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edit: GUYS fuck stalin and fuck tankies, period. i understand that this community is more sensitive than most to pro-stalinist vibes, and i apologize for unintentionally twinging that nerve, but you need stop calling each other (and me) slurs
good heavens, happy new year, fuck incarceration and murder in all forms
(mods pls also do your job and help with the slurs thing)
edit2: big thank u 2 da mods for helping with the slurs thing u guys rock 😎 💕
Nah instead Stalin just killed 6 million+ Russians, in Soviet Russia you don't need gulag when you have bullet.
“any and all of my country’s actions are beyond criticism because at least we didnt kill them”
An important part of critical thinking is the ability to see flaws in comparisons and arguments even when they point towards conclusions you agree with. It’s telling that you interpreted their comment the way you did.
It's telling, the way you're talking about this. Unless OP is defending Stalin, something I've not seen evidence of. It's pointing out how hypocritical most criticisms of Stalin are. The whole point of it, whether it's 100% accurate. Is to bait hypocrites out into "but Stalin" bullshit. If their gulags are wrong. Maybe we should reevaluate our own similarly troubling practices.
Don't get me wrong, despite being libertarian Marxist. I'm wildly against Lenin, Stalin, Mao, hell Engles for that matter etc. But Americans general hypocrisy make our criticism pointless and largely mute. Making you and the other person ironically, the ones likely failing at critical thinking
my response was sarcasm and an intentional fallacy in the form of an appeal to incredulity for the sake of rhetoric ❤️
if you think that counts as an interpretation thats on u bestie
my response was sarcasm and an intentional fallacy in the form of an appeal to incredulity for the sake of rhetoric
My bullshit-english translator is a bit rusty, but all I'm getting out of this is "I intentionally wrote a wildly incorrect comment just for funsies" in which case fuck off
Hey, hey. Come on, now. The United States doesn't just lock up brown people. We execute many on the spot, without provocation or probable cause. Credit where credit is due.
The US has killed dozens of times that through social murder.
I'm not saying that Stalin wasn't an autocratic dickhead, but if you're gonna compare him unfavorably to present day US, number of own citizens killed is a bad choice of metric 🤷
Are you suggesting the us gov killed at minimum 6*12 million of it's own citizens? 72 million? At the low end? You said "dozens" plural so 144million or more? Bullshit.
ACAB, injustice is alive and well, and extrajudicial killings are a serious serious issue in America, but your scales are just fantasy
This has got to be one of the most stupid memes ever.
The percentage of Soviet citizens that were put into prisons/gulag camps/colonies will have far exceeded the percentage of us citizens currently incarcerated in the usa, and in far more inhumane circumstances.
Unless the op is trying to deflect from the problems of the USA penal system by drawing attention to a far worse system, I don't get the point of this meme.
Why’s it at +157/-3 after 3hr:
The US stat is so bad you easily believe it when attributed to stereotypical evil regime.
Then you’re reminded that same evil thing is actually something the US is currently doing.
I’m glad we don’t just kill everyone we arrest, I’m glad we’re not ruled by a dictator… still, I wish the average person viewing a meme weren’t able to easily believe something we do was actually done by someone we vaguely recall learning was the worst.
Why’s it at +157/-3 after 3hr:
Because blahaj.zone doesn't count the downvotes. The -3 downvotes that you see are only those that are counted by the instance you're viewing from (given out by the users of that instance only). Right now, on lemmy.world it has 28 downvotes, on dbzer0 it has 2.
I did some googling out of curiosity, turns out Wikipedia has a whole ass article on it: The US prison rate as of 2021 is 531 per 100000 (peaked in 08 with 755 after a huge spike in the 80s and 90s, I wonder why). In the Soviet Union during the high of the gulag system, it was estimated (by actual historians, not the soviets) to be 714 to 892.
Apartheid South Africa was 851. Saudi Arabia has 200.
You're counting the percentage of population, in the meme it's the percentage of all incarcerated people.
I don't want to search for stats, but it may be so that with a higher incarceration rate the USSR still held less of the total.
Then it's a pretty stupid metric. A small country could imprison and torture half its population and still be a tiny fraction of total people in prison.
That being said, there's obviously way too many people in prison in the US right now.
Hexbear is leaking.
When your gulag population has 50% death rate within a year thats not hard...
We also aren't counting people in China's concentration camps because they aren't officially prisoners and there aren't any real numbers...
But the justice system in USA is shit yes.
This comment is excellent.
If your average prison sentence is 10 years, you will have 10x more prisoners than annual arrests/sentences.
It’s the same kind of misleading stat as life expectancy being 30 years in medieval time. If you survived childhood you could easily reach your 60s or later, just like how you can live that long without any serious health interventions today.
it’s not a misleading stat it’s a stat with nuance. slavery in the U.S. is legal per the 13th amendment, as are for-profit prisons.
this fiscal motive leads to more sentences for smaller crimes (marijuana possession) for longer times, and it’s obscene.
My favorite jokes is the "Look how bad it is in North Korea/Russia/China..." Then the ol "sike that's America".
My second favorite thing is all the whataboutism replies because butthurt folks don't like reality. Rather than address the problem, they'd rather go into finger pointing.
I think it's because the meme itself is the wrong way to try to make that argument. Instead of just saying "the US has 22% of the world's aggregate prisoner population and that's a problem", it's making that argument by directly comparing it to a MUCH WORSE regime for that exact violation of rights.
The whataboutisms tend to be bristling at the bad comparisons more than a direct refutation of the underlying point being made. I think complaining about the whataboutisms misses the point of those replies, which is valid.
As the other poster said, why not compare with Scandinavian countries that genuinely do have better justice systems rather than comparing with USSR or CCP which have much worse justice systems?
i think sometimes it’s worth critiquing memes for the rhetorical impact rather than raw arguing power
if you wanted a watertight meme that perfectly describes your argument, you’re right, this isn’t it.
but if you want an emotionally jarring meme that encourages debate and spreads awareness of the disturbing nature of american justice, i’d say this has acheived that goal looking at these comments :)
i’m still working this position as a shitposter but i’d say this is at least an A- tier meme in that a) it’s factual (not outright false), and b) it encourages active discussion and awareness of issues in the comments.
I hate the US as much as the next person but the meme itself is basically whataboutism.
It's always "if you don't like it, go live in Somalia" and never "if you don't like it, go live in Denmark". It's saying "it could be worse" instead of "it could be better".
I'm editing over my old comment and deleting my replies bc it was me assuming op was a tankie and being an asshole to them about it. It's a good meme, I'm just a lot more sensitive to tankie looking stuff on a place like lemmy, and this isn't an excuse but I've been in a pretty shit place mentally and looking for fights where there shouldn't be any. I'm really sorry op, you didn't deserve any of the shit I originally said to you, I hope you have a good day :3
There’s something (🤷♂️) I don’t get here.
Are you thinking OP is pro-Stalin?
lol hexbear is leaking again
I have a full instance block and it still isn't enough. Every day more braindead tankie takes make it through the filter.
"everything the USSR/CCP/DPRK did wrong is actually capitalist state intelligence propaganda" is so exhausting.
"Capitalism is bad" apparently no longer includes state capitalism or the political capital exploitation of the vanguard class that preceeds it.
What is this, Facebook forwards from babushka?
Now, I'm all for a Socialist utopia, but that guy did NOT do it right.
Authoritarian state =/= socialism
That's what happens when citizens break the law and retain their rights in the eyes of the state. They don't disappear or get mulched into the soil to increase yields.
Here's a fun article on Survivorship bias
That doesn't change the fact that US prisons are for-profit. And that corporations have huge lobbying powers. It's why marijuana laws are so harsh and disproportionate to actual heinous crimes. Stoners make a more complacent prisoners to make money off of then psychotic killers.
The US constitution permits slavery as punishment for crimes. So they made a whole set of laws to criminalize black lives and optimize enslaving them.
why do people bring up other countries when USA is criticized, just admit you're in a shithole country
No offense OP, but source please? Random memes of Stalin are not the same as actual statistics and facts.
I'm not a tankie, fuck Stalin, but the stat is correct: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
I don't know how well we know China's figures, though.
i also am not a tankie, fuck stalin, and thank you scv for doing my dirty work for me. tbh i didnt realize how bad it was here and i wouldn’t have posted what i thought was a funny little anti-copoganda meme if i had known. sorry yall 🥲
To me it struck as "hey, America is just as bad as Stalin". I'd say, message well formed and nicely presented.
For profit prisons need to be abolished for sure But any downplaying of the horrendous gulags is just wrong https://youtu.be/dBjcT0QxSS0?si=jIvtvNe6j7lUiFxy