You started this flamewar and then went around the other side and started another. That sort of thing will get you banned here. So will generic ideological trolling, which you bring in here completely extraneously.
Please don't do any of these things on HN again. Instead, if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
Please keep flamewars and online rage off Hacker News. We all know what the callout/shaming culture has wrought on the internet, and the idea of this place is to try to be different. You've perpetuated it in this thread as much as the other person whom you've scornfully criticized for it. That's the way these things usually go.
As for 'purge', if you use a politically charged word like that next to a rage word like 'fuckers', the internet dynamics are predictable. Therefore, the fault for the flamewar about communism and genocide the thread ended up in lies largely with your comment. We can argue in general about words and contexts (and sure, you're not wrong), but the point is irrelevant because the current context has such well-known properties, like dynamite and dry forests.
It's kind of amazing that this needs to be clarified. I'm starting to think that people around here are only familiar with the word as it relates to that dumb movie of the same name.
I feel like a lot of posters will take the most uncharitable interpretation possible of your post, no matter how implausible, and then argue against it.
It needs to be clarified because "purge" seemed like a very charged word which was meant to convey more emotion than information. I interpreted it as a double-entendre. The original commenter defended their use of the word but only in a way to stir the situation more.
I read it as the word used to describe bulimic emesis. The open source community has ingested something undesirable, and now it needs to induce vomiting.
We don't have to leap right to the edge of the mass graves whenever someone elects to use their thesaurus. Or would that actually be doubleplusgood, if people were to suffer ad hominem attacks based on their vocabulary choices? If you're headed to the bottom of the slippery slope anyway, you might as well grease yourself up and grab a boulder, right?
Was going into personal attacks of the other poster and Horseshoe Theory supposed to be a more measured and informative take on the discussion at hand?
To be fair, if one is a self-described "commie", there's only one possible interpretation. Maybe avoid associating yourself with genocidal regimes? Even as a joke (I sure hope it's a joke)? Maybe?
Communism isn't genocidal. You should read up on what it actually is instead of relying on pro-capitalism propoganda. "Somebody died because Stalin/Mao" holds no candle compared to capitalism's "somebody died because housing, hospitalizing, and feeding the poor wasn't profitable".
Ah the old "there were no poor people before capitalism" mistruth again. You might want to research what Mao did before defending it in any why.
But you're right, communism the idea is not genocidal, just all of its prominent leaders were. The fact that the ideology lends itself towards "there is only 1 truth" has nothing to do with that, I'm sure.
Rather than trying to argue capitalism vs communism I would like to point out that neither specifically calls for mass murder. Both to happen to be associated with plenty of it though.
For people thinking capitalism is completely clean please look up the Indonesian genocides. For people thinking communism is great, consider how mao and stalin could have been stopped by communism.
Definitely said nothing like that. In the US there are 6 unoccupied house for every homeless person. Somehow this is better because you found a way to decentralize the dictator and blame the victims?
You're free to have an opinion about which economic system is better. But the opinion that communism implies genocide and capitalism implies freedom is quite non-negotiably uneducated.
Your link makes no effort to suggest that capitalism is a positive force in reducing poverty or that communism is a negative force. In fact, it seems more likely you'd draw the opposite conclusion:
> Second, we can also see from this chart that despite remarkable progress, in some rich countries—notably the United States—a fraction of the population still lives in extreme poverty. This is the result of exceptionally high income inequality
The best conclusion I can draw here is that Western powers are rich because they imperialized other nations effectively and survived key historical wars. Africa is doing bad because they were heavily colonized and met the bad end of several wars. Communist nations failed to reach US levels of power because they imperialized less effectively than the US. No where in history or that article do you see "they became communist then became more impoverished"
The article even goes forth to mention poverty traps, a problem well known to critics of capitalism. A problem that socialism reduces and communism eliminates.
Again, you're free to pick capitalism as your ideal economic model, but you should at least start with factual information on the alternatives.
