>>98634607>The guy was saying something Stalin said. I can't speak russian, and it's an anecdote of an anecdote by a guy that didn't like stalin and probably wanted the cold war to end.
>I'm sorry for telling you communists supported capitalism.they didn't
>All of those things have been improving in capitalist societies.You've been eating up neoliberal positive propaganda, look at the image you posted. $1,9 a day is the poverty line. A flat, unbending average of national poverty lines from the world’s poorest countries, the IPL sits far below the national poverty lines of many different countries. Using the IPL, Thailand has a 0 percent poverty rate; under its national line, that number is 9.9 percent. Even starker disparities can be found in countries like South Africa (18.9 percent vs. 55 percent), Mexico (1.7 percent vs. 41.9 percent), and, of course, the United States (1.2 percent vs. 12.7 percent).
>“The IPL is explicitly designed to reflect a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” writes Alston. “Under the measure, one can ‘escape’ from poverty without an income anywhere near that required to achieve an adequate standard of living, including access to healthcare and education.”Besides this, the IPL flattens and even erases a host of other inequities within this astonishing inequality, including glaring gender disparities and the hundreds of millions of people who are homeless, refugees, migrant workers, and other groups who disproportionately feel the sting of poverty.
There is nothing inherently wrong with optimism. Despair is, after all, often the cousin of inaction and surrender. But the style of optimism pushed by thinkers like Pinker is designed to lead to these exact same ends, assuring people they needn’t struggle or even worry because things are inexorably on the right track.
