Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
r2_pilot | on: Trump wins presidency for second time
Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up! Considering your own sources, seems like that work of scholarship may have not been an entirely impartial view. Particularly, from your own wiki link, >Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship",[38] faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries,[6][39]: 194 [40]: 123

I appreciate your deep dive into these scholastic studies. I always appreciate learning new things.

TimTheTinker | parent
You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.

When an idea has resulted in the deaths of a significant portion of the world's population at the time, it's healthy to regard it (and similar ideas) with a bit of skepticism.

r2_pilot | root | parent
>You may disagree with that particular source, but your remark glosses over the grim reality: a heck of a lot of people died under socialism, more than the entire body count arising from World War 2.

I'm specifically trying to avoid the whole "no true Scottsman" argument by saying these aren't necessarily examples of how an actually functional communism economy would be, but I do wish you could be consistent with your terminology as socialism and communism are distinctly different ideas. I'd also like to emphasize the mild sarcasm when I used words such as "merely" and "complete and total cooperation",to close out this conversation which I have little more to contribute to.

TimTheTinker | root | parent
Sounds like this is academic to you; it's visceral to me.

"If only every single person would..." is not how you create policy where people are actually free.

r2_pilot | root | parent
I must have missed the part where, at birth, I signed the social contract saying that I approve of the governance and monetary policy. That, or I'm not free.
TimTheTinker | root | parent
You're still free to leave, unlike citizens under socialism.

(Seriously, have you read about all the escape attempts over the Berlin Wall?)