Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We’ve come far, and have further to go!
Yes they are! Many people’s identity is wrapped up in the idea of saving people who can’t save themselves. If you go around suggesting people have some power to save themselves, these people need to find a new identity.
Not really any way to overcome the adversity of the 10 generations that came before you polluting the world to the point of civilizational collapse. Nice quote though.
Where there is life, where there is Will, there is hope. We should already be extinct twice by now. And by all probability in the known Universe we should never have existed at all.
Posting a bunch of context-free statistics without any citations is not what I’d call hope-posting.
There are hopeful trends in the world: the resurgence of unions, successful environmental protest, public opinion changing against police, etc. They inspire hope because they point to the possibility of a better world. Statistics like these just point to how bad the world used to be, and in contrast, how good the current world is. It’s a way of saying “be thankful for what you have”, a sentiment easily weaponized against progress and protest.
The problem is that the line between “we’ve come a long way” and it’s corollary “therefore why are you upset/why do we have to address [insert issue]?” is razor thin.
Celebrating success is great. Using it as a cudgel to stop further success is not.
The real problem with ignoring progress we’ve made is that it gives the false impression that what we’re doing is worthless, leading to demands to tear down everything we’re doing.
People are constantly clamoring to replace our systems with new ones “that actually work”. This is a result of being blind to the ways our current system works.
I’m not arguing for good enough. You’re framing this as a false dichotomy between completely ignoring all the accomplishments of past generations and all the valuable aspects of our current system, and completely giving up.
What we can do is decide to recognize that parts of our current system work really well, and stop always talking about trying to uproot what we have and replace it.
99% of lemmy is: bashing and memeing rich, companies, conservatives. Posting outrage and celeb articles. Honestly these issues are not even on my mind a fraction as much as it is for most guys here.
Im mainly hanging around for my preferred topics to reach a critical level so that it will be enjoyable.
As of right now, even main lemmy sites like technology is not even about technology but this bullshit “how Musk fucked over twitter at this moment”. And look at that. Wasnt this trend taken 1:1 from reddit. I cant clean up properly because this spam keeps leaking into my feed. I cant subscribe to my only preferred communities as they are too small.
I grant you the being left/progressive part, but I never said a word about that being an issue did I. I am heavily left leaning if you want to put a badge on it, but I have nothing to do with character assasination attempts and bashing certain people all day. That is just shitty conduct. Celeb news level of bullshittery.
Does a site like that have proper communities for things like spirituality, Zen, audio equipment and drugs?
I think its pretty self explanatory that we are already in an echo chamber since I never fucking said anything about what my political beliefs are. The current lemmy community is kind of okay to keep up with the events in the world, but still dogshit. And I want to look at the conservative bullshittery even less.
What an odd take on what I said. Obviously you only need to die at some point if you want to go all the way, which would mean the word can not be used anymore. But that is not how people use that word, obviously. The intention behind what I wanted to say should be rather clearly not that sort of “need”.
That never worked out for me. People feel attacked regardless. They might not comment (in any meaningful way) as they have no way of reflecting on my argument, but they still downvote.
What statistics? The one the CCP made up? Over a quarter of chinese are still in extreme poverty and a huge amount of chinese still have an income of under 1500 yuan a month.
Sure, they might have lifted some people out of poverty, but they also put them into poverty in the first place under mao. So celebrating this is kind of self congratulatory.
“Elsewhere in the region, Vietnam has also seen a dramatic fall in extreme poverty rates over a similar period. Another large country, India, had 22% of its population living below the international poverty line in 2011 (the most recent data available). Brazil has 4.4% of its people earning less than $1.90 a day.”
How many people has the US lifted out of poverty? How many people has Britain lifted out of poverty? How many has any state in the EU lifted out of poverty? And france isn’t even mentioned in the article. Vietnam is btw. socialistic.
The US didnt have to lift X people out of poverty because it never had this problem in the first place. The US didnt let millions die in famines. There is also no other country boasting about how many people they got to a survivable state since 1980.
How well is your understanding of english? We already discussed what you think is a counterargument before you came up with it.
The fact that you dont understand why i chose france shows that your understanding of these arguments and the underlying reasons are too high for you.
Let me rephrase it for a 5 year old.
France had royalty and many rich people but also many many poor people. Those lived under poverty. They then killed the royalty and reshaped france. Now france is better and those people were not in poverty anymore. Does this make sense to you?
https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/2b174134-6dcb-4ed7-a51a-c0e7c06410bf.jpegI am asking again. Do you understand english enough to follow what we are saying?
Because you just linked a statistic on poverty. A statistic that as you can see started at 25 (in a time where this data wasnt even tracked) and ended at 12.
Your heartwarming story about china and its 0.7 Percent is; let me bold this so you see the difference; extreme poverty. And again. Chinas poverty is directly in relation to policies made by the chinese ruling party.
Chona started at 98% and is still on a modest 14+
Great Britain in 2020 had a poverty rate (5.50 per day) of 0.7 percent.
China has 20 times that. Just editing that in here because later you compared britain to china.
I am asking again if you understand what i am writing. Because you made it very clear up to this point thst you do not understand.
I don’t know if you remember the meme… but it’s about extreme poverty and extreme poverty declines, because China does a huge job in this field. This is a fact. And you said that poverty is not a problem in the USA. You’re always saying, that you can’t compare those numbers, because you have to measure them differently, but it’s also fact, that poverty were rising in the US, while it was declining in China. If the west would do such an excellent job in fighting against poverty, we would all knew it and there wouldn’t be a need to mention China. Also if you’re comparing it worldwide China is still leading, while in the West poverty rises. Google risk of poverty in europe, the last few years were horrific. And you also have to mention, that if the west can do everything good, the west can also fight against poverty. But here we are and we are seeing nothing. I don’t know if you understand the problem or if you are just against China.
What? English please. Here’s an article. This one explains why this oh so huge achievement has not been made in other countries. To save everyone some time: Because no other country had this problem.
If you wanna bring up a “risk of poverty” then please also provide some statistics on why this is relevant.
The CCP doesn’t even have a statistic on this.
I am speaking english. What is your fucking problem? What are you talking about? Others countries don’t have such problems? Ok, bro… There are no poor people in the west. It’s a myth. I have understood.
The conclusion approves my statements. I don’t know what you wanna say. Can you please speak english?
😂 Is it states or countries now? Yes. Other countries have not caused hundreds of millions of people to be in extreme poverty.
Other countries also do not have:
动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 六四天安門事件 The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. 天安門大屠殺 The Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派鬥爭 The Anti-Rightist Struggle.
大躍進政策 The Great Leap Forward
文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
Is Great Britian boasting about how many people they “lifted out of poverty”? Did Great Britian have millions of people in extreme poverty in 2019? No. No they don’t and didn’t.
You cannot seriously try to ask whataboutisms and then be a crybaby when the answer contradicts your argument.
How are you this knowledgable about chinese happenings but at the same time such a CCP shill?
Who taught you all you know?
xinhua? Globaltimes china?
Beep Boop Boop Xi Winnie Pooh Beep Boop Boop Bootlicker
I don’t know - how do I know? I’ve read a lot of books. It’s that easy. And if you wanna complain that I am chinese - in fact I am not. I am not a native english speaker, you’re right. Die Lösung des Rätsels ist einfacher, als man annehmen mag.
Come on dude, get a global view. It’s terrible how narrow your sight is.
Ironic coming from the guy that says the exact same things the CCP churns out and uses the same excuses and whataboutisms to deflect from real arguments against chinese claims that sinos do.
Every argument i brought against your claims was met by mocking. Ironically when i tell you that your data is on another widely different topic and i show you data from the same source that shows that china is doing horrible in that regard all you can andwer with is temper tantrums.
How is anyone supposed to take you serious when you throw a tantrum everytime someone proves that your claims are less favorable than you portray them as and in other cases just repeat obvious state propaganda.
Please give me some book recommendations because as i see it China is a totalitarian hellhole.
Feel free to give me sources that prove that it isn’t.
It was met by mocking, because you can’t deal with facts. Even the things you showed were on my side of view.
How can I take you serious, if you think that china is the hell on earth? Your sight is narrow. I can’t give you one book, those are many and I’ve read them in german. So I can’t recommend them to you. Besides this some are just papers about politics… You can even grab some from BPB. Maybe this is one, which could be interesting: booklooker.de/…/autor=Mecklenburg+Jens%3B+Wipperm…
Oh yes. Communist holocaust relativism. Awesome book!
I read these. I dont know how but they paint a much worse picture and one of them is actually written by a chinese person.
Cry more about narrow views and only believing one source when all you have read is tankie books and CCP Propaganda.
lol 10 seconds search about Yang Jisheng and I found massive critics about him. Nice. Well done. Is it that difficult to get good sources? The book that I recommended you is not a about relativating the “red holocaust”, it’s about getting the facts straight. In germany a lot of people would hate you, if you would say communist holocaust, because indeed this shows that you don’t understand what the word holocaust means and you’re doing holocaust relativism. I don’t know if you know Jürgen Habermas, but I think you should learn a lot from him.
btw. did you know that Nazis, who attacked the sovietunion and were killed in combat are official victims of communism? Funny, right?
No, my relatives and colleagues also see the deaths of the chinese communist party as a holocaust. The great leap forward is widely described as one.
And the one book you mentioned is directly talking down the millions of lives sacrificed. It has also been widely disproven. Its just communist propaganda.
I also didnt just link one book. I linked multiple. Have you read them?
Come back when you have.
Ok, if your relatives and collegues see it like that it has to be true. They’re jewish right? Why don’t you say it was a famine or a genocide? Why a holocaust? Cause you don’t know what holocaust means. Read Habermas!
How do you know that the book is directly talking down the millions of lives? Have you read it?
What have you linked? Books from Yang Jisheng? Well done… Next you wanna give me links to the victims of communism foundation, who also believe that covid is a virus made in chinese laboratories and that every, who died from it is also a victim of communism.
Are you jewish? Are you chinese? Are you a former USSR Citizen?
If not then i would greatly recommend not pulling that card. If my grandpa would hear you downplaying communist war atrocities he would probably shoot you. I linked 2 Books. Have you read them? Or did you just decide that my books dont count and only you and your tankie friends know what really happened?
Do u understand the religious meaning of the word holocaust? I think you don’t do. Holocaust is a word specificly for the genocide on jewish people. If you wanna describe genocides done to other people I recommend to you not to use the word holocaust, because if you do, you always compare it with the crimes of the Nazis. And if you do this, you are doing holocaust-relativism. And I hope you understand why this is insensitive, cause the crimes the Nazis did is best know as industrial genocide - they gased, shot and starved people in a scale nobody can imagine. Even the crimes of the communists weren’t that bad. I deeply recommend Habermas to you to understand the problem. It’s not only a problem of scale, it’s a philosophical problem. And because you are doing holocaust-relativism and don’t want to understand what the Nazis did, I don’t wanna talk to you anymore. I’m feeling sick, because of you.
It’s fine dude. You’re moving goalposts.
On one hand youre supporting authoritan communism on the other hand youre so sick of people calling the genocides in china holocausts.
Do you want to defend chinas genocides that caused over 60 million deaths and counting or do you wanna remind people of how bad that time was when nazis killed 6+ Million People?
Good when china, bad when Germany?
Its always the same with you tankies. You get disproven and you change to the next miniscule thing. How about you disprove that 60 Million People died in China and that china has never apologized for that, the tianenmen square massacre or the cultural revolution. How about you disprove the genocide on the people of the uyghurs.
Then we can talk again about what the CCP wants to spread as propaganda.
Oh you’re comparing scales? Are we on this level? I don’t know, if you have so much self-awareness, but you’re doing a huge job on relativing Nazis. Why do liberals always tend to do this bullshit? Aren’t you able to talk about genocides without doing it? Is there a need for it? No, it isn’t. You idiots don’t understand what you’re doing. I can talk about the things china did, no problem - but I am getting angry, if you only want to do it, cause you love Nazis.
Because i know chinese. And you are a tankie. And because its really fun to debate with you because all your arguments are so weak and everytime i scrape away at the foundation you pivot. Like a little worm. Its just fun.
You’re literally spouting ccp propaganda and downplaying chinas involvement in the poverty of the ones they allegwdly got out of poverty. Also you do not even understand the srticles you post. The poverty line that china is supposedly lifting people out of is 1 dollar a day. That is the poverty line of a third world country. China is not a third world country.
Edit: They didnt. After a long journey we found out that china is boasting about how all chinese citizens are now above 1 dollar a day aka. EXTREME poverty(in 2011) Aparrently this is an achievement and not incredibly sad.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China I am also pretty sure, that the great leap forward was under Mao and not Deng Xiaoping, but who knows? I am just a CCP-Bot. Beep Boop Boop. Wikipedia is also under the control of China. Beep Boop Boop. Winnie Pooh Xi Jinping Beep Boop Boop
" For example, the World Bank draws a higher poverty line for upper-middle-income countries, which tries to reflect economic conditions. It sets this at $5.50 a day. China is now an upper-middle-income country, says the bank.
About a quarter of China’s population is in poverty, according to this metric. For comparison, this is slightly higher than Brazil.
And there is widespread income inequality. Last year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said China still had 600 million people whose monthly income was barely 1,000 yuan ($154). He said that was not enough to rent a room in a city.
The great leap forward is the reason so many people from extreme poverty died and reversing those changes is not liftig people out of poverty but reversing changes that put people in extreme poverty.".
Yes, by 1980 third world country standards china has a 0.7 percent poverty rate. Thats ignoring 40 years of development of the rest of the world. And also that china is not a third world country anymore.
Go move into a Tofu Dreg Highrise and tell me how good it looks from up there.
Reversing policies that killed millions and is the reason for 800 million people being in extreme poverty does only exist in china. Yes.
And being less shit is not a success story.
Still a TofuDreg Dictatorship
No, the great leap forward is not the reason for it. I don’t know if you learned it, but China has also a history of colonization. Damn, the west did horrific things in China. You do everything to not recognize the problems China had before Mao.
And reversing most of the things that mao did.
He killed over 50 million people and caused a braindrain in china that no following leader has managed to fix. The fact that china got everyone over the extreme poverty line in 2020 is sad. A marketleader like china shouldnt have anyone in extreme poverty.
Maybe I’m too naive, but even if you hate a country for its economic and political choices, you can still be glad their working class population is getting out of poverty and It’s not like they are getting richer by slaving a whole continent
As well as the average life span being skewed by those same infant mortality rates. People have been living long and now they’re forced to retire later.
Plus, while we have extended life, we haven’t made progress with extended life care. So you might live 20 years longer, but those 20 years will be spent in your bed waiting for your nurse to clean your diaper.
This writeup is a great argument, here’s some highlights I thought were good:
I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South. If you have read colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.
Remember: $1.90 [chosen poverty line] is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011. The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).” That goes beyond any definition of “extreme”. It is absurd. It is an insult to humanity.
From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive popular resistance. During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion. In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty increased, from 62% to 68%.
But there is something else that needs to be said here. You and Gates like to invoke the poverty numbers to make claims about the legitimacy of the existing global economic system. You say the system is working for the poor, so people should stop complaining about it.
When it comes to assessing such a claim, it’s really neither absolute numbers nor proportions that matter. What matters, rather, is the extent of poverty vis-à-vis our capacity to end it. As I have pointed out before, our capacity to end poverty (e.g., the cost of ending poverty as a proportion of the income of the non-poor) has increased many times faster than the proportional poverty rate has decreased (to use your preferred measure). By this metric we are doing worse than ever before. Indeed, our civilization is regressing. Why? Because the vast majority of the yields of our global economy are being captured by the world’s rich.
-Overpopulation is a fascist lie
-no one chooses to be illiterate
-agreed
-homelessness is not caused by increasing population but by psychopathic policies.
If you like this post maybe read The Progress Paradox. It goes in much more detail than this meme, it then poses the question but then why aren’t we happy. Without giving answers it does point to possible paths. It’s a good book.
While “technically” true. We all know the average lifespan was brought down by a high infant mortality. So comparingbthat to when peopke retired is meaningless. That said, it dies seem worse because with more information we realize how much better it could be. 100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US. And those that knew considered those slum people less than human. So what we have really done is expanded who is considered human, and who matters. That certainly does make it look worse.
The less/fewer distinction is arbitrary Victorian bullshit flying directly in the face of how English is used. The only point of it was to try and make English more like Latin and allow aristocrats who spoke Latin to look down on those without expensive private education.
I do beg your pardon, it was Georgian not Victorian era when this nonsense was dreamed up for no reason other than preference for trying to cram Latin-esque cases into english.
The very notion of a neat distinction between fewer and less according to whether the noun is countable or not is a myth. It was invented out of whole cloth by an ill- informed 18th-century pedant called Robert Baker in his book Reflections on the English Language (1770). He proposed this distinction not as a hard-and-fast rule of grammar, moreover, but as a tentative suggestion with caveats (“I should think . . . it appears to me . . . ”) that you won’t find in modern style guides.
The wiki article on it notes that
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.
i.e. it is a shibboleth for saying “I am educated unlike you uncultured lot who use natural sounding language”
You cant say “the worst” when talking about an uncountable group, you have to say “the least good” because I prefer that and it makes me sound smart by correcting you. Apparently that is sufficient for it to be understanding language and for you to be wrong.
100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US.
This was and still is very true. The level of the poverty in places like that is astounding and beyond the experience of most anyone in a 1st world country. I grew up in America, in poverty of the level that my single mother was only eating what she could scrounge at work some years so she’d have enough to feed us kids. Yet when I deployed to Panama in the mid 90’s for a 2 month military operation, and had to operate in many of the rural areas of Panama during those missions, I had my eyes opened to what real 3rd world poverty looks like. The way I grew up would have been a huge improvement for many of the people I saw there. You can’t really understand it until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.
the last two are easily debunked. I hate shit like this because it reinforces an idea that time = progress. There are influential and powerful people alive today who would reverse any of these trends if it meant money in their pocket.
It’s bewildering why they decided to restate the 1st point as the 3rd point when they could’ve just said the average retirement age is 10 years lower than it was 100 years ago statista.com/…/average-retirement-age-in-the-us/
I don't get why they are comparing things to the depression rather than after ww2. 50 years would be a better measure. Also retirement wise people can't always choose to so income and home ownership in retirment would be more practical.
Well that’s easy, because the statistics wouldn’t paint the view they’re trying to convey. Saying things are better now than they were 100 years ago is as useful as saying things are better than they were 3000 years ago, aka completely useless to say since when you compare to more recent times like 40 years ago you can point to how many things have gotten objectively worse.
We’ve made a lot of strides on social issues, but everything else? Lmao.
It’s not about time = progress, it’s about showing that there was progress even if feels like we’re in a shitty downward phase currently. I don’t validate the numbers, just the intention.
It’s fair to want to be optimistic and to want to fight against doomerism. I think OP was misguided at best.
To be fair, I don’t think I was as clear as I could have been either. It’s just that post just has smells of neoliberalism has fixed the world propaganda. These are the same kinda statistics they use to justify an immoral and unethical economic system. I think a lot of people agree and get slightly triggered seeing these same untrustworthy statistics paraded around.
And the climate change will help them. They are basically a team just that one of them doesn’t know about the partnership and the other didn’t choose it…
With students I like to use Gapminder as an example in statistics. And there sometimes I get the same reaction you see here in the comment section. Some people feel if you are showing the gains that means you want to stop improvement or that you don’t take the struggles of people seriously.
I have no idea about psychology, so I don’t know what’s the reason.
The opposite is true, also. If you don’t say something 100 % positive, people tend to assume you are in opposition. ;)
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