I have a letterpress print of this from the Cambridge (UK) museum of technology when I was a kid (so about 30 years ago I guess!). I love the juxtaposition between letterpress and the idea of relaxen und watschen der blinkenlichten
For sure, but it doesn’t pervade public consciousness in the same way. Not sure why, perhaps because the memory of mass-scale war has faded with the previous generations.
Fear of nuclear war was useful for midcentury US elites because it could be transmuted into fear of Communism. Since 1991 it just isn't as useful for that purpose, so the culture industry doesn't push it anymore. Their use against Japan in WW2 has also (just about) fallen out of living memory.
Whenever the "tens of millions killed by communism" number gets trotted out, it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism. Which is fine, but it means you need to go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means (not to mention making per-capita adjustments) as well for a fair point of comparison.
Every person who died of preventable illness because they couldn't afford healthcare? Death by capitalism. Every dude who puts a bullet in their head because of financial strain? Death by capitalism. Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food (the U.K., large swathes of Africa).
Numbers are meaningless when you don't put them in context.
When you conflate "armed soldiers steal the grain you grew and the food you have" with "not assigned resources" you are creating a horrifying and dehumanizing reframing that makes me doubt your basic humanity.
Placing people in a cage and not allowing them to grow food or provide for themselves is similarly murder, not "failing to assign resources"
Your language is worthy of HR layoff talk, but used to describe mass human death, the forced control of dictators to prevent people from having the basic freedom to care for themselves.
Further, placing this in the context of "oh it capitalism also resulted in massive deaths thus we shan't be critical of the dictators doing it" is, uh, much much worse.
> it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism
You mean, those who were forcibly starved by their government, those who were forcibly murdered and displaced by their government, and those who were put into forced labor "re-education" work camps by their government.
I'm not talking about the baseline of human problems and suffering that is everywhere -- that's not communism's fault. Communism is responsible for the large increase in death rate following a country's fall to it, and especially for the murders it commits (literally shooting, hanging, decapitating, working to death in gulags, etc., as well as imprisoning and persecuting dissidents and mass theft of peoples' property leading to mass poverty).
The vast power communist leaders hold always corrupts them and turns them into monsters.
> go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means
> Death by capitalism.
You might as well say that everyone in a family who had a preventable death experienced "death by family". Or that everyone with an employer who had a preventable death experienced "death by employer".
It's not other people's job to prevent a given person's misfortune.
> Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food
That's due to government corruption more than anything else. Government officials should be held accountable and prosecuted.
I'm talking about wrongful deaths. It is wrong for a government to kill people for any reason other than conviction of murder. The Bolsheviks, Red Giard, and Stasi straight up murdered people because they owned means of production, disagreed with communism, or tried to escape to a different country. That us evil.
I know that most of the early deaths under communism were due to starvation, what GP calls "misallocation of resources". Thats a fancy term for stealing. Violation of private property - literally taking people's land and things - is evil and it's also directly responsible for the massive famines that happened under communism.
The longer I live, the more I'm convinced that the idea of communism arises because of envy, and not understanding that wealth doesn't just "exist" statically such that it can be fairly (re)distributed.
The real value is what people sell - either food, clothes, houses, and goods/services. By solving the wrong problem, Communism messes up the motivation to work, produce, and sell. And so everyone becomes far more equal - but poor and starving (except political leaders, they usually do far better than the populace... they're "more equal" than others).
It's an evil idea.
... and I am having trouble understanding why all this needs to be said again. Where the heck is the idea that communism is good coming from? The harrowing biographies and memoirs of those who lived under it are out there - all the content dying, famine, fear, the KGB banging on front doors at 3am to "disappear" people (who return 10 years later and talk about torture, prisons, guards authorized to do "anything" to prisoners, and gulags), the learned willing ignorance ("the less you know, the better you sleep").
I had a Russian co-worker over for dinner once who lived through the tail end of the Soviet Union. "The less you know, the better you sleep" is a quote from him.
I'm astounded that people actually think this is mental gymnastics... would you like the KGB banging on your neighbor's door at 3am and sending them to the gulag for saying something critical of the government?
Collectivization is impossible without expropriating people by force. How would you propose accomplishing that without the government's involvement? Central planning also requires a government to allocate resources and fix prices.
If you disagree, I'm curious what government types you think collectivization and central planning can be accomplished with besides those that directly take charge of those things.
We have some good examples to pick from throughout history - postwar Britain nationalizing major industries, Sweden’s soc-dem era, Allende’s Chile (though the US put a quick stop to that), Israeli kibbutzim…
You are collapsing three different questions into one illogical conclusion, leaning heavily on one of the least successful examples of collectivization in the history of mankind. One could use your line of reasoning to argue that because there are bad capitalist countries with authoritarian governments, who do indeed go door to door and murder its citizenry as political suppression, capitalism itself is bad. But they still wouldn’t be logically correct.
I love that I see this on hacker news of all places. As an east-anglian I would definitely second this opinion. Times are a bit harder now but there are still so many great breweries.
Because in their philosophy sex serves a purpose (procreation and the deepening of the marital union).
Anything that doesn’t support those two aims (contraception, abortion, gay marriage, pornography etc.) is therefore immoral but there’s nothing wrong with sex in its ‘proper’ context.
Their philosophy is extremely inconsistent. In reality it's emotionally driven. Not sure what specific emotions cause one to think sex is wrong except for reproduction, but a lot of the people who push this sort of thing turn out to be closeted gay homophobes.
I’m not supporting it, but how is it inconsistent?
I can speak more to the Catholic view than the evangelical, but if you accept the initial premise that there is a creator God then the rest follows fairly naturally (you can look the ‘the theology of the body’ if you want to read more)
I didn’t say God only wants people to have sex for reproduction. There are two purposes in this philosophy: reproduction, and the deepening of marital unity
If you did "web stuff" in the early 2000s (like 2005-2010). You'd probably know who he is. He did Ruby on Rails, a backend web framework.
But that was also very Start-up and America focussed. So if you did web dev in some other country and didn't have colleagues who were into that culture you still might've missed the name.
TBH the biggest difference is him being more vocal.
I'm pretty sure most of the people who did "web stuff" at the time and used twitter (key point maybe) know him simply because you'd often see his tweets. Regardless of coutry (I'm from Russia, for exampl)
DHH markets himself much better. His company (basecamp), in a sense, revolves around his public persona and he's unapologetic about this. It's the same with all of his projects (e.g. Omarchy recently).
I think the idea is that while individuals will absolutely find ways round it, it should help to reduce the network effect of everyone a kid knows being already on it. How true that is remains to be seen.
One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.
I agree, another example is the line ‘lots of things had to be done by hand’. I think a more human narrative would be describing the discovery that thing X that we take for granted was missing and tell the story of figuring it out.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt though, perhaps they were aiming for brevity.
reply