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Cake day: 2024年2月27日

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  • What I’ve read/heard is that the main reason for the famines came down to over-reporting yields. The local level would inflate their numbers a few percent, then the regional level would inflate their numbers a few percent, and then at the national level they’d use those numbers to make decisions. Based on the numbers received, they were like, “great. we can move X amount of food into the urban areas.” That left the rural populations with not enough food.

    The main victims of the famine were the peasants, who made up Mao’s main base of support. So the idea that it was intentionally engineered is ridiculous. It was a combination of the misreporting, bad sweeping policy changes like the sparrows, and the general tumult of recovering from decades of decline, occupation and war





  • I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is not in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

    Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

    There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!




  • I’m not saying that discouraging reproduction is eugenics. I’m saying that @Aitherios@lemmy.ml’s attempt at defining Eugenics is wrong. Saying it’s about producing the best “GENES” possible is just post-hoc reasoning to make it sounds more scientific.

    Eugenics is based on 19th century racial science. If someone is advocating for any sort of population control that uses that framework (of bettering the “race”), they’re doing eugenics.

    A good example of what’s not eugenics is China’s one-child policy. It wasn’t aimed at creating a “better” race of any kind, and It actually provided exemptions for ethnic minorities. The goal wasn’t to create a better type of human race, it was to prevent the population from growing faster that what the economy could support. IMO it was probably unnecessary, but definitely wasn’t eugenics.

    However, if there was an alternate reality where china instituted the one-child policy only for ethnic minorities in an effort to make the nation a pure Han state, that would be eugenics. If they did it based on IQ, that would be eugenics. And if they exempted minorities from the policy out of a belief that the Han were inferior, that would also be genetics