Leftypol BTFO

Probably counting Nazi deaths.

Weeeeeeeeeeeew XDXDXDXDXDXD

Better title than "x DESTROYS socialism in 30 seconds"

ITT knock down number of deaths argument to distract from poverty argument.

...

Even if socialism was against human nature, wouldn't it be piss easy to make the argument that human nature sucks and needs to be changed?

wow you sure got him there, no naturalist fallacies detected here my friend
socialism should be built out of self-interest of the proletariat anyways.

poor countries become exponentially less poor under socialism what are you talking about?

Most Marxist-Leninist countries admittedly saw an increase in quality of life for the majority of their citizens. The best you can argue about that is that liberal capitalism would have done an even better job of raising standards, but claiming it ruined their countries is disingenuous.

Stalin has been retroactively inserting himself into the deaths of people 70 years ago.

I heard that even to get to the 100 million figure they had to include both Soviets killed by the Nazis as well as Nazis killed by the Soviets.

aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html

The world's governments first pledged to end extreme poverty during the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. They committed to reducing the number of undernourished people by half before 2015, which, given the population at the time, meant slashing the poverty headcount by 836 million. Many critics claimed that this goal was inadequate given that, with the right redistributive policies, extreme poverty could be ended much more quickly.

But instead of making the goals more robust, global leaders surreptitiously diluted it. Yale professor and development watchdog Thomas Pogge points out that when the Millennium Declaration was signed, the goal was rewritten as "Millennium Developmental Goal 1" (MDG-1) and was altered to halve the proportion (as opposed to the absolute number) of the world's people living on less than a dollar a day. By shifting the focus to income levels and switching from absolute numbers to proportional ones, the target became much easier to achieve. Given the rate of population growth, the new goal was effectively reduced by 167 million. And that was just the beginning.

After the UN General Assembly adopted MDG-1, the goal was diluted two more times. First, they changed it from halving the proportion of impoverished people in the world to halving the proportion of impoverished people in developing countries, thus taking advantage of an even faster-growing demographic denominator. Second, they moved the baseline of analysis from 2000 back to 1990, thus retroactively including all poverty reduction accomplished by China throughout the 1990s, due in no part whatsoever to the Millennium Campaign.

This statistical sleight-of-hand narrowed the target by a further 324 million. So what started as a goal to reduce the poverty headcount by 836 million has magically become only 345 million - less than half the original number. Having dramatically redefined the goal, the Millennium Campaign can claim that poverty has been halved when in fact it has not. The triumphalist narrative hailing the death of poverty rests on an illusion of deceitful accounting.

But there's more. Not only have the goalposts been moved, the definition of poverty itself has been massaged in a way that serves the poverty reduction narrative. What is considered the threshold for poverty - the "poverty line" - is normally calculated by each nation for itself, and is supposed to reflect what an average human adult needs to subsist. In 1990, Martin Ravallion, an Australian economist at the World Bank, noticed that the poverty lines of a group of the world's poorest countries clustered around $1 per day. On Ravallion's recommendation, the World Bank adopted this as the first-ever International Poverty Line (IPL).

But the IPL proved to be somewhat troublesome. Using this threshold, the World Bank announced in its 2000 annual report that "the absolute number of those living on $1 per day or less continues to increase. The worldwide total rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5 billion today and, if recent trends persist, will reach 1.9 billion by 2015." This was alarming news, especially because it suggested that the free-market reforms imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on Global South countries during the 1980s and 1990s in the name of "development" were actually making things worse.

This amounted to a PR nightmare for the World Bank. Not long after the report was released, however, their story changed dramatically and they announced the exact opposite news: While poverty had been increasing steadily for some two centuries, they said, the introduction of free-market policies had actually reduced the number of impoverished people by 400 million between 1981 and 2001.

This new story was possible because the Bank shifted the IPL from the original $1.02 (at 1985 PPP) to $1.08 (at 1993 PPP), which, given inflation, was lower in real terms. With this tiny change - a flick of an economist's wrist - the world was magically getting better, and the Bank's PR problem was instantly averted. This new IPL is the one that the Millennium Campaign chose to adopt.

Is a useless clown in Russia locally. Why should anyone waste his time on his useless opinion is beyond me.

God Kulaks procreate like crazy dont they

That's probably counting every chicken the kulaks were forced to kill and burn by the evil Soviets trying to avoid starvation

220 millions is quite close to total people dead for any reason for the whole duration of the Soviet govt, if you think about it.

Why should I listen to him? What is he going to say that is new? Does he say anything other than the tired conservative talking points?
If not, then I have better things to worry and argue about.

Someone should pressure him on the free market reforms he's been pushing in the USSR which led to the glorious 90s in Russia.

Seriously, his biography reads like a cliche villian.