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Fidel Castro has died

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Re: Fidel Castro has died

#131

Post by pmarreck »

gragas wrote: post #117
coldtea wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, the man has committed grievous crimes Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides. > keeps 'his people' in abject poverty A 40+ years embargo has something to…

>Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides. That's a logical fallacy. You can't say that Castro's crimes against humanity are okay because the US has committed worse o…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Tu quoque fallacy, for the record

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#132

Post by friendlygrammar »

coldtea wrote: post #89
friendlygrammar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How am I going to comment civilly? This is a dictator and there are people praising him here! WTF. This might be easy for you to comment on when you didn't lose your entire life because of this man but people have.

> This might be easy for you to comment on when you didn't lose your entire life because of this man but people have. Tons of people have lost their entire life because of US actions. And in places the US had no role to be at all, to boot. It's beyond double standards...

Clearly double standards. It's not as if Cuba has been ruled by a strongman and all decisions of the state can be solely attributed to him while the US is ruled by a system where attribution of fault is significantly less clear.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#133

Post by betolink »

refurb wrote: post #127
betolink wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right! Fidel was the first world leader to support Nelson Mandela's fight for liberty and Cuba was the first country in the Americas that Mandela visited after his liberation.

And Stalin helped defeat Germany in WW2. That doesn't really make up for the millions of Russians he killed for political reasons.

You're comparing apples and oranges, Fidel never killed millions, The U.S. government alone has killed far more people in a single day than Cuba under Fidel Castro.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#134

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ekianjo wrote: post #96
CalChris wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per capita GDP for Cuba is $6,789 Mexico $9,909 Guatamala $3,666 Honduras $2,495 I'd say Cuba is in the mix GDP-wise. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD

> Per capita GDP for Cuba is $6,051.22 That does not mean anything if the wealth is not well distributed (which is the case when elites keep the wealth and everyone else is poor).

It wasn't actually better under Batista, where the former elites (mostly in Florida now) had a greater share of the wealth than the elites today.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#135

Post by pmarreck »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #118
CalChris wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per capita GDP for Cuba is $6,789 Mexico $9,909 Guatamala $3,666 Honduras $2,495 I'd say Cuba is in the mix GDP-wise. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD

Life expectancy for Cuba is slightly higher than that of the US.

Because there's no way that a Communist dictatorship would ever lie about that.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#136

Post by mememachine »

bbcbasic wrote: post #110
djsumdog wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you buy a beer for your friends at a bar and maybe next week they buy a round, that's communism. Communism is a central part of western society. China, the USSA and Cuba were never communism. They varied between heavy socialism (also a pinical of all high income countries: roads, trains, parks, police, fire, airports) and fascism. A lot of people who just go on about communists, today, in 2016, seemed to have no…

That sounds more like socialism from what I understand. Communism is more like you and your friends work on a farm, live off what you produce, all do some work, but you are not paid different or receive more or less food/accommodation/luxuries than each other. You are all equal. Now if one of you gets ill, or decides to slack off then that person will still be supported. If everyone slacks off then the society is f'd…

Yep. Communism fails because people arent equal. same reason socialism introduces inefficiency

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#137

Post by tekni5 »

mememachine wrote: post #42
ant6n wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it 'unforgivable' to be communist?

Because of the incredible harm to humanity done at the hands of communists over just the past 100 years alone

Just want to mention that actual communism has never been implemented on any significant scale, the Soviet Union for example never reached communism, arguably never even really reached socialism.

Marx suggested that communism will only emerge after the failure of capitalism. Every single communist regime has ignored this idea.

While I agree that many countries who have followed communist ideas have done some horrible things, the same can be said for every other system, including the current system we have now.

Furthermore pure capitalism has never really been tried either, because it begins to fail and government intervention is needed very quickly.

Actual communism doesn't really mean dictatorship, I think we might see a comeback of ideas related to communism & command style economies in the future. Especially if we start implementing Strong AI to better manage resources and trade. I could see a future where free market may not exist in the form we have it now, instead there might be a system focused on harm reduction managed by various planning systems, better and more careful resource allocation, etc.

Let's not forget that communist ideas also allowed many countries to industrialize rather quickly.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#138

Post by bobwaycott »

gragas wrote: post #48
wallace_f wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't argue that his political philosophy works either---just look at Cuba today. As someone who studied the subject formally, don't place maximum weight on the success and failures of the (statistically insignificant) rise and fall of modern nation states. This is a very far cry from a controlled experiment to begin with, anyways. Don't read into that too much. I'm not saying mainstream economics doesn't have…

Okay, I won't put too much weight on objective facts. I guess that destroys my argument that there hasn't been a single successful planned economy in history so far.

All economies are planned. There are none operating at global scale in the last century+ that have not been planned in myriad ways.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#139

Post by usaphp »

hal9000xp wrote: post #106

As a Russian, who was born in USSR, I regret that CIA has failed to assassinate him 50 years ago. May be Cuba would be liberated from communist/socialist disease. Look at countries who declared a war against free markets - Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea. They are absolutely pathetic.

Look at counties that did not declare war against free markets. Look at mexico, look at Haiti, or some other Caribbean countries, most of them are doing much worse than Cuba. Communism/socialism disease did not harm China that much ether. Embargo is what hurt Cuba

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#140

Post by chinhodado »

gragas wrote: post #117
coldtea wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, the man has committed grievous crimes Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides. > keeps 'his people' in abject poverty A 40+ years embargo has something to…

>Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides. That's a logical fallacy. You can't say that Castro's crimes against humanity are okay because the US has committed worse o…

> Only a US embargo. That leaves more than 80% of the rest of the world GDP to interact with.

That's a naive view. Do you really think the rest of the world can just straight up ignore the US's embargo and play nice with Cuba, while still staying on good terms with the US?

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