Lame jokes can be presented in a funny way. Delivery is important. My favorite method is “matter of fact” like I am telling a normal story about usual things. Catches the recipient off-guard and the joke lands much more betterer.
That’s the joke though. He makes the ridiculous claim that he has a taking cat. She’s skeptical. She sees evidence to make her think the guy is a fraud. SURPRISE, it’s a real talking cat. That’s the twist.
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.
Capitalism instead made food absurdly abundant and gave everyone air conditioned boxes.
Edit: to address all of the nonsense responses below all at once: China’s embrace of capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
Capitalism didn’t give us shit. We had to trade 1/3 of our lives for that “abundance”. Don’t make money because you’re disabled? Doesn’t seem so abundant anymore. Also, growing food isn’t a byproduct of capitalism. The agricultural revolution began before capitalism existed. Imagine how much better your life would be if you didn’t parrot ruling class talking points. You aren’t ruling class so stop LARPing as a member of it.
Noobish kdr. Max 10 millions deaths, somewhere between a French general during WWI (not counting German casualties) and minor paranoid dictators. Too much time larping as a psychopathic torturer, not enough time getting the job done. Mao killed several million people on a good mood, that’s professionalism.
While it has proven difficult to accurately estimate the pre-colonial population and the amount by which it changed under the Congo Free State, estimates for the Congolese population decline during Leopold’s rule range from 1 million to 15 million.
Can definitely blame them… Several of the famines in their ‘empire’ were either engineered, caused through incompetence or arrogance, or ignored when preventable.
Ref: Any of bengal’s several famines under British rule, frankly even after once you take Churchill into account.
It is like miles away from the intentional economical engineering we are talking about. Still not sure why you are so bent on trying to wiggle them into a comparsion between regimes and personnel more direct, intentional and immediate like Mao or Stalin.
If you dont distinguish from those, then why even have a debate on them?
The joke implied that the question intended to ask one or very few directly involved personnel and you disregarded that. Thats it.
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food,[1][2] caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies.
Hey, i hate the british too, but the article doesn’t directly blame the british for the famines and it also includes famines that took place in non-british held or administrated territories.
Nevertheless, it does point out that in many cases, british administration worsened the situation.
It also just one territory, I’m sure the Irish also have a few bones to pick.
Though speaking of time advantage, the best answer might be “mosquitos”, and while “blood sucking insects” could be a name for british colonists, they didn’t spread malaria since the dawn of humanity
I get the joke but I still expected some tankies to show up. But then again, OP is on lemmy.world which is defederated with the tankie instances so that’s why
How about Bill Gates? His control of intellectual property law allowed him to almost personally stop the global south from manufacturing their own COVID vaccines and instead have to purchase them from the west. Bill Gates is answerable to millions of deaths. He’s one of the most evil people alive but you get weird looks saying so. He’s one of the top 5 richest people in the world and has spent the last two decades doing PR.
The question does not require a single name, it said who, which can be answered with a list of people or groups of people. Eg. Who did I make love to last night? A: Your parents!
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