5 ms·
Nice way to revise history to make the Holomdor just a result of lack of computational power not a genocidal atrocity. Next up Mao's 5 year plan only killed mil
by hpoe 6y ago
Nice way to revise history to make the Holomdor just a result of lack of computational power not a genocidal atrocity. Next up Mao's 5 year plan only killed millions of people because of an error in a spreadsheet. Other than that it was totally going to work.
In all honesty to reduce this to a simple problem of calculation and balancing a sheet is incredibly simplified and narrowminded, it's like reducing all of art to a single dimension and analyzing it on that.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThat's not the point of the article. The article talks purely about economic systems. Western, capitalist democracies too did things like the Holodomor. There isn't much of a reason why a (computed) planned economy would have to lead to the Holodomor, or the Great Chinese Famine.
- 082349872349872 6y agoThe Irish would agree.
- yters 6y agoThere is a certain sense where this is communism's central failing. If we remove all the moral components of mass starvation due to idealistic utopianism, the central tenet of communism is materialism and consequently that all human ingenuity reduces to computation. This means that we should in theory be able to replace human capitalists with a giant computer. But, if materialism is wrong, and humans have a trans-computational reasoning ability, then this means even at a theoretical level communism is fatally flawed, because the economy is intrinsically reliant upon human ingenuity and thus must be capitalistic, because the economy rides upon the locus of the individual human mind which can never, not even in theory, be replaced by a computer. In a certain sense, the amoral repudiation of communism is even more powerful, because even the cold blooded bureaucratic bean counters behind the revolution can no longer even appeal to clear minded rationalism to justify their political philosophy. It is not a coincidence that Marx envisioned a mechanical singularity as the apex of the inevitable communist revolution. Also may explain the strong communist and materialist leanings in the elite of the tech sector, along with the collaboration between the tech elite and the CCP.
- sudosysgen 6y agoA cold blooded amoral répudiation of materialism is almost certainly impossible. There is literally no reason to think that the human mind is anything more than the human body, a material construct.
- yters 6y agoThere are plenty of reasons to think the mind is much more. Namely, consciousness, the portal for everything else we know about the material world, is itself completely impervious to a materialistic account.
- sudosysgen 6y agoAbsolutely not. There is no reason at all that consciousness is impervious to a materialistic account. Consciousness can be framed as an emergent property of systems that can process the concept of self and actualize upon it and their environment. You might say that qualia is impervious to materialistic account, however, arguments based on qualia that attempt to be a refutation of materialism are circular - for example, the p-zombie argument, that says that there could conceivably be a "zombie", that acts exactly the same as a human but lacks consciousness, which is only possible if you accept that one could act perfectly human but lack consciousness, which is itself only possible if you accept that something may be different but indistinguishable from something else, which is itself only possible if consciousness is special in some way - which there is no reason to believe. And so, I disagree that the existence of consciousness is inconsistent with materialism.
- yters 6y agoSure, people can make up explanations for consciousness all day, but saying it is 'emergent' is not a meaningful materialistic description. If you tell me the Linux source code 'emerges' that gives me no understanding of how it works or how to write the thing myself. It is no different an explanation than to say 'god did it'. Materialism is the promise that we can break a thing down into components that when reassembled give us the same thing back. 'Emergence' is completely antithetical to this idea. As of right now, there are zero materialistic accounts for consciousnes, and no reason to think one is forthcoming. The only people holding out are those who presume materialism a priori, which is just circular.
- fuoqi 6y ago>Nice way to revise history to make the Holomdor just a result of lack of computational power not a genocidal atrocity. The hunger at the time hit hard not only Ukraine, but also inner Russia (Volga region) and Belarus. It has even affected Poland. The "genocidal atrocity" is so blatantly mythologized and lies upon lies are layered down in an attempt to form a nation-forming myth together glorification of Nazi collaborationist, which have killed a lot of Jews, Poles and even Ukranians. There was no evil order to eliminate Ukrainians issued by the Soviet government, it was a tragic chain of events. It started from purely natural reasons and got multiplied by deficiencies of the system. People on the ground played a crucial role here as well, by passing wrong information about situation on the ground.
- baybal2 6y agoNO, it was a fully deliberate, human engineered famine, with explicit intent of "traitor nation" elimination.
- sudosysgen 6y agoIf it was, then how was this because of Central planning? Man-made, engineered famines have happened under capitalism too, it's not hard to twist and jerk the market into a famine given material circumstances like those that made it possible for the Holodomor.
- baybal2 6y agoA valid argument. British Raj instantly comes to mind.
- 082349872349872 6y agoI believe the (Chicago?) commodities markets explicitly do not deal in onion futures, because perishability meant that market was far too easy to manipulate.