TL DR An Amerikkkan liberal sent me this meme after I sent him an awesome marxist meme that made him SEETHE. He coped by sending me this poop.

Thoughts?

  • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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    6 months ago

    Look at the note below it, it’s not actually measuring direct life expectancy, but the average lifespan of an infant if mortality rates didn’t change throughout their entire life. Which is obviously not how anything in the real world works. This isn’t even cherry picking data, it’s just redefining things until it matches their preconcieved objective. If the life expectancy did increase, they would use that, they wouldn’t do this weaselly shit. I would also look up these three sources as well, and contrast them with other sources, odds are good that at least one just made shit up and don’t actually cite censuses or population records or anything.

    And of course, there were a lot more countries in the USSR than these 6. They’re ignoring the other countries in the USSR, because their life expectancy did decrease.

    And finally, life expectancy doesn’t tell the full story either. I’d much rather live till 60 in a socialist state where I don’t have to worry about homelessness and poverty than 80 in a capitalist one where I slave away until the day I die because I would be homeless on the streets if I didn’t.

    • rainpizza@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      6 months ago

      Thank you for your thoughts! This will actually help me if this liberal within discord that I am currently in throws up this data again.

    • yewler@lemmygrad.ml
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      6 months ago

      After doing some searching, it appears that period life expectancy is a perfectly reasonable metric for life expectancy. It looks to be a clever way of capturing a sort of “instantaneous” life expectancy for a given year. In a given year, you can track how many people of each age range die, but that only tells you death rates, not life expectancy. And you can’t just average the ages of everyone living because you don’t know when they’ll die. So what they do is they take the death rates for age ranges within a given year and they calculate the expected value of an infant’s death age, assuming that infant would live through the same death rates that were tracked that year. In my opinion, this seems like a natural choice.

      That said, there’s definitely other bullshittery going on.

      • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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        6 months ago

        Ah, thank you, interesting to learn. It just sounded like the usual scummy way they redefine all their terms so they can get the results they want. I should’ve investigated further, thanks for that.

    • rainpizza@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      6 months ago

      Thanks! I appreciate your thoughts on this! And yes, this liberal from my discord forum that I am in sounds like a typical anti communist redditor.

      Fortunately, he is willing to listen when I talk about China and actually agrees with me regarding this.

      • RedClouds@lemmygrad.ml
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        6 months ago

        I feel like in spite of all of the insane propaganda around China, people are actually starting to learn the truth.

        Even the most lukewarm libs I know have at least come to an understanding that, hey, China has some capitalism, but it’s very well controlled, and maybe that’s better than what we have. Like having the Golden Stock owner be able to veto any stupid decisions and the most recent decision to require that there are Employee democratically led leaders on the board of directors.

        It’s a stepping stone. Those people still don’t consider themselves socialists or communists, but at least one of them considers themselves a democratic socialist, which is still Libshit, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

  • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
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    6 months ago

    The 1990s in the former USSR is probably second to only the bubonic plague in terms of decreased quality of life and life expectancy during peacetime.

    Shock therapy contributed to something like five million excess deaths.

    • bunbun@lemmygrad.ml
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      6 months ago

      In Russia between 1990 and 1994 male life expectancy at birth dropped from 63.8 to 57.6 years. Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltics experienced a similar decline. Suicides accounted for 16% of that decrease. Good times.

      https://docs.iza.org/dp243.pdf

  • REEEEvolution@lemmygrad.ml
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    6 months ago

    Very interesting, not a single former SSR. Nothing of former Jugoslawia. Albania? Went on vacation. Mongolia and Cambodia? Went hiding, I guess. Yemen, Afghanistan, Aethiopia, Somalia? Missing.

    But yes, capitalism sure is universally better, if you cherrypick data.