Famines were common occurrence before the revolution, and were in fact a major driver behind it. USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union
• https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html

Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:

• https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5

During the 1932 Holodomor Famine, the USSR sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:

While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul’chyts’kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food

Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.

Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.

According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest

It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.

Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, its interesting to see that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2500600

Personally, I just don’t have time or energy to play big AAA games for the most part. I very much prefer smaller indie games nowadays, and Steam Deck has those in spades. I would wager a lot of older gamers are in the same boat.

lol yeah that too

speaking of gulags https://indi.ca/how-america-still-has-slavery/

Mr. ROBESON: In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being. Where I did not feel the pressure of color as I feel [it] in this Committee today.

I’m not sure why you think the fact that Black women turned out to be smarter than wasps would bother me, but you do you little buddy.

nice straw man there, you’re a very original troll

That would be too direct of an admission that markets don’t actually work. :)

I’m guessing the concept of saving information for later use is completely beyond your imagination

sees a bunch of links and reference, bleats about LLMs 🤡

Lack of social cohesion is what makes people open to all sorts of ideas outside the mainstream, including propaganda. Social cohesion isn’t unravelling because of the internet, it’s unravelling because people’s standard of living is collapsing and they don’t believe that the government is working in their interest. Internet has been around for a long time now, but the political polarization is a very recent phenomenon that perfectly coincides with the ongoing financial crisis that started in 2008.

exactly

We understand that chickens are intelligent birds that are capable of suffering, and we understand the horrors of animal farming perfectly well. The reality is that most people just don’t care about it. The same way people don’t care about the suffering of other humans when they pass a homeless person on the street without giving a second thought, or when they buy goods made by slave labor in one of the countries subjugated by the empire.

ironic that you also accuse me of cherry picking when you responded to half of what i said and left the rest

That’s because what you said was nonsense based on your cherry picking. The sources I provided very clearly show that none of this colonialism that you bleat about is actually happening in practice. And if you had a shred of intellectual honesty, you’d be addressing the actual findings in the many studies conducted. Instead, you’ve exposed yourself as a troll. So there’s no need to address anything you said.

also crazy that you just admitted to having an archival system for arguing with strangers on the internet my guy torture wouldn’t have got that out of me

Wow it’s so crazy that somebody would save links that address the arguments that trolls on here make time and again. Absolutely crazy stuff!

so it destroys the local economy, save for businesses now irrevocably economically tied to china?

Gotta love how you cherry picked one quote out of context. Very intelligent behvaior on your part.

also you kept this one in your wank bank for so long some of your links are dead, so you might want to fix it

you could just spend your time to learn to paste links into an archive instead making a clown of yourself in public

Believe it or not, you’re not the first troll to bring up this cliche.

I think it is, but the key reason is that dollar based global economy is now shrinking. The US could issue as much currency as it wanted as long as the dollar was the global reserve, that now changing with trade increasingly happening outside the dollar.

It’s really mind blowing to me that westerners thought that if they’d cut off China from western tech than China wouldn’t be able to replicate it.

The big advantages that T-72/80 have over western tanks is that they’re much lighter meaning that they don’t get stuck in mud as easily, they’re easier to repair, and they have autoloaders reducing crew size.

Only thing that’s laughable here is westerners being incapable of imagining countries having mutually beneficial relationships. Really exposes how the west is a parasitic entity.

• https://www.eurasiareview.com/01022021-chinese-investment-in-africa-has-had-significant-and-persistently-positive-long-term-effects-despite-controversy/
• https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3745021
• https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2023/11/06/sri-lankas-debt-trap-and-the-vultures/
• https://theconversation.com/china-and-africa-ethiopia-case-study-debunks-investment-myths-177098
• https://www.lse.ac.uk/iga/assets/documents/research-and-publications/FDI-in-Ethiopia-Crescenzi-Limodio.pdf
• https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gild/2021/01/26/how-chinese-investment-shape-new-growth-patterns-in-africa/
• https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-debt-trap-claims-in-africa-stem-from-us-rivalry-study
• https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/chinas-infrastructure-investment-helps-fast-track-development-in-africa-expert/
• https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/08/20/china-forgives-debt-africa/
• https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/11/broadband-business-formation-and-economic-growth-in-the-global-south-assessing-chinas-impact/

I’m 13 and this is deep.