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Hrmmmmm (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

Because that's the name it was given by the Ukranian peoples that survived it?

Then why don't we use any Indian names for the very many famines in India due to British occupation? Why do we call them neutral names like "Bengal famine" and not "exterminatron 3000"?

millions of "lives saved" (pop quiz: how do you measure that?)

Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics. Example: Brazil between 1930 and 1960 went from 36 years to 52. USSR went from 30 to 65. By comparing the evolution of socialist life metrics with capitalist life metrics at starting equal levels of development, you can find out that socialism massively boosted life metrics. You can also compare with the country itself in pre- and post- socialist times:

Surely you, so concerned with Ukrainians, knew about the horrifying demographic crisis caused by the capitalist restoration? The millions of lives lost and ruined by unemployment, suicide, malnutrition, defunding of healthcare and treatable disease, alcoholism, drug abuse and violent crime. Now, compare the hiccup in the graph in the 1930s, with the unrecoverable drop after 1990. And look at the vertical axis.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

    Then why don’t we use any Indian names for the very many famines in India due to British occupation?

    Do you mean dramatized names like the Great Bengal Famine? The Bengali name is "Chiẏāttōrēr mônbôntôr (lit. 'Famine of '76')", which is pretty vague given how many famines have happened in the world. Probably it merits the fancier name because it was the first one under british rule. Or did you perhaps mean the Doji bara / Skull Famine (bengali: lit 'many skulls'), which you know, not very dramatic at all and a pretty fair example of us using the indian name.

    Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics.

    Hi! I'm a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling and I'm sorry, that was a little mean of me to bait you like that, it's a trick question: proving lives saved is the classic example of bad statistics and proving negatives. The assumptions required to make a definite statement about lives saved in a historical event are easy to make, but are necessarily so restrictive that they render any conclusions valueless unless you have definite conditions within a narrow time scope (like in a vaccine rollout or cholera outbreak). That's why meaningless phrases like "Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics" are such an easy thing to parrot - you're just saying "and then we do statistics, QED" without having to engage with the actual difficult part (the math).

    Does comparative economics correlate to deaths? Sure! It correlates to just about everything you could ever want! The most famous example is the hemline index, which has spurred over a century of debate as to the actual causal connections (and if the theory itself even has merit). But proving that causal link to lives saved? Now that's a damn tricky problem, and some really promising methodology has only recently arisen from the management of ventilator shortages during covid in the US (and it's still being developed!) I highly recommend looking into it, it's a fascinating field of research right now.

    Edit: Wow, you know what, I'm gonna just point to the entire sections of the wikipedia article you got that graphic from titled "Population Decline" and "Fertility and natalist policies" to address the population decline, instead of just redundantly addressing all the... uh... rigorously cited claims you just laid out.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (3 children)

    Or did you perhaps mean the Doji bara / Skull Famine

    Hmmm. Fair enough. Now let's do an exercise: let's go to lemmy.world search, and look for the words "skull famine", see how many results we get. Oh, we get exactly 2 results containing the words "skull famine", two copypastas from 2 years ago which are simply a list of western atrocities. I wonder why a famine in India with 10+ million deaths has only 2 results in lemmy.world... Compare that to the search of the word "holodomor". My point stands, doesn't it?

    That’s why meaningless phrases like “Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics” are such an easy thing to parrot - you’re just saying “and then we do statistics, QED” without having to engage with the actual difficult part (the math)

    Good that you're a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling! Will be interesting. The thing is, you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism, because you can use many metrics: alcohol consumption, violent crime statistics, drug use, deaths from certain diseases, expenditure in healthcare, number of suicides... etc. You can take all of those metrics and see how they all vastly increase in the transition to capitalism. Sure, if it were just one of those metrics, then you maybe would be able to say it's because of another reason, but when all of these metrics consistently rise sharply during a horrifying economic crisis byproduct of capitalism in several post-soviet republics at the same time, you can quite confidently both calculate numbers, and blame them on capitalism. As a matter of fact, this has been done widely for modern capitalist Russia, with this study talking of 3.5 million probable deaths between 1990 and 1998 alone, and this other study by Paul Cockshott reaching the figure of 12 million excess deaths between 1986 and 2008, though this latter one using much simpler methodology. Similar studies can be carried out for Ukraine, which suffered even harder since the crisis took longer to recover, and either way the numbers point towards the millions. And this is only excess deaths, not including lack of childbirth and economic migrations, both also counting in the millions.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

    Your point was that we don't use big scary names taken from the native language for other famines like the ones that happened under british indian rule thus "Holodomor" must clearly be a politicized name. Except you were flat wrong and we totally do the exact thing you said we didn't. Prior to that, your point was that Holodomor sounded like "Holocaust" so clearly it must be a politicized name. And then you were dead wrong, because despite it being obviously true that the two share a common lingusitic root, Holodomor was coined a good twenty years before "The Holocaust" happened, so it can't have been a reference.

    Now your point is that it must be a politicized name because it's more talked about than a different famine, one which wasn't ever punishable with death to be discussed, which there is no active effort to deny it's severity or cause, which has no relevancy in the broad political climate, on a tiny website, and even using the world's most arbitrary and cherry-picked metric you got the number wrong (there's 11 results, including my comment above, but for some reason (possibly related to LW's search indexing being notoriously unreliable - which is true across pretty much all of lemmy) excluding your comment. So, we can chalk it up to 12 and also question the reliability of the methodology as a whole.

    Here: Yes, the Holodomor is political - it was absolutely the result of political actions (you even agree) and is the subject of a great many conspiracy theories and weirdo apologist movements today. No, the name Holodomor was not made up just to be scarier by association with The Holocaust to discredit the Soviets who caused it like you're implying - the word existed twenty years before the coining of the term Holocaust as we know it today. You're just plain flat out wrong in the particulars you're claiming. How many more variations on this theme are we going to have to sit through, because I am getting -so- bored with you trying to justify this narrative by shifting it around.

    Can you please move on?

    Okay, next topic:

    Cockshott's (great name) paper is just pretty awful in general (which is probably why it's in a self-described magazine and not a journal (yes, I know the name is a reference)) and his methodology for calculating excess deaths is, as he acknowledges in the text, extremely dubious (which is fine, he does that to illustrate a tangential concept). but it does make some good points towards the end and I agree with his overall thesis about planned economies being too easily dismissed (once I figured out that was his thesis, it's kinda unclear). Rosefielde's (great name) paper is excellent, and breaks down his calculations in an extremely easily digested manner. I might even use it as an example of decent demographic calculation at some point, it's just a really good overview of the process and details the factors effecting (hehe) the calculations.

    However: Both of those papers show examples of addressing death rates, and make no attempt at the problem of calculating lives saved. Lives saved is the metric in question, not death rate. They're terrible examples for your point, because they make no attempt to address your point whatsoever.

    If the claim "you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism" has merit, which we can assume you consider it does, why did you choose to cite these papers instead of ones that, idk, actually support your argument?

    ^edit:^ ^clarity^

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    My claim isn't that the word Holodomor was coined to make it sound scary, it's that the word becoming the one to refer to the event in the western world is no coincidence. The etymological origin can be whichever it is.

    Now, why oh why does the Skull Famine not have relevancy on the political climate? That's exactly my point. Other famines are depoliticized (the article on Wikipedia for example chalks most of it down to climate) but "Holodomor" is made out to be by western anticommunist propaganda an attempt of genocide against Ukrainians. The motivations, followup or precedents are left to guess, though, but that's fine, nobody will question it because first, questioning genocide is a risky thing to do, and secondly, it's le evil Russian commies doing it, so ofc we will all believe it in the west.

    Just a small remark: the two search results I referred to after searching "skull famine" came from not just searching those words on lemmy.world, but also from doing a Ctrl+F search for the words to be together. After ignoring our conversation, only two results meet that condition.

    Rosefielde's (great name) paper is excellent, and breaks down his calculations in an extremely easily digested manner.

    Ok. Funny to me that you hadn't seen any of this before. Given the proximity to our modern times of this excess mortality numbering the millions in Russia alone, it should be a political hotbed shouldn't it? Especially now that sensibilities with Ukraine are high, I wonder, why is it that similar studies but regarding the impact of capitalism in Ukraine aren't constantly discussed? Be honest, were you aware of the scale of death and suffering caused by capitalist restoration in the eastern block? Given your original dismiss when I talked of drug abuse, organized crime, suicide rates, malnutrition and preventable disease, I doubt it. You seem to know so much about Holodomor though, so ask yourself: why is that? Why do you only seem to know about the millions of Ukrainians who died under socialism 90 years ago but you didn't quite know what happened in the region in terms of life metrics for the past 35?

    However: Both of those papers show examples of addressing death rates, and make no attempt at the problem of calculating lives saved

    Cool, but I addressed that already. I already gave you the Brazil example. Tell me any other underdeveloped country that, between 1930 and 1960, had a doubling of life expectancy from 28 to 60. Comparative economics is a valid method, and there is no country that had this growth at the time, which is even more relevant in the case of the USSR because for equally developed countries, socialist ones consistently give better life metrics. You don't believe in comparative economics, or in the idea that economic development correlates (especially in socialist societies) with increased life expectancy and reduced mortality?

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    I hate doing these quote-heavy replies but yeesh, please forgive my lack of narrative structure:

    Now, why oh why does the Skull Famine not have relevancy on the political climate? That’s exactly my point.

    Oh lookit, another version of what your point was. No, other famines aren't depoliticized - they're just not particularly relevant to modern discourse. That isn't the same thing.

    Just a small remark:

    Hey look, documenting methodology! I heartily approve!

    Funny to me that you hadn’t seen any of this before

    What? It's one paper in an obscure journal and another in a random magazine. Why would I have seen either of them before? Do you mean the discussion of this topic or... what?

    Especially now that sensibilities with Ukraine are high, I wonder, why is it that similar studies but regarding the impact of capitalism in Ukraine aren’t constantly discussed? [...] Given your original dismiss when I talked of drug abuse, organized crime, suicide rates, malnutrition and preventable disease, I doubt it.

    Did you even read either of the papers you linked? Hell, even Cockshott's pretty rough paper has a couple sections devoted to why this isn't a straightforward conclusion, and things like drug abuse and alcoholism started prior to the dissolution of the soviet union as a result of policies like Khrushchev's attempt to implement prohibition. Neoliberal ideas were pervasive sure, but it's not like they were inflicted on the USSR by singularly outside forces - the post-stalin neoliberal movement was aggressively suppressed explicitly because of it's popularity, which was due to a whole multitude of factors (doubtlessly the CIA fondly wishes to be included in that list) but the concepts absolutely were developed from within the country as well as from without.

    Cool, but I addressed that already. I already gave you the Brazil example.

    You made a completely unsupported claim, provided sources for an entirely unrelated claim, now you're again attempting to assert that first claim is true without providing any sources while insisting the second claim matters. Come on man you said this was easy. Hell, one of your own previous sources provides an astoundingly solid explanation of why your position (that a doubling of life expectancy in the 30s is notable) is pretty spurious.

    Comparative economics and demographic statistics can be correlated to pretty much anything, like you're doing here. Without actual substance to back you up it's meaningless. You can't just wave the magic statistics wand, point at a single graph and then draw whatever conclusions you like and then hope to maintain any shred of credibility when you're challenged and fail to have anything of substance to back up your claims.

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