this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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me_irl
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That’s not a very good example, because good and bad people drink water, pretty much everyone does. Here is a list of communist states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states_(communism)
I’d say that all of these sucked to live in. There are definitely states that treat their citizens better than these. If something always leads to death and suffering, maybe we can conclude that it’s a bad idea. Communists are not “associated with“ communism, they are communism.
I remember the name of the fallacy for this one! It's called "correlation, not causation". If thing X is correlated with thing Y and we agree that thing Y is bad, that does not necessarily mean thing X is bad. If you want to attack thing X, you have to give reasons why X is bad or why X leads to Y, not just that the two are correlated. This is not to mean that correlation is useless--if Communism (X) is heavily correlated to death and suffering (Y), and we both agree that Y is bad, it is a signal that it could be useful to look into whether X causes Y and, if so, why/how.