reminder rule

An important part of critical thinking is the ability to see flaws in comparisons and arguments even when they point towards conclusions you agree with. It’s telling that you interpreted their comment the way you did.

Hey, hey. Come on, now. The United States doesn't just lock up brown people. We execute many on the spot, without provocation or probable cause. Credit where credit is due.

Are you suggesting the us gov killed at minimum 6*12 million of it's own citizens? 72 million? At the low end? You said "dozens" plural so 144million or more? Bullshit.

ACAB, injustice is alive and well, and extrajudicial killings are a serious serious issue in America, but your scales are just fantasy

Famously no one died in the USSR due to social issues

Why’s it at +157/-3 after 3hr:

Because blahaj.zone doesn't count the downvotes. The -3 downvotes that you see are only those that are counted by the instance you're viewing from (given out by the users of that instance only). Right now, on lemmy.world it has 28 downvotes, on dbzer0 it has 2.

based

You're counting the percentage of population, in the meme it's the percentage of all incarcerated people.

I don't want to search for stats, but it may be so that with a higher incarceration rate the USSR still held less of the total.

I find back about that it peaked at 1.4% or 1.5% in 1950 in a few sources: 2.5m to 2.7m prisoners for about 180m citizens. So significantly higher than what you found.

On Quora a Russian posted a nice graph, but I don't see a source for the data : https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Soviet-citizens-were-incarcerated-at-any-given-time-The-US-has-0-7-of-its-population-in-prison-and-I-was-wondering-how-that-compares-to-the-old-USSR

Having read testimonies of the nazino island gulag and a few Russian prisoner novels, the Soviet prison system really shouldn't be compared to the USA one. Those percentages might not be far off ("only" 2x more at the worst), but numbers don't tell everything. Stalin's reign of terror was so much worse than the modern day USA dystopia. Compare the USA to modern day Canada or western Europe and it will highlight much better how bad it is doing.

What's your source for the gulag numbers? The wiki lists 18M though the system with a population of 180M, with something like 1.5M deaths. That would seem to indicate a number higher than 1%.

The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

it’s not a misleading stat it’s a stat with nuance. slavery in the U.S. is legal per the 13th amendment, as are for-profit prisons.

this fiscal motive leads to more sentences for smaller crimes (marijuana possession) for longer times, and it’s obscene.

So a 10 year prison sentence isn't 10 times worse than a one-year sentence? You think 3 people in prison for a month each is worse than two people with a year each?

i think sometimes it’s worth critiquing memes for the rhetorical impact rather than raw arguing power

if you wanted a watertight meme that perfectly describes your argument, you’re right, this isn’t it.

but if you want an emotionally jarring meme that encourages debate and spreads awareness of the disturbing nature of american justice, i’d say this has acheived that goal looking at these comments :)

i’m still working this position as a shitposter but i’d say this is at least an A- tier meme in that a) it’s factual (not outright false), and b) it encourages active discussion and awareness of issues in the comments.

Pretty much. "Could be worse" is for when you're recovering from the flu, not the "There is 1.2 million people in prison right now".

this is such a beautiful way to put it, thank you

Well the Somalia people actually want a Somalia style government and are free to go there. The Denmark people want a Danish style government but can't go there.

It's a reasonable assumption to make, considering this is basically a hexbear meme

ive yet to see anything other than reactionary posting from hb

TFW you attack people for saying "capitalism is bad hurrdurr" but can only offer "capitalism is good durrhurr"

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Reagan by Killer Mike, good song.

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

You're not wrong, here's a list of countries that may execute you for possession of canabis;

Bahrain, Brunei Darussalam, Iran, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, Sudan, Taiwan and the USA.

Something tells me the USA has executed far fewer prisoners over this charge, leading back to the point I had originally made.

Only 8 percent of the US prison population is housed in for profit prisons. For profit prisons might be an okay place to start, but the entire US prison system is terrible and absolutely needs reform. There are a myriad of other things that need to be changed, just as much.

Depends on local laws of their state, but yes in most states you lose the right to vote while in prison and some places, like Florida, make it difficult to get your right to vote back. Not sure if the prison sentence being for a state or federal crime makes a difference or not.

Yea they lose some rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not on the list of rights removed. That's why the USA has larger prisoner populations.

Shall we make a meme about prisoner death/execution counts?

My bad, that doesn't fit your narrative so it's a moot point. Lmao y'all are hilarious.

Couldn't tell ya, I don't know much about European laws. Just shining some light on statistics regarding the country I live in.

i also am not a tankie, fuck stalin, and thank you scv for doing my dirty work for me. tbh i didnt realize how bad it was here and i wouldn’t have posted what i thought was a funny little anti-copoganda meme if i had known. sorry yall 🥲

the United States has the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 531 people per 100,000

That gives 0.5% of America by my math, which would be 0.02% of the world population. I have no idea where the 22% is coming from, it's off by 3 orders of magnitude.

Edit: I missed that it said prison population, I thought it was taking overall population.

Yeah, this is like how North Korea technically has the world's highest literacy rate. These statistics specifically exploit the transparency of western democracy on these issues by just lying about their own statistics. Anyone who doesn't think China has at least 2M people jailed is completely delusional. There's likely more than that in their Xinjiang work camps alone.

Just kidding that was under Stalin.

it's oppression-lite.

Maybe tactical oppression or indirect oppression, I don't know? Down right oppression is...well quite direct. You don't spend years carving out a socio economic class for a certain group which forces them to remain in the lower rungs of society eventually leading more likelihood of criminal behaviour. You incriminate and imprison them directly.