but we're not currently at Iranian levels
Have you considered that might have to do with Iranian geography? Like, surely you understand that it rains more in Paris than In Tehran?
Also, if water management is your metric for government success, do you give your allegiance to the Communist Party of China for it's anti-desertification campaign in the Gobi desert?
The source for the half a million (actually 560k a year) comes from this recent study in The Lancet medical journal. It takes into account 50 years of sanction policy and arrives to that figure of murders, yearly, since 1971.
Good on you for questioning the sources, I love seeing people critical of online figures.
Because water problems are famously well managed by which government? I'm a Spaniard, and I can tell you that our glorious European democracy™ has golf fields in Castilla La Mancha, and farmers in the vicinity of the Doñana natural park are draining the groundwaters to the point of destruction of the ecosystem.
Are people in Spain rioting due to the mismanagement of water? No. Would people riot if our currency suffered an enormous devaluation and suddenly we couldn't import basic products? Absolutely.
Edit: as short as 4 months ago, the user above was referring to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians as "the Israel-Palestine conflict". They have posts complaining about leftism on Lemmy, praising the Cybertrucks and Teslas, and edgelording AI. Also, their posting and commenting hours suggest timezones in the continent of America, contrary to their claim of being Iraqi.
The main problem in Iran and the reason why protests broke out last months is simply US + EU sanctions. The Iranian currency imploded over the past months and drove many people to desperation, the current exchange rate is like 1.5mn to 1USD, and this is unequivocally the fault of the US + EU. However bad their regime, US+EU sanctions murder HALF A MILLION PEOPLE YEARLY in the world, the death burden of these sanctions is astronomically higher than anything you can ascribe to the Iranian government. The literal, EXPLICIT POLICY of sanctions is, and I quote official US documents: "to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government".
Iran could have been a secular socialist democracy as Iranians democratically decided in the previous century under the government of Mosaddeq, but UK+USA conspired to bring the government down and brought back monarchy. The Iranian government is literally the fault of the Anglos. Stop doing atrocity propaganda for the US empire on the fucking verge of an invasion. And there are plenty of Iraqi who wholeheartedly condemn the invasion of Iraq even if it brought down the government of Saddam, because what followed was orders of magnitude worse. An example is Hakim on YouTube.
In this comment section: members of the Zionist instance with social credit score complain about "authoritarianism"
Punching a Nazi should always be determined in self-defense.
Cool stuff, great that you can do that
Do you think there are no consequences of creating more currency?
I didnt say "create unlimited money", I said "states have unlimited potential for expenditure in self-denominated currency, and so taxation is not a way of paying for things". Creating more public deficit has many consequences, both positive and negative depending on where and how this money is invested, but the response to this should be done by economic simulation, not by hard rules and guesswork as we do in most capitalist countries.
How much space should the housing have? How... [...] of these questions are fundamentally decentralized in nature
Yes. But first, most people in capitalism do not get the housing they we want where we want it with the services we want it etc, we get housing where we can find and afford it, so capitalism is clearly not a solution to those questions or to decentralization. Chaos is not sinonym with decentralized decision making. Second, socialism has the highest potential for decentralized economic and urban planning. It seems to me that you believe socialism is when the government does things autonomously, but socialism is actually based on grassroots movements and decisions, and cybernetic decentralized planning could easily, massively improve what we have now. Even the old and outdated soviet model is an improvement: everyone could afford housing, which is much more important than rich people having the power to decide how many square meters they get.
Where do people get allocated? Who chooses who gets to have what housing and where?
Any form of decision would be desirable to the current allocation method: chaos based on wealth. An example would be union-owned housing such as the USSR, in which workers got to enjoy housing generally in close proximity to their workplace. Another example would be region-based lotteries with preference for local workers and local inhabitants. Almost anything would be a more fair allocation method than "poor people get fucked over".
We don't need to fund anything with taxes, that's outdated classic economics. Modern monetary theory has proven otherwise. We don't need taxes to fund things, states can create unlimited amounts of currency, the whole "this is funded by taxes" is simply not true. Taxes work primarily for three purposes: removing money from the economy to prevent inflation, imposing obligations denominated in a certain currency to enforce usage of said currency, and discouraging certain behaviors.
If the whole point of taxing is not to pay for anything, and the whole reason is simply to disincentivize landlordism, georgism simply offers no advantages over collective land ownership and public decisions over land usage. Wanna build housing? Build it. Wanna build schools? Build them. Wanna have a park? Have it. The obsession with taxation is outdated once we've found out that taxes aren't paying for anything and we can have arbitrary amounts of currency created with the purpose of funding whatever projects we collectively decide. In this manner, Georgism is obsolete.
replaced it with state landlordism and political allocation which equally involves rent seeking behavior
False. Housing in the Soviet Union was rented at maintenance cost prices, and on average costed 3% of the monthly income. This is not rent-seeking behaviour.
In both Soviet Union and China land was collectivized, which removed incentives for land use, agricultural output fell and a famine followed
Terrible analysis. The 1930-1933 Soviet famine was caused by economic and productive disadjusting due to the need for extremely fast industrialization, combined with drought and retaliation by landlords. After the initial drive for industrialization, agricultural output rose immensely due to usage of modern agricultural techniques and land reform, and hunger was actually eliminated. The big hunger episode in China was similarly not created by lack of incentive to cultivate the land, but by an ecological catastrophe caused by misguided anti-plague campaigns that eliminated a key part of the ecosystem in a time and society before ecological sciences were developed. Similarly, agricultural output rose rapidly after that and hunger was permanently eliminated. You can compare the exponential rises in life expectancy in the USSR and China after those episodes with similarly developed countries like Brazil or India respectively, and you'll find that this land reform and industrialization drive saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Scholars have argued this is because economists like John Bates Clark (foundational to the still dominant school of economics: the neoclassical school) was paid by landlord lobby to make “land, capital and labor” into “capital and labor”.
That's the biggest problem with Georgism. Policy is not something you can apply based on which one is ideologically better theoretically (which I don't even agree Georgism is), and Georgism, not doing any class analysis, doesn't provide answer to the most basic question: why would the landlords in power allow us to tax them? And if they don't, how do we force them?
Socialism having had mass movements and success in expropriating the land from landowners is not a coincidence: since Marx and Engels put forward scientific socialism and Lenin advanced the idea of the vanguard party and of revolutionary tactics, the only revolutions in the world have been socialist.
Number of socialist revolutions that eliminated landlordism: several
Number of georgist revolutions that eliminated landlordism: none
Seems to me like this is more of a socialist argument
So what do you do for a living that you should be offering to everyone else for free?
Teaching? Medicine? Those are services provided for free to the public. Why is housing, a literal human right that literally everyone needs, not provided either free or extremely subsidized?
Landlords aren't any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food
You're thinking of construction workers, the people sweating their asses to build the housing you inhabit, not the leeches between you and the housing that's already constructed.
It might be great if we could find a way to move to a post-capitalist world although I don't know what that would look like
How hard is "public rent either for free or for extremely low prices" to imagine?
But they aren't the only problem in a capitalist society
Agreed, they're part of capitalism, capitalist business owners are the other part of the problem
many of the individual ones are just people trying to get by
Housing shouldn't be allocated based on how lucky you are to get a good landlord or not, people shouldn't be at the mercy of landlords to enjoy decent housing. It should be a guaranteed right.
The landlord doesn't provide a place to live, they paywall it. The construction of housing provides places to live, landlordism only leeches off the poor classes who can't afford to buy housing.
Dbzero has Defederated from Feddit.org following its Governance post about the later's "Zionist Bar Problem"
Ukraine from 2014 to 2022 was shelling eastern Ukraine (majority Russian ethnic territories) without any Russian invasion because two regions declared independence. This is the part where Russia is claiming ethnic cleansing and it uses as casus belli. I don't believe the genocide accusations because not everything bad is a genocide. We can condemn the invasion without making up genocides.
Dbzero has Defederated from Feddit.org following its Governance post about the later's "Zionist Bar Problem"
I'm the bad faithed one? You don't engage with the fact that soviet-occupied "Poland" was actually Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, reduce the 10 years of collective security proposals under the Litvinov doctrine to "an agreement that was never gonna happen anyway", and you minimize the soviet war contributions in my own country against fascism 3 years before even WW2 started. You also completely ignore the fact that the English, French and Americans perfectly understood the Molotov Ribbentrop for what it was: buying time against Nazi invasion because they had been left alone by western Europe.
Answer this question: what would have happened to the "polish" territories invaded by the Soviets had it been the Nazis instead (only alternative possible). Then explain to me how that's desirable.
You're low effort in your response not because "I'm bad faith", you're low effort because you don't have shit to say to historical evidence contradicting your western-sponsored anticommunism.
I listed you the countries...
Huh, whaddyaknow, I thought not
Dbzero has Defederated from Feddit.org following its Governance post about the later's "Zionist Bar Problem"
Do you really think States under war have no reason to do atrocity propaganda? And you're mischaracterizing what I said, I denied similar accusations made by Russia
So, I'm a tankie user from Hexbear. db0 and hexbear are not federated because, to db0, tankies in hexbear are synonym with redfash and nazbol, and to hexbear, db0 are libs. Db0 democratically choosing to defed from feddit is something that positively surprised me and I wholeheartedly support.
"I consider it a government task. Yes, I'm making atrocity propaganda of the Iranian government during a US military buildup in the region just months after the country was bombed by the US. I am very progressive and totally not running Israeli propaganda by doing this"
How many comments do you have about water mismanagement by the Saudi government?
How many comments do you have supporting the Muamar El-Qaddafi government for carrying out one of the biggest civil infrastructure projects of the history of humanity (taking water from the great Nubian aquifer) to provide clean drinking water to its citizens, and how many times have you criticized the western intervention that murdered Qaddafi and left the infrastructure of the water supply crumbling?
Or maybe you don't give two shits about people having access to water in any Muslim majority country, and you just want to find reasons to criticize a government on the brink of being invaded by the US?