Cunnilingus Kills!

Here.

That is one Hell of a way to die. There you are on your back, halfway to Heaven already, and the next thing you know, you are dead.

It’s the #1 killer of women in the US.*Heart disease is second. Little known fact!

*Actually I lied. The #1 killer of women in the US is not blowing into vaginas. The #1 killer of women in the US is Ted Bundy!

Haha!

1,000 Honor Killings a Year in India

Here.

Good God, what a toilet this place is! I didn’t know Hindus engaged in honor killings. I thought it was only a Muslim thing. And it looks like Sikhs go in for it bigtime too. In India, almost 100% of honor killings are due to young couples marrying across caste barriers. Someone from a higher caste falls in love with someone from a lower caste. The higher caste person’s parents or the elders of the village decree that the higher caste person should be killed for marrying a lower caste person.

There have been a few honor killing in the US, all involving Muslims and a few possibly involving Sikhs or Hindus. As you can see, American humans don’t engage in this sort of thing. Only the non-humans do this.

Indian Morality Compared to American Morality

Jaipal writes:

By the way, speaking of morals and whatnot, what morals does Western society increasingly have?

Skyrocketing divorce rates, with no real family values or respect for the basic functional unit of society, namely the family.

Out-of-Wedlock births and a growing bastard population,
increasing welfare dependency parasites on the dole, a drug and gun culture where a shooting now takes place  every now and then?

Growing Christian Evangelism which emphasizes irrationality over reason like the creationism versus evolution debate.

What about gay marriage permissiveness. Should be the last to talk about morals!

Surely the low morals of America are vastly trumped by the devastatingly low morals of Indians. As humans, Indians are probably by far some of the morally lowest humans on the face of the Earth.

1. Of all humans on Earth, no humans care less about their fellow man than Indians. This is the most serious form of condemnation. Further, India has always been this way. As far back as we can go in history, Indians have never cared one whit about their fellow man.

2. One of the most viciously racist societies on Earth. India has actually instituted the most cruel and savage racism into every single crevice of its society in the form of the caste system. Is India the most racist society on Earth? In terms of the racist abuse doled out to its citizens, it may well be. In racist terms, what you have in India is nearly an entire nation of Nazi-like racists. And it is no wonder that Indians have long revered Hitler and the 3rd Reich.

3. Callous abuse of women. Of all societies on Earth, women are less safe in India than most other countries. Rapes are out of control, and possibly this has been the case for hundreds of years. For millenia, widows were set on fire on the streets of India. There are many 1000′s of cruel and horrific dowry murders of women every year in India. These murders are supported by the majority of the Indian people.

4. Child abuse. There is a long standing tradition of child abuse in India, actually sanctioned by Hindu priests. Hindu temples have been havens for the open sexual abuse of female children and even boys for hundreds of years. There are almost no arrests for these crimes, and they continue in vast numbers to this very day.

5. Slavery. Everywhere you look in India, you see frank and obvious slavery. Many millions of Indians are slaves, bonded into unpaid labor to higher castes for perpetuity. Many children are also slaves. Most of the women in Indian brothels are sex slaves, trafficked into slavery.

6. Callous abuse of traffic laws. There are few traffic laws in India, and what laws there are are violated by almost everyone. This is one of the worst countries on Earth to be a driver of a vehicle or a pedestrian on foot or bicycle. Indian drivers simply do not care and will gladly run into or over any pedestrian or bicyclist who gets in their way. There is no consideration of other drivers, and you take your life in your hands every time you step on the gas.

7. Widespread fraud, thievery and scamming. India has a business community in which ethics are nearly nonexistent. Indian businessmen constantly steal from each other, so no one trusts each other. There are no criminal prosecutions for fraud because all Indian politicians are criminals themselves. You can pursue the civil suit route, but it will take years to decades. Most Indian judges are corrupt criminals themselves, so there is no guarantee of any justice.

8. Corruption everywhere. Whether there is a single honest politician anywhere in India would be a great question. It is automatically assumed that all or nearly all politicians are criminals. This level of governmental crime is not seen much in the world outside of parts of Africa.

9. The worst starvation on Earth. India has the worst malnutrition and starvation figures on Earth. The only country that is worse is Ethiopia, and they live in the desert. Indians starve because their fellow Indians don’t care whether they starve or not or whether they live or die. India grows enough food to feed all of its people, but it is not distributed properly. Indian government programs to feed the poor are handed over to corrupt locals. Probably 95% of the food aid is then stolen by these locals and diverted to the open market.

10. A medical system based on callous abuse of the sick and dying. There are few places on Earth where you have to pay the doctor to keep you alive. India is one of those places. If you don’t pay the doctor, you get no treatment. You either live or die, or get better or worse. The only way to assure that you get any kind of treatment of all is to pay off the doctor-criminal.

11. Shit and piss everywhere. 600 million Indians lack toilets, so half a billion Indians shit and piss outdoors every day. The sidewalks and fields of India are covered with shit. It is difficult to walk in many Indian cities because there are shits everywhere you step on the ground.

Indian men piss openly, often on walls of cities. Many walls in cities smell horrifically of piss. If you look around big Indian city in the daytime, you will see city walls along sidewalks with dozens to scores of men lined up pissing on the wall. The piss rolls off the wall, down the sidewalk and into the gutters. The rich and middle class walk by carrying briefcases and care nothing whatsoever about the men pissing right next to them. No one will give these poor wretches toilets or build pubic restrooms because the Indians that have money don’t want any of it going to poor people, and the Indian state exists to serve the rich and only the rich, forever.

12. The most horrific beggars anywhere on Earth. In any Indian city, you will see beggars. You will see young boys, completely covered in shit, trying to steal food to survive. You will see men and women living on the streets, covered in in filth and degradation. You will see human skeletons everywhere, begging for food. If you give any of these wretches food, many Indians will rush up to and demand to know why you gave food to the “scumbag beggar.” According to Indians, giving food to beggars “only encourages them.” Instead of giving it to him, you should have given it to them instead.

13. If you go to the Indian holy city on the Ganges, you will see countless Indians drinking, bathing and swimming in the filthiest river the world has ever seen. Dead bodies float everywhere on the river, bloated, rotting, sickening. Crows perch on the bodies, gnawing on the dead. The rotting bodies loll up onto shore, where packs of roving dogs hound in on them and feast on the rotten corpses. This is India. This is the holiest city in all of India, the holiest city in Hinduism, the citadel of Hindu India.

14. Crabs in a barrel, dog eat dog, the law of the jungle. India has been this way as far back as anyone can remember. This is normal for India. Every man for himself, fuck everyone but me and mine. India is a nation of 1.2 million Mitt Romneys.

15. Nonexistent schools. Many villages lack schools. The state is only for the rich, so they don’t want to build villages for the poor. In many Indian villages, the schools have no toilets, so the children shit and piss outside all through the day. In many of these schools, the teachers simply never show up. They collect a paycheck for many years, but they never spend a day in class. This situation often goes on for many years.

16. The worst religion on Earth. One reason why Hinduism is the worst religion can be exemplified by Hindu temples. All Christian churches, especially Catholic churches, are mandated to give many to most donations to the poor. The churches also raise money to serve the poor. Mosques are also mandated to serve the poor.

Muslims must tithe a certain portion of income to the mosque, which is then distributed to the needy. Mohammad himself mandated this tithe and the destination of its funds. Mosques and Islamist groups often run all manner of social services agencies from schools to day care to hospitals for services for the poor and needy. Islam is essentially a socialist religion, and this impulse dates back to Mohammad himself, who was actually a bit of a 7th century socialist.

Buddhist societies have cultures that mandate a lot of distribution of income to the poor and needy. Buddhism is at core a socialist or Communist religion, which is why forms of these economic systems were easily implemented in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Korea and Japan.

In contrast, the Indian rich give their money to Hindu temples with the comforting knowledge that not one penny of those riches will ever go to the poor. For the Indian rich, if any of their money went to the poor it would be seen as wasted. So all of their money goes to the temple instead. Hindu temples accumulate vast riches, but not one dime of it goes to the poor. For the Indian Hindu, this curious dispensation is the proper one.

One gives money to the temple in the pagan tradition of trying to buy favors from the Gods. You give the Gods money, and they give you stuff and money in return. It’s analogous to the buying of indulgences in Medieval Catholicism, and it’s as corrupt, backwards and primitive as human religion gets.

*****

As you can see, America has none of these problems. Sure, American society has some serious moral transgressions, but at its core, it is a profoundly more decent, moral, cleanly and functional society than we see in India. America is a much more moral society than India, though things are on a downswing. India is much more morally degenerate.

America is a more moral country because Americans are morally superior people. India is a depraved and vicious country because Indians are immoral, savage and animal-like people.

Societies are a reflection of the people who live in and create them. Mexicans created Mexico. Mexico blows for one reason and one reason only. Mexico blows because it’s full of Mexicans. Everywhere a Mexican goes in the world, he can only recreate the disaster that is Mexico. This is because this is what his culture has programmed him to do.

80% of Mexico wants to come to America. If we let 90 million more Mexicans flood our heaving shores, America will become Mexico North by default.

400 million Indians want to come to the US. If we give in and let them in, America, the shining city on the hill, will be gone. In its place will be Calcutta from sea to shining sea.

Eric Hobsbawm Interview

Very nice interview with Michael Ignatieff (who I don’t like too much) interviewing the late, great Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party at age 14 in Germany in 1933 and remained a party member for the rest of his life. He always supported the Communist cause.

He now admits that the Stalinist paranoia of the USSR was a disaster (beginning with the “Trotsky was a British agent” line soon after the Revolution). Stalin killed so many people for little or no good reason. As Hobsbawm points out, many of those killed by Stalin were Communists themselves, often the finest revolutionaries.

Hobsbawm’s statistics on the deaths in the USSR are exaggerated. There were at least 2.6 million excess deaths in the USSR from state violence, not including the population transfers during the WW2, various wartime deaths of the enemy, and the famine of 1932. That’s a lot, but it’s not 10-110 million as we often hear.

Hobsbawm took a lot of heat for this 1994 interview in which he implied that the deaths during the USSR might have been worth it if a better world had unfolded as a result. He meant this as an analogy to the 50 million deaths in WW2. Most say that those deaths were worth it in order to defeat fascism and rightwing militarism. So it is as an analogy to the WW2 statement that he wonders if the Soviet deaths might have been worth it if things had turned out differently.

Hobsbawm makes no apologies for the crimes of Stalin. He also says that the invasion of Hungary was a turning point among Western Communists. This is when they started to abandon the USSR. Hobsbawm says the Hungarian invasion was a catastrophe.

Hobsbawm is correct though, along Rosa Luxembourg’s lines, that the question is still one of a better world versus barbarism (Luxembourg said the choice is “socialism or barbarism). With the triumph of neoliberal capitalism the world over, what we are seeing is barbarism writ large spanning the planet. Hobsbawn says this is also a catastrophe, and I agree with him.

Hobsbawm was a famous Marxist historian who authored a number of famous books, including “The Age of…” series.

“India a Self Deluded Nation,” By Raghu Dayal

Great article about what a shithole India is which goes into the various reasons we have discussed in the past for India’s shitholeness.

One wonders, though, why.

Apparently India’s education fails completely. Even higher education does not function at all. The graduates are crap. The Indian state spends almost nothing on education, which means that society thinks it is a low priority. But why is it that one goes to a 4 year college and comes out with a defective education? What’s that all about? Why does so little learning take place even at the tertiary level?

Cheating is apparently endemic. India appears to be basically a society of cheaters. Not to mention liars and thieves.

When Indian immigrants come to the US, they bring the culture of cheating, lying and thieving into the workplace as employees or as business owners.

The reputation of Indian businessmen among US businessmen is very low. They are regarded with the same contempt Jews used to be. No one wants to negotiate with them or do business with them. “The Indian will take you for everything you’ve got.” I hear this a lot from people who do business with Indians, but then I hear similar things about Chinese “businessmen.”

We already know why India spends so little on healthcare. In a society without any conception of the common good, almost no money will be spent on health care.

This is also why so many are starving while the middle and upper classes get obese and diabetic. The starving are “those people,” and according to Hinduism, they deserve their fate. The Indian middle and upper classes seem like a nation of Mitt Romneys. “Let them eat cake,” the Indian bourgeois cries.

That the Indian political class is utterly corrupt goes without saying. But we wonder why once again. Does it go back to no conception of the common good once again. In a society with no conception of the common good, how does this lead to an ultra-criminal political class?

The justice system apparently does not even function at all, but why is this? Society doesn’t feel like spending any money to have a functional justice system? And why is this? Because society itself has no sense of justice whatsoever?

The blatant misogyny of course is culturally embedded, but it shows no signs of change, apparently because misogyny is so embedded in Indian culture that no one wants to change it.

All of the mess below is the product of a shit culture. Society flows from culture. If your society sucks, then quite probably it’s because your culture sucks. In conversations with Indians, they rarely want to change Indian culture. This is particularly true with Indian Hindus. Everything is fine, and nothing needs to change. It’s all good. Shining India and all that.

Change flows from self-reflection. In order to change your society, you have to face the fact that it’s crap and needs changing in the first place. It’s Stage One that Indians never get to.

India a Self Deluded Nation

By Raghu Dayal

A land of myths, India takes mythology rather seriously till some myth-buster jolts it down to reality. We have often deluded ourselves that we are intellectually up there with the best in the world till the OECD-conducted PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) of 15 year school children had Indian students scoring second from the bottom, only ahead of Kyrgyzstan, among half a million students from 73 countries.

While the PISA ranking laid bare India’s poor school education, the 2012 QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University rankings include none of Indian universities or institutes among world’s top 200. China has seven in the top 200 list. India has over 26,000 higher education institutes with 15 million students on rolls; a survey has found 92% of their graduates are deficient in programming or algorithms and 78% of them falter in English.

Although there are more children in school, they are now learning less. As per Annual Survey of Education 2011, only 48% of class V children are able to read a class II text, and less than 30% of those in class III can do a 2-digit sum. Some 1.25 crore students come to the job market every year who have no skills. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is at pains to lament, “education in India is in peril”.

Mere enunciation of rights to education can be no solution. Andre Beteille termed the UPA move as “the Marie Antoinette Solution” – “they don’t have schools, so give them rights…” India’s high growth potential is largely predicated by its assumed demographic dividend.

This very demography appears likely to end up as the Achilles’ heel and worse, with country’s youth remaining inadequately educated and trained. There is serious dearth of employable technicians – plumbers, carpenters, electricians. India’s 1.4 million schools are in need of 4 million new teachers and 8 million more to be retrained.

Like education, health too has been a sad story. As many as 130 million of Indians have no access to basic health care; as Census 2011 shows, half of country’s population defecate in the open; 20% of households have to travel more than half a km for drinking water; more than two-thirds of houses (87% rural, 26% urban) use firewood, crop residue, cow dung, coal.

The number of physicians per 1,000 population for the world is 1.5, for India it is 0.6; the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population in India is 0.9, much lower than the world average of 3.3. Almost 2 million children die in India before reaching their first birth day.

The country boasts of more than 30 million tonne of grains stacked, some of which in open for want of warehouses; yet 40% of its children are underweight and 70% anemic. According to a WHO 2000 estimate, of the annual 529,000 maternal deaths globally, 136,000 or about 26% of them occur in India.

Although some pockets of the country have experienced material gains, and people now live longer, no fewer than 37.5% of countrymen are reported to remain malnourished, 41.6% of them subsisting on less than $ 1.25/day (The World Development Report, 2012).

While, on one hand, the Global Hunger Index 2007 by International Food Policy Research Institute ranked India 96th among 119 countries, well below all its neighbors except Bangladesh, on the other hand, it imported 1,100 tonne of gold last year, valued at Rs 3.5 lakh crore.

When the wide world around said India had all the basic wherewithal of an emerging global economic powerhouse, we started behaving as if we were already there. The Pew Research Centre survey of 21 major economies just conducted has revealed how Indians have had their optimism faded, how they have lost faith in the Indian economy and its future. Along with a dysfunctional Parliament, country’s polity is mired in sleaze; a bumper crop of robber barons mulct the national wealth.

Albeit a vibrant democracy it claims to be, India remains torn by language, region, caste, religion, no less than by pockets of wealth. We took pride in the steel frame of governance we had; today, it is left to be a creaking bamboo frame.

Symptomatic of a major myth, some erudite commentators have found in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson a facile belief that India would ultimately outpace China by dint of its inclusive political institutions, China being pulled back, as they perceive, because of its extractive political institutions.

This pervasive myth of the delusion of democracy, as in effect it is practiced in India, engenders only derision. More and more of us keep striving to become more equal than others. Money and muscle rule the roost. An Election Commission analysis revealed that no less than 40 among Hon’ble MP’s and 700 MLAs among the legislators had suffered criminal indictment.

India lays great stores by the world’s largest democracy it is with constitutional freedom of expression, yet it has no qualms in slapping a young cartoonist with a incredible charge of sedition.

India’s parliamentarians, notwithstanding their hysterical avowals of its sovereignty, meddle in the minutiae of deciding which textbooks will have what text or which cartoons, exposing the hollowness of our democracy. With more than 30 million cases pending in courts, up to 26 years old, it takes an average of 17 years to get a judicial decision.

What better embodiment of our enduring myths than Delhi being touted as world’s “most beautiful city”, or Mumbai outshining Shanghai, or, better still, Kolkata soon transforming, Mamata di-style, into “better than London”!

We generally like to believe nice things about ourselves – a kind of collective mythomania. We fancy ourselves as a tolerant society and yet we have cases like Rushdie, Taslima, M F Hussain, et al. We hold the teaching profession in reverence, yet we kill a teacher who says no to cheating.

We similarly give our parents a pedestal just short of godhead but countless cases occur of old parents being dispossessed, cheated, even murdered in property disputes.

We respect womanhood as nothing short of devi or Mother (yatra naryastu pujyante, ramante tatra devata) but cases of rape and other crimes against women, shameful treatment of girl child (in embryo and after birth) and the fact that no woman considers herself safe after dark in the capital of India show that this is the biggest myth of all.

We believe in welcoming tourists and visitors to our country (atithi devo bhava) but few such guests would ever revisit after the harrowing time we give them.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Tasher Desh has a message wherein citizens, who had lost their vitality and elan, and their capacity to respond to the rhythm of life, were played a magic flute whereupon their vitality flowed back. Some similar transformation India needs, a leader to play that magic flute, to turn some myths into reality.

Killer Bug at NIH Hospital

Frightening story.

Damn, that’s scary as Hell. At the National Institute of Health‘s hospital? Yow.

Uncle Saddam (2000)

Pretty poorly done movie that is probably nevertheless one of the best movies ever done about Saddam Hussein and his sick, screwed up family. The same sort of epic corruption and horrific abuse of power was seen with Ben Ali in Tunisia, Gaddafi in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt, though Saddam was more murderous than all of them.

I do think that Saddam tried to take care of his people pretty well at the end of the day, but that’s down to his philosophy of Baath socialism more than anything else.

The hospitals were ruined and the people impoverished mostly due to the UN sanctions. The sanctions killed at least 1.5 million Iraqis, mostly via untreated water. The parts to fix the water treatment system were deliberately denied by the US and UK crackers on the UN committee. The only possible reason apparently was to slaughter as many Iraqis as possible.

In addition, imports of most medical treatment was denied under “dual use” rules which were horribly abused by the US and UK. Turns out he already got rid of all of his WMD’s anyway. The sanctions were to make him get rid of his WMD’s, and he already got rid of them long ago. Then followed the fake inspections, the fake lies about the WMD’s cooked up by the imperialist worms in the US and UK and Zionist dogs in Israel.

After that, the fake war, the criminal, Nazi like war of aggression against the Iraqi people launched by the imperialist dog Bush.

Saddam was the scum of the Earth, but things are way worse with him gone. The war was nothing but a colonialist war of aggression. In true colonialist fashion, the Anglo imperialists and their mostly White lackeys attempted to take over the Iraqi economy and siphon most of the wealth out of the country under the flag or “free market capitalism.”

Up to $9 Billion was simply flat out stolen from the Iraqi people’s oil revenues. The theft was accomplished in plain site, and the imperialist US media simply refused to report on it.

In addition, much of the Iraqi people’s property was stolen at the beginning of the invasion right under the approving eyes of the Anglo imperialist dogs. A lot of it was shipped straight to Kuwait as revenge war booty. Anglos aren’t the only thieving colonialist criminals in the area, and the Arab mind is primitive and brutal, unwashed with modernist and civilizing pretensions.

Nevertheless, that’s no excuse for outdated colonial wars of aggression and thievery. It’s shameful that most Americans are not sickened by the criminal conduct of their state in that war. The only conclusion is that apparently most Americans are simply down with US imperialism and neocolonialism.

Thank God for the Iraqi resistance, horrific though they were, for driving the imperialist conquering army out of the land.

Regarding Western colonial/imperial invasions and conquests, along similar lines, after the Western imperialist conquest of Libya, the Western criminals, who had frozen most of the Libyan people’s money in their banks, apparently just flat out stole hundreds of billions of the Libyan people’s money.

War under capitalism is always about the booty, the loot. Just forget everything else. All the rest is jingoistic bull and political lies, but the yahoos fall for it every time.

OSHA Saves Lives

As you can see, OSHA saves lives. Lots and lots of lives. As the OSHA budget rises, more and more lives are saved.

As you can see, the more money OSHA spends, the more workers’ lives are saved. The Republican Party is determined to cut or eliminate OSHA. There’s nothing that businessmen and the Republicans hate more than that agency. They have vowed to cut it or eliminate it if they get into office. All that will do is kill workers, lots of workers. But that’s what the Republican Party is all about, killing and hurting workers. When you vote Republican, you vote to kill and hurt workers. Think about it.

Source for Stalin’s Death Toll

Here.

For a more academic source that Sousa’s essay is based on, see Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years:A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence by J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Ritterspoon and Viktor N. Zemskov.

I am really getting tired of endlessly answering these questions to people who are not familiar with the literature. Note: I am not insulting those of you who have not heard of the revisionist studies, as the revisionist tolls on Stalin have never been disseminated by the “free press” (LOL!) in the West, so of course no one has heard of any of this stuff.

Peacetime figures for political deaths in the USSR 1921-1953 are:

Executions:             900,000
Deaths in the gulag:    300,000
Dekulakization Ukraine: 390,000

Totals: 1.59 million

Granted this does not include their fake deliberate famine (5.4 million) or the deaths during WW2. It’s open to debate whether to include such things or not.

The source is J. Arch Getty and various Russian scholars. The KGB archives were opened up by Gorbachev in 1990 and the millions of pages were pored over by scholars from the world over. The killers wrote down everything. Google J. Arch Getty for more.

The debate has continued to be conducted in academic journals since then, and the Conquest liars have stuck to their guns. The debate gets complicated, and I am not privy to all the details. Bottom line is that Conquest is saying that Commies lie all the time, so why should we believe the KGB archives, since obviously the KGB lied in their own archives?

Feel free to dip into it if you wish. I gave up after a bit and am just siding with Getty and rest. It may be some time before this is all sorted out. There are clearly some overheated emotions, at least on one side anyway.

The figures do not include:

WW2 minority transfers:    300,000+
Executions during WW2:     ~100,000+
Gulag criminal deaths:     900,000

Totals: 1.3 million

Even if you include those deaths, the figure only goes to 2.9 million. That’s a far cry from 20-110 million.

So many people have been fed the Conquest fertilizer for so many years that they can’t help but believe it, and they refuse to believe that the US government and the World Press lied to them for so many decades. People don’t like to hear that they got lied to.

References

Getty, J. Arch, Ritterspoon, Gabor T. and Zemskov, Viktor N. 1993. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence American Historical Review 98:4, 1048-49.

A Debate About Communism and Capitalism

Steve wrote:

‘The system is already killing at least 4 million and probably a lot more anyway.’ [citation needed] ???

‘Communist countries have done great things as far as feeding and housing people, giving them basic education and health care and putting in essential sanitation. India has failed at all of these things, mostly because they haven’t even tried.’

North Korea- questionable on health care and food sufficiency.

Cuba- I don’t know much about Cuba, but the life expectancy is slightly higher than the US and people are well fed, so it must be doing something right.

U.S.S.R.- sure it achieved those things but it was poor, and they only managed the basics. Compare it to the western half of Europe.

China- I might address that on the other post.

In any case, supposing you have a generally good point, I’d still say so what? Capitalist countries have achieved those things too. Europeans achieved all those things on both sides of the divide. The question is would a Communist government achieve them in India? India is not Europe or North East Asia. It is a tropical, caste ridden country with rampant corruption.

Oh…watch the bodies pile up as they try to stamp out caste.

‘As they became more capitalist, they became much more corrupt.’

Really? I don’t know how you would measure it or prove that but I don’t think it is controversial to say that there was plenty of corruption in Soviet Union. And do you think Indian officials/politicians/police will stop being corrupt because they are communist? Really?

“There won’t be any “economic development that will eventually lift millions of out poverty.” It’s not going to happen under neoliberalism.

Don’t you ever get tired of neoliberals telling us to wait around for the “economic development that will eventually lift millions of out poverty?” Don’t you realize that under neoliberal capitalism reduction of poverty is a goal that has zero value, and I do mean zero value.”

Economic growth is already happening in India. The economy will keep growing, as long as there isn’t a big war or global financial collapse or something. As the economy grows, the small middle class will grow and per capita incomes will rise generally.

Incomes are already higher than in sub Saharan Africa. (The malnutrition is a separate problem related to Indian culture.) Income inequality is less in India than in China or America. Why won’t the economy keep growing?

Maybe poverty reduction has no intrinsic value in capitalism but it happens anyway. It can anyway. If you are practical, the question is what will work?

Compare North Korea to South Korea, Eastern Europe to Western Europe. And look at the Chinese economic growth in the past 30 years. It has been meteoric. The fastest industrial revolution in history.

I only have to look at my own country and think of it 100 or 200 years ago. There was widespread poverty and squalor. People lived with terrible hardship. How did it get from that to this? This being high levels of development and widespread material wealth and comfort, probably unimaginable to my great great grand parents. Capitalism.

Capitalism is better for economic development, or at least a strong element of capitalism. I’m not advocating libertarianism or neoliberalism. The public sector (in health care and education for example) and government regulations (like minimum wage, working hours etc) are important and have been important to my country.

Capitalism must be harnessed. And poor countries must not be forced into structural adjustment policies. When capitalism is harnessed, it is more effective at providing economic growth and development than Communism, as it was in the 20th century. Let people get on with enterprising and they will produce growth. How big the public sector should be and what it should encompass is open for debate.

If the USSR is so poor and capitalism is so much better for Russia, why have only two republics recently surpassed the USSR in per capita income. Agricultural production is still far below the USSR. If capitalism is so much better for Russia, then why did the USSR produce more crops than Russia does now?

The problem is you are comparing socialism to socialism. They haven’t had pure capitalism is Western Europe for many decades. You are comparing state socialism of the USSR with social democracy in Europe. They are both socialism – just different kinds.

One would think that if a tropical country like China or Cuba could do great things, why wouldn’t India? India can’t even provide the basics for its people. I don’t give a flying fuck about “economic growth.” The capitalists have been saying sit back and watch the economic growth as the rising tide lifts all boats in trickle down, supply side economics forever now.

The 3rd World has always been pure capitalist or colonialist, which was a form of mercantilism. When is it supposed to start working? When is capitalism in the 3rd World supposed to start working so this rising tide can lift all boats and raise everyone out of poverty? It hasn’t happened, and a lot of us are getting tired of waiting around. Poverty in the capitalist 3rd World is horrific, and capitalism has utterly failed to alleviate the problem in any way, shape or form.

Yes, corruption skyrocketed as China, the CIS and Eastern Europe went to capitalism, and no, there was not a lot of corruption in the USSR or Eastern Europe compared to now. There is always vastly more corruption in a capitalist society than in a Communist one, and always far more crime too. Capitalism causes incredible amounts of crime and corruption.

Neoliberalism only benefits the top 20% of society and it actually harms the bottom 80%. This has been proven the world over in neoliberal experiments for the past 30 years. It worked the same way in the US. It’s just class war and all neoliberalism ever does is cause mass wealth redistribution from the bottom 80% to the top 20%.

Why is this economic growth acceptable in China? Millions of people are dying every year in China from lack of health care. That wasn’t happening under Mao. Why is this ok? Why was it ok to shut down hundreds of thousands of schools. You realize that the privatization of health care and mass shutdown of schools all over China was part of Deng’s project that you are now cheering on? Why is that ok? Was it ok to do that just to get some “economic growth?”

You know what? Fuck economic growth. If you have to kill millions every year and shut down hundreds of thousands of schools so tens of millions of children don’t even get a primary school education, why is that worth it? I say it’s not worth it!

That so many live so well in the UK now is testament to social democracy. And keep in mind that the UK was a very socialist place until recently. The state even ran mines and all sorts of “commanding heights of the economy” type things.

You argue for capitalism, but all over the world, the capitalists are all 100% behind forcing poor countries (and even rich countries like Ireland and Greece) into structural adjustment policies. Who are the only people opposing structural adjustment? Only us socialists! And increasingly, it is only us on the Hard Left, and so many social democrats in Europe now are pushing structural adjustment.

The problem is that the only people who are advocating that capitalism should be harnessed in any whatsoever area us socialists. Almost all capitalists agree that capitalism should not be harnessed in any way whatsoever. Capitalists are all radical neoliberal, neoclassical Libertarians. Almost all of them are. They all oppose regulation in any way, shape or form, and they always will. That’s why capitalism is unreformable.

Anyway, hardly anyone on the Left is advocating USSR style Communism anymore anyway.