If you were to approach this question with intellectual honesty, you would identify pretty quickly that there are far better ways to try to answer it.

Case-control methods, natural experiments, surveys of criminals, and meta-analyses of the prior.

Literally any method other than "pick 600 year period and say 'vibes shifted generally across a continent and then homicide went down'"

Of course this question has been studied extensively for decades and the current conclusion is: completely inconclusive!

There's some evidence it increases violent crime, some that it decreases it, most evidence doesn't clearly show any effect at all.

So whatever effect it may have, it almost certainly isn't very strong, or is countervailed by opposing effects.

I think that if we're proposing the State, which we know to be fallible in so many cases, should make irreversible decisions like "executing suspected bad guys" more frequently, then we should have extremely strong evidence that it would actually achieve the desired result.

> It's also at least quasi-testable; someone could fund a study on examining alleles associated with aggression in historical remains.

Good luck establishing how "alleles associated with aggression" contributes to violence. I'm pretty sure most of the people who adopt your position would argue that their "aggressiveness" is a virtue in whatever competitive landscape they choose to occupy.

It's rather difficult to tell. Your comments read as bad-faith and have been flagged as such.

s/know/nor/, plausible phone typo.

[flagged]

Who is Lonsdale referring to as the "good guys"?

(It's one thing to ask people to be fair in responding to your actual comment and not a strawman. It's another to ask us to pretend we were born yesterday. We do in fact have external sources of information about Lonsdale's political allegiences.)

What good being defended from evil were you alluding to, and who is mounting that defense?

There are many documented links with Peter Thiel, the much more influential founder of Palantir. Epstein and Maxwell had their hands all over the Silicon Valley spooktech sector of which Palantir is an integral part.

Hasn't Palantir been gathering and storing data on U.S. citizens since the earliest days of the company?

Presumably in a communist party meeting.

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I’m not sure why this is flagged, it’s fairly easily verifiable.

So you think it's ok to kill people who have not killed hundreds of millions because those who did and the former people are both labeled as communists? That's not just insanely inhumane and against basic principles of law but also just illogical.

That is authoritarianism. Indeed, you have a valid point, except that communism in fact only is an economic theory and does not implicate anything on other areas of government. There is no difference between a capitalist authoritarian and a communist authoritarian except that a communist actually has a story (i.e. a fairy-tale) to sell to their people.

The problem isn't the "commun" but rather the "ism" - the elevation of a set of beliefs above individual human lives, and then consequently people leveraging that belief system to justify overt harm to other humans (justify to others and to themselves). Given that "communism" has very little relevance in the modern western world, yet a few other "isms" have been widely adopted to the totalitarian levels "communism" had been, the reasonable suspicion is to judge anybody still bashing "communism" as doing so with the motivation of pushing their own "ism".

they just misinterpreted Marx! if we try again this time it will work

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I'm not really inclined to do too much Monday morning quarterbacking of the USSR's defeat of Nazi Germany. I'm especially not inclined to give it the time of day when it's coming from Westerners who never say a peep about their own countries having given Hitler territory and financing.

where is that popular, and what is a proletariat?

true communism has no concept of "The State", what you are describing is authoritarian socialism.

or you let them be hermits that they are. No need to murder people. If they don't fit in with the collectivism then they are shunned from society. Much like social media.

It's important to remember the Anti-Comintern Pact started as an anti-communist agreement between Germany and Japan. Look what that did.

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Now we’re talking…

I'd like to see that argument. Russia pre-WWII and Mao's China don't seem to me to have much capitalist pressure against them, yet Stalin and Mao killed millions. Stalin's purges were internal, against people who were on his bad side. Now, you could say that maybe Western spies agitated, but there's no way that Western agitation would account for millions of people. Furthermore, in 1930, the Communist system was widely seen as successful, since initial food production in the USSR was strongly up. Mao's deaths were incompetence (famine: killing sparrows, resulting in sparrows not eating insects the next year; famine: misallocation of resources, causing starvation in Sichuan when enough food existed elsewhere; Cultural Revolution: Mao's reaction to losing his grip on power). I think China was so poor that it realistically did not interact with the rest of the world, but in WWII, the US actually helped the Communists.

Every other Communist state that I am aware of also killed millions in internal purges: Cambodia and N. Korea, notably. I'm actually not sure what happened with Vietnam and Cuba. I'm not sure if contemporary Venezuela counts as Communist, but I am under the impression that there was killing or at least persecution of internal political enemies. I don't see how US sanctions have anything to do with how one treats political enemies.

I guess Eastern Europe might be an exception, but I think that is because Communist states were imposed with external force, not revolution from within, and the population mostly capitulated. However, I believe that political opposition was still likely to be deadly.

Since Communist states seem to be highly correlated with killing internal enemies, it seems like a feature of the system, not a response to external pressure, particularly since the largest two did not have serious external pressure at the time.

Hasn't Xi lifted more people out of poverty than anyone else in the last century?