Democracies are better off than non-democracies also on average.
how many capitalism points does democracy offset? how many socialism points do we lose with one orban?
Dude this is literally our countryās history but with Communism
And yet you ate it hook line and sinker
This is a great example. As if the war we instigated and then used as an excuse to bomb their country back to the stone age had nothing to do with the fortunes of North Korea.
Capitalism did that
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People bitch about regulations but without them we had the safety of the 1800s coal mines and drunk Irish immigrants holding their shovels over their heads while dynamite went off nearby to build infrastructure.
Obviously it can progress to the ridiculous but naked capitalism is evil.
When we stumble upon good rules like limited ownership of media and equal time rules, eventually someone corrupts or eliminates those rules.
I donāt think any pure economic system works. Power corrupts whether itās billionaires or ruling party officials (absent the risk of being voted out). I think for the Everyman, having freedom of mobility and some opportunity for better is probably the best of the bunch. But of course better gets massively carried away and you get the robber barrons of today and the gilded age.
The best the world has come up with is capitalism with a healthy safety net. Think Northern Europe.
Convincing the bottom they are just a day away from the top is the biggest magic trick.
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Doubt there are going to be a lot HIV patients that fall into this group. In the US most people with HIV donāt go on to get AIDS. With the drugs out there today, as long as you stay on the meds you can get your viral load down to ~0, so you arenāt likely to be significantly immunocompromised. And if you do have HIV, there are lots of resources available to get you meds even if you donāt have insurance.
Iām sure there are exceptions to this. While not cured, in some ways HIV is kind of solved at this point. If I had to choose between having the beetus or HIV, Iād really need to think on it, and I might well choose HIV.
The Korean War is quite obviously not the cause of NKās poverty today. North and South Korea were at similar levels of development for decades after the end of the war.
Communism vs capitalism is kind of a vacuous framing, because state-led development initiatives were a major ingredient in SKās success, and the specific kind of crazy communist dictatorship that NK had was a key ingredient in its failures. But saying that capitalism was responsible for NKās disastrous economy is just wrong. Honesty so absurd that if you believed it you should be wondering what other things you believe without question would immediately fall apart if you subjected them to any scrutiny whatsoever.
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The argument should really be for statism vs libertarianism or anarchism and a preference for bigger rather than smaller government within the statist spectrum.
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Hard to say itās just the democracy (though thatās part of it)
The negative aspects are exacerbated by our system giving the most weight to the least intelligent, most socially backwards voting constituencies by valuing rural votes over urban votes
Part of Americaās issues have to do the declining empire status. And more specifically with baby boomers / GenX growing up in an era of the cold war, which meant maximum propaganda and American hegemony. They feel the American exceptionalism more strongly than other generations to the point where it become American entitlement. They feel entitled to their place at the top of global geopolitics because they think their religion and values are what put them there rather than the circumstances of World War II. This is constantly reinforced by propaganda which at this point they willingly lap up over any news which might interpret events in a way that is contrary or orthogonal to their exceptionalist world view.
Now as the empire starts declining thereās both a collective denial about it happening plus a need to find others to blame for changes in their circumstances, whether thatās immigration, NAFTA, etc.
Maybe the lesson from Rome is that hegemonic empires are incompatible with Democratic governments for any extended period of time
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not at all buying if us/un instigated the war. ussr/prc directed kim to invade the south.
Right and werenāt the US / South Koreans like pushed to a tiny corner of the country before the Inchon landing? It wasnāt some one sided war where US was just bombing the shit out of North Korean territory from the start to finish
North Korea didnāt even have any industry to bomb. We didnāt bomb the back to the stone age, they were already there. The Japanese occupation, which started before WWI, was terrible for the whole peninsula.
holy shit dude you donāt have to repeat tankie propaganda. The war starts with the north invading the south. Hell the north supported coups before that
no, itās true that us bombed them to smithereens, but it doesnāt tell the whole story at all
CAPITALISM
Pro: cheap T-shirts
Con: slow destruction of the environment
SOCIALISM
Pro: labor rights
Con: no Pringles
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Sure but donāt you think ācapitalism with a very strong safety netā and āsocialismā are 2 distinct categories both methodologically and in terms of expected outcomes?
So Socialism could be fixed with a Pringles-Committee? 
Weāre the ones that created the arbitrary dividing line, weāre the ones that kept their Japanese oppressors around after Imperial Japan surrendered, weāre the ones who helped put in power an authoritarian stooge who was opposed to the idea of unifying Korea, and weāre the ones that stood by while our authoritarian stooge massacred tens of thousands of people. Gee Iām shocked that a war broke out, how convenient to start with the invasion and ignore everything before it.
