kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

About 1/3 people in the world use social media News headlines often report "social media linked to mental health problems." But what does the empirical research tell us? https://ourworldindata.org/social-media-wellbeing

@yogthos Avoided? With rich CPSU nomenclature shopping at "Берёзка" ("Pewex" in Poland) and the rest living three families in single flat and waiting in overnight queues to buy basic supplies?

@yogthos BTW USSR is the rightmost column

@wbtd @yogthos Od course we can! "Social democracy" is just extremely broad and flexible term describing a general framework for building society.

@wbtd @yogthos It's not impossible, just rare and unlikely if you adopt Marxian communism specifically. And everything else just reduces to some variation of social democracy.

@yogthos Here's a comparison of life expectancy in USSR and West per https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy which is one of the most reliable sources on world demography. You can clearly see it never catches up with the West. No doubt USSR made great progress since pre-Revolutionary times... but everyone did - USSR just did it worse than other countries, at huge cost of human oppression and it eventually bankrupted.

@yogthos How can you tell if anyone is happy or not in a country with full-scale censorship and laws like article 58 of the USSR criminal code that could put people into jail for vaguely ddefined "anti-Soviet propaganda"?

@wbtd Russia didn't either - it's a very popular catch phrase there "democracy, freedom of speech and rule of law didn't work", like they ever had one! It's because market economy is orthogonal to democracy, which I'm for quite a while trying to demonstrate to @yogthos Plus, both of them are spectra rather than binary states.

@yogthos It's "clear" how exactly?

@yogthos So, to summarise, Poland is still recovering from the poverty left by real socialism, but on the right track.

At least in terms of economy, because the current national-populist government is a separate topic...

@yogthos The difference is that modern capitalist economies can be, and are, changed without the use of oppression. USSR couldn't change on its own because of the inflexible Marxian ideology that has driven it. And this is why it eventually collapsed.

One of the few countries driven by similarly inflexible ideology is USA and I have similar attitude towards neocons as I have towards Marxism. Levels of personal freedom and rule of law are still much higher though.

@yogthos USSR was not only ineffective, authoritarian and oppressive towards its own citizens. It was also exploitative and imperialistic towards its neighbours, which I have personally experienced. This gives me many reasons to dislike it.

In market economy I have built my career, significantly improved my economic status and - most importantly - I'm free to go wherever I wish at any time, rather than being effectively a prisoner of my own country, as I was under communism.

@yogthos To put that a bit in perspective https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Poverty_rates_in_Central_and_Eastern_Europe.png

@yogthos In market economy BP had an insurance and paid for cleaning up Deep Water Horizon from their operational profit and reserves. And we knew about the disaster from the first minute. USSR denied Chernobyl disaster for a week, just as it covered Kyshtym, Andreev Bay and other nuclear incidents you never heard of.

@yogthos The data about income and life expectancy is simply false. I'll find references tomorrow

@yogthos Oh please, don't lose the discussion so cheaply. Tu quoque argument, really?

@yogthos If people were living so wonderfully, just ask yourself a question: why they used every opportunity to escape? Why we had no passports and couldn't travel abroad without a special permit? Why was Berlin wall built with a "shoot to kill" order for anyone trying to escape from the socialist paradise?

@yogthos I have some original booklets about life in USSR printed in 80's. I'm sure you'll love them even more as they paint even more successful story. There's just one problem: they had nothing in common with the reality on the ground in these countries.

@yogthos This data is also completely invented - in 80's Poland ("upper middle income socialist") an average monthly salary was $20 (twenty dollars), so 10x less than the number given in the article.

@yogthos Do you realize that 50% of income of the late USSR and now Russia is from exports of hydrocarbons?