carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
Nations trying to transition to communism certainly tried to subvert the power of capitalist nations the incentives were different. For the capitalist communism represents the destruction of their power. Also since most of global power after WW2 was in the hands of capitalist nations even if you assume they were equally working against each other the capitalist send just had much larger numbers.
Do you think Bolsheviks tried to subvert the power of capitalists, or that they were unsuccesful? After WW2 for a couple of decades there was a balance between West and Communists, again you are factually wrong.
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
Given history, there is no way to isolate a reason why some nations failed to transition to a communist state. "It was due to inefficiency" is the capitalist narrative but there are far too many variables to isolate a single cause.
It's not capitalist narrative, it's the laws of the economy and historical facts. You can point a finger at specific solutions conducted by these "transition countries" that led to disasters.
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
On the contrary, I'm merely presenting a different interpretation of world events. (...)
It's not only interpretation, you dismiss facts.
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
Also it should be noted that while its not a pure communist state, China has been rather successful. Over the last 50 years they have achieved a dramatic reduction in poverty.
It has been quite succesful after it allowed Western corporations to get in and became a cheap producer of all sorts of things for the rest of the world. You point at the success of China, but fail to recognize it was achieved by capitalist intervention.
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
If you're going to change actions by the number of deaths you'd have to make them relative to population size. But regardless I still don't get the underlying thinking here, a misguided reform by a qausi-communist state is no more an argument against communism than the many misguided reforms by capitalist states.
Of course, because death of tens of millions doesn't matter if there are hundreds of millions more. You dodge that one because you know that there is no single case of a capitalist country that starved millions of its people to death. By the way, maybe I should refer to capitalist countries as "quasi-capitalist" and go the same route of defence? No true capitalist...
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
The war significantly damaged their economy which would take decades to recover from even with ideal conditions.
The war they started, so who is to blame?
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
But the sanctions have been ongoing and, no, in this case they really don't work both ways.
They do, it's truism. If A doesn't trade with B, then B doesn't trade with A. It's symmetric relation.
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
The Sanctions against North Korea have been designed to basically bully global businesses to avoid trading with North Korea. North Korea doesn't have a principle of being economically independent in the sense of avoiding global trade.
I don't read in mind of Supreme Leader.
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
I'm not sure what your 3% figure is suppose to refer to but the military makes up around 55% of the US federal budget.
3% is the figure from the avaiable data, and you are again factually wrong or lying.
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
I'm not sure why you think well-being is "unmeasurable nonsense", a measure of well-being would certainly be more fuzzy than some hard economic figures but human well-being is really the goal. HDI doesn't measure well-being, for example, just looking at life-span doesn't tell you how healthy people and how functional their lives are.
You can measure whether people are rich, how educated they are, and so on, but it's hard to measure happiness. And even if it was easily measurable, you may have people that have all they need to live and thrive, and yet unhappy, because having all these posibilities they make bad decisions.
Coefficients I invoke may not be perfect, but they are the best we have to say something meaningful on the topic. Do you think that life-span doesn't reflect in any way also the health-span? If so, why?
carnap wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 11:44 pm
Also the numbers are starting to reflect the realities in the US, life-span is starting to decline for some cohorts in the US. Also Seniors in the US are considerably more sick than seniors in other developed nations. I think it should go without saying that being sick reduces your well-being but perhaps you consider that "nonsense".
I just value data over various bon mots.