claim, provided sources for an entirely unrelated claim, now you’re again attempting to assert that first claim is true without providing any sources while insisting the second claim matters. Come on man you said this was easy. Hell, one of your own previous sources provides an astoundingly solid explanation of why your position (that a doubling of life expectancy in the 30s is notable) is pretty spurious.

        Comparative economics can be matched to pretty much anything, like you’re doing here. Without actual substance to back you up it’s meaningless. You can’t just wave the magic statistics wand, point at a single graph and then draw whatever conclusions you like and then hope to maintain any shred of credibility when challenged. You’re just making this up to try and force your conclusion through, and it’s getting sad.

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