That’s pretty fucked in the head, fam, even if these lists love blaming single communists but it when it comes time to talk about the death tolls of WW1 and 2 it’s always a shared responsibility and contextual.
What else would it be? I don’t see how one could blame WW1 on a single person. Though I would say most of WW2 could be blamed on a single person, if you really feel like it.
The common narrative of WW1 is that it indeed was started by a single person. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand which most people agree was the inciting incident that caused WW1.
I think it would be quite reductive to just blame the assassin. Sure, he was the one that created the spark that ignited the conflict, but it had been brewing for years, and we can’t ignore the roles the heads of states were playing in starting the war.
And Mao personally executed 40 million people, huh? There wasn’t an entire ecosystem of officials fabricating reports at every level? His head of state security gets no credit for making everyone afraid to tell the truth?
Hell, the obnoxious thing about it is all it really does it blame the wrong single communist, people go on about the sparrows but Lysenkoism had destroyed crop yields before they got exterminated.
So, yes, it is as absurd to blame Mao entirely for The Great Leap Forward as it is to blame a Serbian assassin for WW1. There were cultural considerations, treaties, idiot officials, an agricultural policy built almost entirely on fraud, etc etc.
The most devastating thing about the Great Leap Forward is that the famine was entirely preventable if people weren’t afraid to tell the truth, and that simply isn’t a situation that can be built by one person.
Hell, there were good crops left to rot because the workers had left for the industrialization projects in the cities. Do you think Mao personally said “fuck that rice, go build some tractors?”
Everything is contextual. Hell the plan the assassins had was exactly to provoke a war. They might not have thought it would get as big as it did, they just wanted a civil war for independence, but if intentions don’t matter, and they must not for this discussion because the intention of The Great Leap Forward wasn’t to starve people.
The funny thing with The Black Hand’s plan is, it worked. Serbia didn’t just get independence, it became the primary power of Yugoslavia when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved.
You could quit doom scrolling and learn that the vast majority of everything is and WILL be fixed given a long enough timeline. Humanity has proven over and over that the vast majority of us are good people just wanting to live our lives happily. There are always great people doing great things behind the scenes that never generate as many clicks as OMG KILLINGS OMG THREATEN NUKES OMG OTHERS!
Lets start you off with the easy recommendation. Kurzgesagt Overpopulation and how it’s bullshit:
Lol, I’m a Science+Tech nerd. I also watch Kurzgesagt and some other science and math related channels, like Sciencephile AI, Vsauce, Veritasium, 3brown1blue, Science Click and so on.
I disagree that you should believe everything will be fixed given enough time. I don’t believe doomerism is the correct response either, but I fear that believing things will just work out makes it easy to ignore problems.
I agree with you on that but believing everything will magically work out is rejecting reality to me. Clearly had things happen. Just because they get fixed doesn’t mean they’re weren’t still bad. Wars and genocides kill so many people. Just because the “good guys” might win eventually doesn’t mean nothing bad happened. It doesn’t mean we should just relax about shit.
It sounds like you’re just needlessly fearful to me. What you’re saying has nothing to do with optimism and trust in the innate good nature of humanity to plod along despite all the shit it throws at itself.
I think my top comment in this chain was pretty clear. I’m saying that the belief that everything will work itself out leads to personal inaction. I believe it leads to complacency and that leads to more bad things happening.
I don’t even need to believe it’s the opposite, it’s scientifically sound.
Optimism does FAR MORE than doomerism. Doomerism leads to complacency, and there’s been numerous studies that back up Learned Helplessness. You believe doomerism begets action, when it’s the opposite.
Learned helplessness is literally a political propaganda tactic used by large nations against the west specifically due to it’s innate properties. The more likely you are to believe something is inevitable, the less likely someone does something about it. This isn’t the Bystander Effect lmfao.
Learned Optimism has significant health, familial, and societal benefits. Conscious gratitude, thankfulness, and other similar positive coping mechanisms that were borne from CBT are being used in every profession where you see the worst of humanity on a daily basis.
I’m not advocating for doomerism, sorry if that was unclear! I agree with you on that! Doomerism is awful as well, and like you said, much worse than optimism! All I’m saying is that it’s dangerous to believe things will work out without your involvement. I think it can be like a bystander effect on a global scale, you know?
I do get what you’re saying, but the Bystander Effect doesn’t even work at those scales of economy. Not only that but the Bystander Effect is a very learned cultural phenomena. It even mentions as much in the article you linked. Sorry if you didn’t catch my edits ex posto facto since I was sourcing after but I did end up mentioning it in anticipation of that rebuttal when editing lol.
The root difference here isn’t the finer details though. It’s probably going to end up in an agree to disagree sentiment.
I firmly and vehemently deny that trusting in the goodness of humanity to work on and solve issues that many people don’t even think about isn’t rejecting reality.
You believe it is. It’s literally just the difference between a jaded cynic and a hopeful optimist. Behind every jaded cynic there usually was the later. I just hope you get there again and do see the beauty in the world around you and have faith in your fellows while knowing ALMOST EVERYONE is doing their small part. Some much larger than others.
Generally the people who don’t help were never going to anyway. I believe that’s a fools errand that requires far more effort than any benefit gained from it.
It’s very important for one’s mental health to remember that everything humans do is fleeting and ultimately unimportant on a long enough time scale. The idea of meeting accomplishment metrics society imposes is just a manipulation to get you to do stuff you otherwise wouldn’t to benefit people that have never and will never care about you. You’ll only find fleeting, shallow, false purpose falling into the trap of chasing their approval.
Find connections that give you bliss if you can, beyond that, to hell with not meeting the standards of the sociopaths in charge. Dictate your own purpose, and don’t fill it with unnecessary pressure.
Disagree, you can have your own sense of purpose through which you derive value within a framework of acknowledging how much impact you have comparatively.
This reminds me of something that the people that diagnosed me with adhd said that boiled down to me supposedly dropping hobbies and interests that I am not immediately good at. I felt like a lot of unfair assumptions were made about why things do or do not interest me.
Like… I am a chemist. It took 15 years to obtain my degree. And because of indecisiveness, I also have very nearly enough credits in biochem and physics to have two more degrees on top of that. Some of my hobbies: running molecular structure optimization calculations using multiple computational chemistry software suites, learning programming to be able to mod video games, designing meal plans from scratch using a spreadsheet that tracks 30+ food nutritional and other parameters for hundreds of foods (vetted by a dietician and was in part responsible for stabilizing my mother’s kidney failure and helping me lose 70+ pounds) The idea that I apparently dont have my own preferences that outweigh the difficulty of hobbies seems laughable to me given that.
I failed out of college once and almost twice before completing my degree 15 years after I started. I was diagnosed in my final semester. So not so much functional as incredibly stubborn.
I once found a wounded pidgeon on my balcony, I guess it flew against the window. I nurtured it back to health. Over a period of a month or so, I kept it in a cage and hand fed it, but eventually it grew restless and it was time to let it go. As soon as I opened the cage, that horny bastard flew into the nearest tree, jumped on another pidgeon and made the tree shake.
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