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The death toll of Capitalism is a negative number.

Poverty worldwide included 94 percent of the world’s population in 1820. This number was reduced to 17 percent in 2011. The largest part of the fall of poverty took place between 1981 when 53 percent of the world lived in poverty and 2011 when the aforementioned 17 percent did so. This rapid fall is largely due to the onset of industrialisation which in turn was made possible by the availability of the capita needed to build the mines and factories. While it may have been a rough ride to start with - working conditions in early capitalism were atrocious - this was eventually solved in western countries due to regulation and enlightened self-interest. The same cycle has taken place in non-western countries where working conditions sometimes more resemble those in the early industrialised west.

Capitalism with regulations is still capitalism, no matter whether that be European- and North American-style big-state capitalism or Deng Xiaoping's Chinese state-regulated capitalism.

Now about those examples you gave:

On the death toll of the Atlantic slave trade here's some numbers courtesy of Statista [1]. From 1501 until 1866, it is estimated that the transatlantic slave trade saw more than 12.5 million African people forcefully put on slave ships and transported to the Americas. Of these 12.5 million, only 10.7 million disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, meaning that approximately 1.8 million (14.5 percent) did not survive the journey, known as the Middle Passage.

The principal cause of the Bengal famine - with a death toll of around 3 million people - was the epidemic of Helminthosporium oryzae (a plant disease affecting rice crops), an epidemic only matched by the Irish potato famine of 1845. This was exacerbated by poor regional administration and the war with Japan [2].

The potato famine was caused by an infestation of Phytophtora infestans (potato blight, a crop fungus) which was exacerbated by the fact that only a single variety of potato was grown in all Ireland in combination with inadequate (the repeal of tariffs on grain products, import of corn from the USA) and counterproductive (continued and sometimes even increased export of food products from Ireland to Great Britain) government responses. The death toll of the Great Famine is estimated to be up to 1 million people.

The death toll of the colonisation of the Americas (north and south) was largely due to diseases like Smallpox which had been chronic in Eurasian populations for hundreds of years but to which native Americans did not have any acquired immunity. It is important to realise that the Spanish and Portuguese and French and British and Dutch (etc.) did not know about the dangers of these diseases to the native population when they landed on the shores of the Americas, this was not some plot to eradicate the native population. It was also not related to Capitalism which only became a thing some 400 years later. As to the numbers involved this seems to be disputed but they are indisputably large, probably in the tens of millions. The number of native Americans killed in combat by westerners in the 'Indian wars' in the United States is far lower, around 30.000. Most importantly, none of this has anything to do with Capitalism unless you want to equate all types and wars of conquest with Capitalism in which case Genghis Khan was the greatest capitalist of all.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143458/annual-share-sla...

[2] https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-bengal-famine-what-the-ex...

The reasoning behind "allowing" Communism while "shunning" Nazism is a product of the way these subjects are treated in schools, media, politics and entertainment. It is not difficult - nay, very easy - to see the parallels between the ideologies but they are presented in a different light: Communism is "basically good but difficult to get right", Nazism is "pure evil and can only lead to death and destruction". It is just as easy to turn these narratives around since national socialism is but a variation on international socialism which - according to doctrine - is the precursor to Communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat needs a class enemy just as much as the "volk" - German for 'people' - needs an enemy to blame for all its misfortunes. It can easily be said that Hitler just did not do national socialism right just like Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and the Kim dynasty and Castro and all the others did not do international socialism right. There is just as much room for a budding national socialist wearing a T-shirt with "Blood and Soil" on it to claim that he only means the best for his folk, that the Third Reich went wrong when they saw the Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and handicapped and Slavs and Negroes and unemployed as the enemies of the "volk" who needed to be eradicated - this time things would be done right. He would be just as wrong as the budding international socialist/Communist who makes that claim in defence of his shirt bearing a "Communist and proud of it" [1] banner.

These ideologies belong in the same dust bin of history, "tried & failed disastrously - avoid" but somehow they are not. This needs to change and it needs to change sooner rather than later given the resurgence of Communism as somehow being a viable ideology.

[1] https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Communist-and-Proud-of-I...

The claim was: "the types of advertisers on Rush Limbaugh etc. [were] Not nearly as profitable as say Nike, GM, Sony, Apple etc."

That claim is false and I provided evidence to show it.

As for your whataboutism: that's patently untrue and you know it. Transmission rate and vaccination rate are very clearly inversely related no matter what dataset you're referencing.

But you're correct, misinformation knows no bounds, be it right wing radio or the comments section of a tech forum. The best we can do is vet sources sufficiently, or otherwise learn to disregard unfounded claims as random noise.

I'm talking about prophylaxis. Dexamethasone is used for critically ill COVID cases only. There is no approved prophylactic drug or even early treatment drug. It's use an off-label drug or nothing.

The link I referenced includes monoclonal antibody studies, and also paxlovid studies. It happens that I'm fully vaxx'd, got COVID, took paxlovid, and recovered (slowly). You might take a look at the link.

I'm not interested in "large groups", I'm interested in scientific evidence.

You may know that IVM is a Nobel prize winning drug that has been administered in billions of doses world wide for decades. It's on the WHO Essential list and is safer than aspirin.

The FDA staffers really enjoyed their "horse de-wormer" propaganda campaign. Yes, some people were using veterinary grade IVM, because they were denied the pharmaceutical grade prescription.

It's disingenuous, like saying don't drink water, because it's a chemical used in sewage treatment plants.

Here in NH, the legislature passed a bill to allow OTC dispensing of IVM. The Governor vetoed it (rightly, I think). His comment, when he signed the veto, included the remark that the measure was unnecessary, because any doctor can legally prescribe IVM for COVID. Except, most are actually not allowed to do that by their administrators.

As an experiment, my wife asked the local Walgreen pharmacist what he would do, if she gave him an IVM prescription for COVID. "We can't get any," he lied.