Oo, I can do you one better: Nobody knows how many jails there are! You’d think it would be an easy question, but no, jails aren’t a strongly defined thing - every mall, school, sporting venue and major industrial facility has a jail in it and often nobody is aware of that. Every prison has a jail, too, and pretty much every rural gas station has at one point served as a jail. Drug treatment programs, inpatient mental health, troubled youth education, all either count as jails or have jails attached.

The biggest issue in this subject is that people think of jails as a definite institution, when it’s a poorly definied broad categorical term that roughly means “place where a person can be detained without a LEO present”. The reason for this failure in reporting, besides systemic police incompetence, is that there’s no systems in place for reporting of this - nobody knows who to report this information to, nobody knows if they’re the person who should be reporting it, etc.

While there’s absolutely a component of pigs being pigs, the real issue is that we desperately need an overhaul to address the fundemental systemic gaps that go unnoticed. We don’t even know how much of this is “pigs being pigs” and how much is human error and how much is it not being anyone’s job to do this. It’s disgusting.

I’m only intimately familiar with the hospital reporting numbers and unfortunately I no longer know of a publicly available source on the side-effect incidence rate of in-hospital usage (for many depressingly obvious reasons, thank you Donald Trump). However benzos are extremely well documented as having diverse reactions, and the label is extremely clear that even low therapeutic doses see severely adverse psychological reactions at rates of around 1% in the population (delerium, hallucination, self-harm, etc.) (page 17). This is predictably exacerbated by being in a clinical setting and, coupled with a tendency for the side effects of benzos to have superlinear increases in severity as dosages go up, is a very worrying trend on it’s own.

It’s a disparity from my (admittedly reductive) 30% claim yes, but between the datasets I am basing that claim on getting purged and the shocking lack of independent public studies on the topic (wtf??) I’m at a bit of a loss to provide concrete sources for it being that high (how convenient for me…). From the data available though you can see it’s closer to 5% that has a “severe” psychological reaction outside a clinical setting, if you’d prefer to assume that number is correct and that I was exaggerating for effect I sure wouldn’t blame you. IMO that’s still unbelievably high for a medication that has a risk of becoming even more popular in recreational usage.

Man I wish I could do that one recreationally. Five hours of falling backwards through the spider dimension though, whoof. Just gets tedious after a while.

oh jesus, like 30% of people have a horrifyingly bad reaction to ativan. Like total psychosis + amnesia shit, I sure hope it doesn’t wind up being a popular drug because that is gonna be a -problem-

They’re non-harmful if you eat them, but they’re also not compostable and need to be removed before being disposed of.

I suspect the downvotes are more because you’re behaving like someone who gets downvoted and calls people “depressed illiterates” as a cope, rather than general unawareness of pedophila’s role as a vice of the powerful throughout history.

In case anyone is confused as to what OP is describing, here’s a vid that explains the method.

It’s not that straightforward - pinephones have varying results depening on carriers, Verizon is notorious for blacklisting them while most of the other major carriers are hit or miss on if you’ll get penalized.

I have a pine phone - they’re super neat because linux on a phone! but… not really usable yet. Not getting texts, random bugs (they fixed the one where you could only receive calls, not make them, but that took a year or more), incredibly laggy UI even just trying to navigate,the battery life is abysmal, the battery management hardware is lacking and the software is even worse, the UIs that exist are poorly supported, basic apps are decently represented but anything not built for mobile is going to be godawful to get working (esp. through something like waydroid), the UI stabbed my puppy, the devices are so underpowered you’re gonna be unable to do things like have two apps open at once or have a video playing in one tab while trying to navigate in another…

The pro phone has supposedly improved the hardware issues, but it’s new and niche enough that I haven’t seen much of a consens emerge (or hardly any in depth testing at all, really). Fairphone is much more usuable, still not without it’s glitches but much better than the pinephones.

I hate doing these quote-heavy replies but yeesh, please forgive my lack of narrative structure:

Now, why oh why does the Skull Famine not have relevancy on the political climate? That’s exactly my point.

Oh lookit, another version of what your point was. No, other famines aren’t depoliticized - they’re just not particularly relevant to modern discourse. That isn’t the same thing.

Just a small remark:

Hey look, documenting methodology! I heartily approve!

Funny to me that you hadn’t seen any of this before

What? It’s one paper in an obscure journal and another in a random magazine. Why would I have seen either of them before? Do you mean the discussion of this topic or… what?

Especially now that sensibilities with Ukraine are high, I wonder, why is it that similar studies but regarding the impact of capitalism in Ukraine aren’t constantly discussed? […] Given your original dismiss when I talked of drug abuse, organized crime, suicide rates, malnutrition and preventable disease, I doubt it.

Did you even read either of the papers you linked? Hell, even Cockshott’s pretty rough paper has a couple sections devoted to why this isn’t a straightforward conclusion, and things like drug abuse and alcoholism started prior to the dissolution of the soviet union as a result of policies like Khrushchev’s attempt to implement prohibition. Neoliberal ideas were pervasive sure, but it’s not like they were inflicted on the USSR by singularly outside forces - the post-stalin neoliberal movement was aggressively suppressed explicitly because of it’s popularity, which was due to a whole multitude of factors (doubtlessly the CIA fondly wishes to be included in that list) but the concepts absolutely were developed from within the country as well as from without.

Cool, but I addressed that already. I already gave you the Brazil example.

You made a completely unsupported claim, provided sources for an entirely unrelated claim, now you’re again attempting to assert that first claim is true without providing any sources while insisting the second claim matters. Come on man you said this was easy. Hell, one of your own previous sources provides an astoundingly solid explanation of why your position (that a doubling of life expectancy in the 30s is notable) is pretty spurious.

Comparative economics and demographic statistics can be correlated to pretty much anything, like you’re doing here. Without actual substance to back you up it’s meaningless. You can’t just wave the magic statistics wand, point at a single graph and then draw whatever conclusions you like and then hope to maintain any shred of credibility when you’re challenged and fail to have anything of substance to back up your claims.

Your point was that we don’t use big scary names taken from the native language for other famines like the ones that happened under british indian rule thus “Holodomor” must clearly be a politicized name. Except you were flat wrong and we totally do the exact thing you said we didn’t. Prior to that, your point was that Holodomor sounded like “Holocaust” so clearly it must be a politicized name. And then you were dead wrong, because despite it being obviously true that the two share a common lingusitic root, Holodomor was coined a good twenty years before “The Holocaust” happened, so it can’t have been a reference.

Now your point is that it must be a politicized name because it’s more talked about than a different famine, one which wasn’t ever punishable with death to be discussed, which there is no active effort to deny it’s severity or cause, which has no relevancy in the broad political climate, on a tiny website, and even using the world’s most arbitrary and cherry-picked metric you got the number wrong (there’s 11 results, including my comment above, but for some reason (possibly related to LW’s search indexing being notoriously unreliable - which is true across pretty much all of lemmy) excluding your comment. So, we can chalk it up to 12 and also question the reliability of the methodology as a whole.

Here: Yes, the Holodomor is political - it was absolutely the result of political actions (you even agree) and is the subject of a great many conspiracy theories and weirdo apologist movements today. No, the name Holodomor was not made up just to be scarier by association with The Holocaust to discredit the Soviets who caused it like you’re implying - the word existed twenty years before the coining of the term Holocaust as we know it today. You’re just plain flat out wrong in the particulars you’re claiming. How many more variations on this theme are we going to have to sit through, because I am getting -so- bored with you trying to justify this narrative by shifting it around.

Can you please move on?

Okay, next topic:

Cockshott’s (great name) paper is just pretty awful in general (which is probably why it’s in a self-described magazine and not a journal (yes, I know the name is a reference)) and his methodology for calculating excess deaths is, as he acknowledges in the text, extremely dubious (which is fine, he does that to illustrate a tangential concept). but it does make some good points towards the end and I agree with his overall thesis about planned economies being too easily dismissed (once I figured out that was his thesis, it’s kinda unclear). Rosefielde’s (great name) paper is excellent, and breaks down his calculations in an extremely easily digested manner. I might even use it as an example of decent demographic calculation at some point, it’s just a really good overview of the process and details the factors effecting (hehe) the calculations.

However: Both of those papers show examples of addressing death rates, and make no attempt at the problem of calculating lives saved. Lives saved is the metric in question, not death rate. They’re terrible examples for your point, because they make no attempt to address your point whatsoever.

If the claim “you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism” has merit, which we can assume you consider it does, why did you choose to cite these papers instead of ones that, idk, actually support your argument?

^{edit: clarity}

Then why don’t we use any Indian names for the very many famines in India due to British occupation?

Do you mean dramatized names like the Great Bengal Famine? The Bengali name is “Chiẏāttōrēr mônbôntôr (lit. 'Famine of ‘76’)”, which is pretty vague given how many famines have happened in the world. Probably it merits the fancier name because it was the first one under british rule. Or did you perhaps mean the Doji bara / Skull Famine (bengali: lit ‘many skulls’), which you know, not very dramatic at all and a pretty fair example of us using the indian name.

Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics.

Hi! I’m a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling and I’m sorry, that was a little mean of me to bait you like that, it’s a trick question: proving lives saved is the classic example of bad statistics and proving negatives. The assumptions required to make a definite statement about lives saved in a historical event are easy to make, but are necessarily so restrictive that they render any conclusions valueless unless you have definite conditions within a narrow time scope (like in a vaccine rollout or cholera outbreak). That’s why meaningless phrases like “Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics” are such an easy thing to parrot - you’re just saying “and then we do statistics, QED” without having to engage with the actual difficult part (the math).

Does comparative economics correlate to deaths? Sure! It correlates to just about everything you could ever want! The most famous example is the hemline index, which has spurred over a century of debate as to the actual causal connections (and if the theory itself even has merit). But proving that causal link to lives saved? Now that’s a damn tricky problem, and some really promising methodology has only recently arisen from the management of ventilator shortages during covid in the US (and it’s still being developed!) I highly recommend looking into it, it’s a fascinating field of research right now.

Edit: Wow, you know what, I’m gonna just point to the entire sections of the wikipedia article you got that graphic from titled “Population Decline” and “Fertility and natalist policies” to address the population decline, instead of just redundantly addressing all the… uh… rigorously cited claims you just laid out.

And why exactly did that term stick in the west, only transliterated as Holodomor instead?

Because that’s the name it was given by the Ukranian peoples that survived it? I’m not sure what your point is here when you agree that it’s a transliteration of the name.

ngram graph

It’s not exactly a disputed fact that things like the Holodomor didn’t gain much traction in western literature until after the fall of the soviet union, because that’s when western literature was able to access it.

Discussion of the Holodomor became possible as part of the Soviet glasnost (“openness”) policy in the 1980s. In Ukraine, the first official use of the word “famine” was in a December 1987 speech by Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi

Add to it that the soviets violently suppressed reporting on it within the USSR, which you can even see reflected in that graph, explains the lack of occurrence in non-western works. That seems, you know, pretty gosh dang basic.

You’re seriously arguing the pretty straightforward etymology of this word is some kind of deeply political conspiracy, to deflect from the openly manufactured nature and your weird stalinist apologist thing you’ve got going on where millions of “lives saved” (pop quiz: how do you measure that?) somehow outweighs millions of deaths. Maybe there is a similarity with the term “holocaust”, which would seem kinda fair given the scale of the killing. But you know, there isn’t. Like there provably isn’t, it was a term coined from the original meaning of the word “holocaust” before “The Holocaust” even happened.

Just come on with this. They share a similar root.

inappropriately label “Holodomor” (scary word for a specific famine to make it sound like holocaust, I wonder if you have any other special scary words for other famines)

The word was used in print in the 1930s in Ukrainian diaspora publications in Czechoslovakia as Haladamor

Try again, buddy.

edit: Also, the Holodomor specifically refers to the famine within Ukraine which killed millions, while the “Soviet Famine of the collectivization” (a specific name I can find referenced nowhere else, is that a translation?) is (evidently) the broad famine impacting the USSR of which the Holodomor was a part.

Lysenko’s politically derived pseudoscience that started with ideology instead of evidence combined with Stalinist/Maoist paranoia and conflation of scientific dissent with rebellion and threats to the state created the famines from what would have been shortages during the restructuring.

Yes, exactly. Although I take quite a bit of issue with your depiction of Lysenkoism (you’re presenting it as much broader in scope than even wikipedia claims and certainly more generally impactful to the system than any of the academic sources I’ve read considers it having been) I don’t think that you’re overall wrong by any stretch! Countries are complex systems, which again has been my entire point, and I’m glad we agree on that.

Wait, there are switch games that aren’t compatible with the switch 2? That seems extremely weird, backwards compatibility was the switch 2s whole deal. Ugh this platform…

So your argument is that it wasn’t just Lysenkoism, but the political situation at the time which exacerbated the faults of Lysenkoism and lead to conditions allowing for those famines?

Which has incidentally been my entire point this whole time?

^{edit: clarity}

Sure, it was a pervasive piece of reasoning that existed in a system which would kill you if you tried to criticize the pseudoscience du jour. It had a large influence in soviet culture, yep, but it was absolutely not the sole driving force behind things like the Holodomor, or the other many famines.

Man yeah, the fall of Lysenkoism is really the defining moment of mid-late 1940s soviet russia. Couldn’t possibly have been any other factors which played into the shift in cultural attitudes within the soviet union at that time. Nope, must have been down to Lysenkoism itself falling out of favor.

Also it ended in the 60s and the last big soviet famine was in 47s so idk about that timeline

There was no one single cause, and trying to deflect blame onto a single (exceptionally whackdoodle) pseudoscientific theory is intellectually dishonest at best, and regular dishonest at worst.