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So the ideas of communism is what cause people to kill off sparrows or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role sparrows played

SonicScrub 4y ago
The power and control wielded by centrally planned economies allows for wide-scale top-down dictation which vastly exceeds that of the democratic-capitalistic states. Thus enabling destruction on this scale. It's not about specifics of ideology, it's about how much authority is concentrated in the hands of the central planners. If central planning only works in a world where perfect knowledge of the state of the economy is possible, then central planning can never work. Fun side note: I really love The Culture sci-fi series by Iain M. Banks, for it's depiction of a truely utopian, classless, centrally planned Galactic Empire. As it turns out, this is the ideal form of human social organization provided that the central planning is done almost exclusively by post-singularity benevolent AI ( who are essentially gods). This is about the only scenario where central planning seems viable.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Also, authoritarian communist states in practice have a very hard time course correcting from courses their leaders decided on.
  - SonicScrub 4y ago
    Just want to expand on this comment, because it can be easily handwaved away with a "our version will be democratic". The level of power afforded to central planners is a stabilizing force away from distributed power, and towards tyrannical governments. Every government's primary objective is to retain power for themselves, else how would they achieve their goals? Every other objective must be subservient to this, because no other objective can be achieved without it. This is true be it a state is democratic, monarchic, communist, or whatever. Give a governing power 100% control of a national economy, and they will use it to entrench their own power. If they fail to do so, they will lose power to those who will. Benevolence cannot be relied upon as a long term stabilizing force.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  culture minds are not always so benevolent (though they may tend to be towards culture human citizens) - this is one of the major threads of the series
zabzonk 4y ago
one nitwit in a town somewhere decides to kill sparrows - stupid, but not too bad one nitwit, megalomaniac communist dictator decides to kill them all off across a vast country he rules by terror - stupid, and a disaster
at_a_remove 4y ago
The ideas of communism are that of the command economy, total centralization. Someone at the TOP decides all of this stuff. This means that if someone at the top (who is not to be questioned, see Mao's other wacky hijinx) makes any kind of error, well, you don't hear about it until it is unavoidably terrible. No early feedback, everyone is afraid to give it to you. In a more decentralized setup, it is bottom-up, and suddenly "hey this isn't working" gets propagated. Also, a peer is more willing to call you on your bullshit, but if you're a dictator, you just get yes-men. Essentially, the setup was such that anyone less than a perfectly informed leader who never made mistakes would wreak havoc.
- CrackerNews 4y ago
  The political system was democratic centralism where there are levels of indirect democracy starting from the local levels of factories and villages, which elect up to a legislature, which elects an executive top command. Power is indirect granted bottom-up but decisions are wide-spreading from top-down. Ironically, there's a level of decentralization in China that's tolerated as long as they meet government goals. (I'd say at times it's too decentralized, so bad behavior is too tolerated as long as it achieves economic directive goals.)
throwawaymaths 4y ago
It's communism (or more specifically, Marxism). This sort of outcome was predicted by Benjamin Tucker as an inevitable consequence of Marxist socialism in 1888, essay: "state socialism and anarchism", long before any implementation of Marxism came to being
- CrackerNews 4y ago
  If you really want to get into details, it's Marxist-Leninism. Much of the Soviet-style political system came from Leninist theories of achieving Marxist goals. Lenin said it himself, it's state capitalism. (Stalin then called his implementation first stage of socialism.)
revelio 4y ago
Killing off sparrows is only one example of crazy/random/destructive policies that are a regular occurrence under communism. Some others (not in any order): - The USSR sometimes overproduced cigarettes, so ran ad campaigns to convince people to start smoking. - The Holomodor, in which Ukraine was starved by exporting (stealing) all its grain, including the grain needed to plant next season's harvest, and when starving peasants tried to flee they were then banned from leaving. - In modern China, ghost cities full of buildings nobody is living in. - Stalin's mass execution of basically everyone who mattered in Soviet society, including virtually all of his military and intelligence leaders, which put the USSR into such a weakened state that Hitler is on record as saying now is the time to strike because the Soviets will never be so weak again. - The single-minded obsession with steel production. - In NK the government maintains a list of approved hair cuts. There are 28 approved styles and anyone with a haircut that's not on the list will be punished. Additionally, punishment for crimes are often levelled against the families of the criminals. It's inevitable that these sorts of things happen because the goals of communism are deeply unnatural (e.g. banning markets, central planning) and can therefore only be implemented through totalitarian power, which lacks sufficient bandwidth and flexibility to incorporate feedback loops. So everything goes off the rails because the people making decisions are blinded to the outcomes.
- CrackerNews 4y ago
  The goals of communism are to resolve class contradictions, which "naturally" happened in the case of feudalism ending. Communist states attempt to accelerate and resolve them through stages. This is where they can seem "unnatural". On the flip side, there may not be anything to inherently prevent capitalism from doing similar things too. The USSR tried to have a much more planned and state managed version of capitalism to progress through the stages of socialism. The central planners decided where profits went instead of private property holders. If these property holders were to have control of a political system, then there is the potential they could enforce similar things.
  - revelio 4y ago
    I'm really not sure that anything in the USSR could be described as capitalism, not even a state managed version of it (which sounds like a contradiction). They really saw capitalism as the enemy and one of Stalin's weird mental hangups was an insistence on seeing Great Britain as the center of global capitalism.
ashwagary 4y ago
>So the ideas of communism is what cause people to kill off sparrows or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role sparrows played We can try this framing in another 100 yr drought scenario and see what gets blamed. "So the ideas of capitalism is what caused the Dust Bowl or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role grass/trees played when creating vast plots of dry overplowed land"
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  Sounds to me like it was information

SonicScrub 4y ago

The power and control wielded by centrally planned economies allows for wide-scale top-down dictation which vastly exceeds that of the democratic-capitalistic states. Thus enabling destruction on this scale. It's not about specifics of ideology, it's about how much authority is concentrated in the hands of the central planners. If central planning only works in a world where perfect knowledge of the state of the economy is possible, then central planning can never work. Fun side note: I really love The Culture sci-fi series by Iain M. Banks, for it's depiction of a truely utopian, classless, centrally planned Galactic Empire. As it turns out, this is the ideal form of human social organization provided that the central planning is done almost exclusively by post-singularity benevolent AI ( who are essentially gods). This is about the only scenario where central planning seems viable.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Also, authoritarian communist states in practice have a very hard time course correcting from courses their leaders decided on.
- SonicScrub 4y ago
  Just want to expand on this comment, because it can be easily handwaved away with a "our version will be democratic". The level of power afforded to central planners is a stabilizing force away from distributed power, and towards tyrannical governments. Every government's primary objective is to retain power for themselves, else how would they achieve their goals? Every other objective must be subservient to this, because no other objective can be achieved without it. This is true be it a state is democratic, monarchic, communist, or whatever. Give a governing power 100% control of a national economy, and they will use it to entrench their own power. If they fail to do so, they will lose power to those who will. Benevolence cannot be relied upon as a long term stabilizing force.
zabzonk 4y ago
culture minds are not always so benevolent (though they may tend to be towards culture human citizens) - this is one of the major threads of the series

zabzonk 4y ago

one nitwit in a town somewhere decides to kill sparrows - stupid, but not too bad one nitwit, megalomaniac communist dictator decides to kill them all off across a vast country he rules by terror - stupid, and a disaster

at_a_remove 4y ago

The ideas of communism are that of the command economy, total centralization. Someone at the TOP decides all of this stuff. This means that if someone at the top (who is not to be questioned, see Mao's other wacky hijinx) makes any kind of error, well, you don't hear about it until it is unavoidably terrible. No early feedback, everyone is afraid to give it to you. In a more decentralized setup, it is bottom-up, and suddenly "hey this isn't working" gets propagated. Also, a peer is more willing to call you on your bullshit, but if you're a dictator, you just get yes-men. Essentially, the setup was such that anyone less than a perfectly informed leader who never made mistakes would wreak havoc.

CrackerNews 4y ago
The political system was democratic centralism where there are levels of indirect democracy starting from the local levels of factories and villages, which elect up to a legislature, which elects an executive top command. Power is indirect granted bottom-up but decisions are wide-spreading from top-down. Ironically, there's a level of decentralization in China that's tolerated as long as they meet government goals. (I'd say at times it's too decentralized, so bad behavior is too tolerated as long as it achieves economic directive goals.)

throwawaymaths 4y ago

It's communism (or more specifically, Marxism). This sort of outcome was predicted by Benjamin Tucker as an inevitable consequence of Marxist socialism in 1888, essay: "state socialism and anarchism", long before any implementation of Marxism came to being

CrackerNews 4y ago
If you really want to get into details, it's Marxist-Leninism. Much of the Soviet-style political system came from Leninist theories of achieving Marxist goals. Lenin said it himself, it's state capitalism. (Stalin then called his implementation first stage of socialism.)

revelio 4y ago

Killing off sparrows is only one example of crazy/random/destructive policies that are a regular occurrence under communism. Some others (not in any order): - The USSR sometimes overproduced cigarettes, so ran ad campaigns to convince people to start smoking. - The Holomodor, in which Ukraine was starved by exporting (stealing) all its grain, including the grain needed to plant next season's harvest, and when starving peasants tried to flee they were then banned from leaving. - In modern China, ghost cities full of buildings nobody is living in. - Stalin's mass execution of basically everyone who mattered in Soviet society, including virtually all of his military and intelligence leaders, which put the USSR into such a weakened state that Hitler is on record as saying now is the time to strike because the Soviets will never be so weak again. - The single-minded obsession with steel production. - In NK the government maintains a list of approved hair cuts. There are 28 approved styles and anyone with a haircut that's not on the list will be punished. Additionally, punishment for crimes are often levelled against the families of the criminals. It's inevitable that these sorts of things happen because the goals of communism are deeply unnatural (e.g. banning markets, central planning) and can therefore only be implemented through totalitarian power, which lacks sufficient bandwidth and flexibility to incorporate feedback loops. So everything goes off the rails because the people making decisions are blinded to the outcomes.

CrackerNews 4y ago
The goals of communism are to resolve class contradictions, which "naturally" happened in the case of feudalism ending. Communist states attempt to accelerate and resolve them through stages. This is where they can seem "unnatural". On the flip side, there may not be anything to inherently prevent capitalism from doing similar things too. The USSR tried to have a much more planned and state managed version of capitalism to progress through the stages of socialism. The central planners decided where profits went instead of private property holders. If these property holders were to have control of a political system, then there is the potential they could enforce similar things.
- revelio 4y ago
  I'm really not sure that anything in the USSR could be described as capitalism, not even a state managed version of it (which sounds like a contradiction). They really saw capitalism as the enemy and one of Stalin's weird mental hangups was an insistence on seeing Great Britain as the center of global capitalism.

ashwagary 4y ago

>So the ideas of communism is what cause people to kill off sparrows or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role sparrows played We can try this framing in another 100 yr drought scenario and see what gets blamed. "So the ideas of capitalism is what caused the Dust Bowl or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role grass/trees played when creating vast plots of dry overplowed land"

kevviiinn 4y ago
Sounds to me like it was information