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Comment by Serious_Cheese | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to see HN users just downvote something they don't agree with instead of responding to the arguments made berg.

berg, what other options do we have besides capitalism? We saw how millions of people died of starvation with communist/socialists societies.

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There's a site guideline against taking HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. That's because such threads are inevitably repetitive, tedious, and eventually nasty.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did we see that? A lot of what is said by capitalist press about socialist countries is not true. If you ask an Eastern European old enough to have lived before 89, they’ll tell you a very different story.

Someone said that "winners write the history books," but how true is that today given that most developed countries are connected through the internet and information spreads as fast as the speed of light (literally).

Anything to backup your claims about Eastern Europeans living in the 80s? Anything I can read? Not trying to refute your argument, but I'm just curious to see things from their perspective.

It's not just history books, but capitalist control over media in general. Beyond selectively reporting facts, ideology is constantly reinforced. It's how workers end up acting against their own material interest so often, when acting collectively in solidarity with their fellow workers would gain them far more of their labour's value.

Remember Iraq WMDs? At the time, there was almost complete consensus on them being real and necessitating war. Now, we know it was entirely made up. The same is true of many movements and countries that oppose (for various reasons) US and EU imperialism.

If you don't have a significant sample of Eastern Europeans at hand, here's an article summarising the situation (https://thecommunists.org/2019/07/26/news/workers-eastern- europe-former-ussr-prefer-socialism/). It references many sources that I recommend you read. Many of the sources are capitalist and contain clear propaganda to that end, but also contain useful raw data.

There's a difference between misleading spin and being "entirely made up." It is an indisputable fact that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It is also probably a fact that most people hearing this term of art assume it means a catastrophic nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon. It does not.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction

Often, downvotes are about the way an opinion is presented, not the opinion itself. Saying that capitalism is the real shoplifting is vague and unproductive, and it doesn't contain a counterproposal, so as a statement it's hard to engage with.

If the GP had come up with a proposal for how to fix this, which would probably have meant elaborating on how to completely abolish all private property in the context of the modern US, I think the post would not have been so heavily downvoted.

You're right. I agree with you. Thanks for clarifying.

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