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> I will not call people calling for public healthcare and social safety net communists Yet you just did. A lot of the “communists” in the Hollywood blacklist

> I will not call people calling for public healthcare and social safety net communists Yet you just did. A lot of the “communists” in the Hollywood blacklist era were advocating for things exactly like this. Plus communism isn’t even close to history’s deadliest ideology. If you’re going to tally communism’s numbers then you need to also total capitalisms. The main & most cited work in that area is “Red Holocaust” which estimated the total for communism at ~60 million people. But using the same criteria as that work we can easily attribute 100 million deaths to capitalism in the 20th century alone (btw, this pales to both Christianity & Islam, who are #1 & #2 respectively)

ramblenode 3y ago
It also doesn't make sense talking about the world's deadliest ideology without normalizing for population. Capitalism, communism, Christianity, and Islam have killed the most people because the most people have lived under them.
- photonerd 3y ago
  Reasonable, to a point, but a slightly different metric.
cat_plus_plus 3y ago
And that folks is how brainwashing works. I explicitely stated !A, yet someone claims I stated A. For anyone interested in substantial conversation - as I understand it, in UK you pay certain tax for NHS and in return you get access to certain medical services at certain quality/timeframe, that not everyone is happy about. Nevertheless, the government does not generally prevent you from getting other services on your own dime, or ban private research into new medical treatments. I understand that there have been a few contraversies regarding babies who NHS declared braindead and inelligable for transfer to another willing hospital, but those are rare corner cases where there are legitimate arguments from both sides. For these reasons, I do not consider public healthcare implemented simularily to NHS to be equivalent to communism, and if I were to consider moving from US to UK, different healthcare systems would not even be on my top 10 list of deciding factors.

ramblenode 3y ago

It also doesn't make sense talking about the world's deadliest ideology without normalizing for population. Capitalism, communism, Christianity, and Islam have killed the most people because the most people have lived under them.

photonerd 3y ago
Reasonable, to a point, but a slightly different metric.

cat_plus_plus 3y ago

And that folks is how brainwashing works. I explicitely stated !A, yet someone claims I stated A. For anyone interested in substantial conversation - as I understand it, in UK you pay certain tax for NHS and in return you get access to certain medical services at certain quality/timeframe, that not everyone is happy about. Nevertheless, the government does not generally prevent you from getting other services on your own dime, or ban private research into new medical treatments. I understand that there have been a few contraversies regarding babies who NHS declared braindead and inelligable for transfer to another willing hospital, but those are rare corner cases where there are legitimate arguments from both sides. For these reasons, I do not consider public healthcare implemented simularily to NHS to be equivalent to communism, and if I were to consider moving from US to UK, different healthcare systems would not even be on my top 10 list of deciding factors.