@yogthos Out of all countries in the world, USSR and Russia have the least moral right to teach about it ;)
@kravietz US still has a far worse track record there :)
@yogthos I wouldn't say so. The poster was printed in 1956 - so just after Soviet invasion on Hungary, or in 1986 - so during invasion on Afghanistan. Half of Europe was practically occupied by USSR with Soviet military bases guarding its interests.
@kravietz yeah, but compare what kind of governments and social policies USSR created in places it occupied to those of US. Just look at the horrors in Asia, South America, or Middle East.
Compare Afghanistan under Soviet influence to what it turned into under US as an example.
@yogthos I compared :) And it likely looks like this for every country that was under USSR control I'm afraid
@kravietz so where are the USSR versions of the contras, Pinochet, Taliban, and IS then?
@yogthos So at best, USSR involvement into state terrorism matched that of CIA. In reality, it was much more aggressive, since CIA never organised outright terrorist acts on USSR territory as KGB did with RAF in Germany.
@kravietz I'm talking about the kinds of regimes USSR and US supported. Pretty much every US backed regime is either a dictatorship or a terrorist one. USSR created socialist governments like the one Vietnam still has today. So, that's a pretty big difference between the two.
@yogthos And just looking at the economic side - this is Afghanistan GDP per capita, where you can see the beginning of Soviet invasion and the beginning of Western
@kravietz GDP doesn't measure quality of life, and it's a pretty useless metric that gets a lot of abuse in my opinion.
@yogthos If you don't like GDP per capita, propose a better metric for comparison. For some countries it's the only metric we have I'm afraid because it's easy to estimate even if the country in question doesn't have this data, or just lies.
@kravietz GDP is a fundamentally wrong measure because it says moly measures economic output. High economic output often has strong correlation with exploitation of the local population.
PQL is a far better measure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Quality_of_Life_Index
And I agree that emperialism of both USSR and US is a net negative for the countries subject to it. Just saying that one is a lot worse than the other.
@yogthos PQL has the same issue as USSR: it does not exist.
It was proposed in 1980 but I cannot find any systematic calculations so how could you use it for for comparison?
It's a bit like saying faster-than-light engine is better than ion thruster for space travel :)
@kravietz you were asking to propose a better measure, and I think it is one. The fact that it's not widely used is a separate problem.
@yogthos Well I asked for an alternative to use in this discussion
@kravietz there really isn't a good one, but lack of an alternative doesn't make GDP into a meaningful or a useful metric.
@kravietz it also fails when comparing poor countries. You can have a country where majority of the population is poor and miserable that produces high GDP.
In fact, there tends to be a direct correlation between the two because exploiting people in a country will result in a high GDP.
So it's measuring the completely wrong thing. GDP tells you nothing about working conditions, social services, education, or free time of the citizenry.