Ahh... please tell me more about this human nature which is incompatible with communism while microplastics flows in your veins.

And the value it provides is enough to prop up the entire car insurance industry with incredibly inflated salaries at the top, and pay for a good portion of the damage caused by car accidents plus a fuckload of attorneys paid trying to avoid the rest of the damage.

It's part of how car insurance works. It also works by underwriters and adjusters being paid to do everything they can to keep from paying out claims.

Then why bring communism into a critique of a dictator concerning his methods of control?

How would you determine what the individuals collectively decide?

Shhh, you'll interrupt the lib circlejerk of how they're the only good ones who commit atrocities, every other atrocity done by others is worse.

Nope, a government can't disprove a moral & political philosophy. As we can plainly observe, liberalism/libertarianism & authoritarianism are on opposite sides of the ideological map.

Liberalism is a philosophy whereas liberal democracy is a type of government as was clearly stated:

Colloquially, democracy refers to liberal democracy, also called Western-style democracy, or substantive democracy: democracy following ideas of liberal political philosophy.

If anything, all you're observing is a government depart from a philosophy to become a different type of government. Even so, your claim is off: the US has been protecting inherent human rights & liberties for the most part in recent history until Trump.

Even so, there are other liberal democracies across the globe.

So, communism, just as capitalism and socialism, can be combined with all sorts of governance types.

While this is true, they're talking about Stalin & the political system mentioned before

Colloquially, communism refers to a communist state (also known as a Marxist–Leninist state)

not any political system. None of the other types of communist governments have existed to scale for a meaningful duration & none have fulfilled their fantastical/mythical promise. They either fail within a few years or persist through authoritarian repression while purporting to strive for a fantasy they may never achieve.

Now, an argument can actually be made that capitalism is inherently undemocratic.

Not a political system. Nothing you wrote about it necessarily happens (depends on government), and the rich have been successfully sued & convicted of crimes before.

liberalism

Isn't some deluded speculation. It's a moral & political philosophy of immediately realizable demands to restrict government authority¹. Are you arguing against the restriction of government authority & against liberty? That's a strong argument to reject your political system as illegitimate.

Unlike the fantasy of a communist society, the demands of liberalism have been achieved before in North America & Europe. It's why you're allowed to write everything you have.

true democracy

Because liberalism is not democracy, liberal democracy is, and as mentioned:

Colloquially, democracy refers to liberal democracy, also called Western-style democracy, or substantive democracy

True democracy was already defined

Democracy is a political system/government in which political power is vested in the people or the population of a state.

and demands less.

This is why socialism exists as a transitory state

Only to communists: socialists regard it as the goal.

economic system that grants a lot of benefits of communism (worker’s rights, a social state, socially owned industry)

Economic systems aren't political systems, so they don't have rights, though they may depend on rights (from a political system). :::spoiler Moreover, those benefits amount to less than purported in communist states. With all their rhetoric on substantive equality, & the time, state ownership, & central planning to achieve it, we'd expect at least the main outcome of economic equality. Yet, measures of economic inequality don't support that: China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba rate medium on economic inequality. (Only, North Korea with an average height notably shorter than South Korea due to food shortages has low economic inequality.) To the contrary, the "flawed" liberal democracies in Europe, Canada, East Asia, Australia do better with low economic inequality.

Despite an ideology opposing the exploitation of workers, Soviet forced labor camps did exactly that & would work the malnourished to death.

The formal guarantees for nutrition from those benefits meant little when at least 5 million died during the Soviet famine of 1932 the Soviets created.

For instance, over five million people lacked adequate nutrition and starved to death during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, one of several Soviet famines. The 1932–33 famine was caused primarily by Soviet-mandated collectivization, although the famine in part was also caused by natural conditions. In response to frequent shortages, massive second economy existed for all categories of goods and services.

In contrast, during the Great Depression in the United States, mortality fell & there were few reported cases from starvation.

Without profit motive in those "benefits", we might have expected a better environmental record in the Soviet Union. To the contrary

Total emissions in the USSR in 1988 were about 79% of the US total. Considering that the Soviet GNP was only some 54% of that of the USA, this means that the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times more pollution than the USA per unit of GNP.

Their planners considered pollution control

unnecessary hindrance to economic development and industrialization

and

By the 1990s, 40% of Russia's territory began demonstrating symptoms of significant ecological stress, largely due to a diverse number of environmental issues, including deforestation, energy irresponsibility, pollution, and nuclear waste.

Stemming from those so-called benefits, the Soviet constitution of 1977 made a number of promises it couldn't realize.

• labor, free from exploitation, as the source of growth
• continuous improvement of their living standards (art. 39)
• steady growth of the productive forces (art. 40).

The Soviet experience of socialist ownership and the concomitant centrally planned character of the economy showed the difficulties of realizing economic growth in order to ensure an increasing standard of living. Growth in the Soviet Union had been high in the nineteen thirties and early fifties, but had been deteriorating ever since.

The actual functioning of the centrally planned economy was very different from the way it was planned to function. This had very much to do with the fact that economic actors in the Soviet Union also responded to state actions in a way that frustrated the state's stated intentions. People engaged in informal and illegal activities and reduced their working time, frustrating the growth targets.

Shortages increasingly lead people to the second economy with its blat (favors) network. Eventually, the last Soviet leaders, conceding failure by their own standards (economic, social, & cultural rights) & western standards (civil & political rights), dismantled the system from within: Western governments had exceeded their communist state by all standards.

The end of the Cold War has changed the focus of the debate on human rights. The West, with its focus on civil and political rights, no longer opposed the Soviet states, with their emphasis on economic, social and cultural rights. The demise of the communist systems gave rise to a certain extent of triumphalism in the West, which had proven to be not only superior in political and civil rights, but also in economic and social rights. The economies of the western countries produced much more income and the material welfare of their populations was much higher than that of those living in Eastern Europe. :::

State terrorism is a contradiction in terms.

Nope

State terrorism is terrorism conducted by a state against its own citizens or another state's citizens.

Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims.

The violations mentioned before are illegitimate exertions of authority to repress inherent human rights & liberties. Legal authority isn't always legitimate authority. Violence against nonviolent dissidents (for political/ideological aims) is unjust.

You claim liberal democracy is fundamentally incompatible with authoritarianism

Nope, reread:

Liberalism, however, is fundamentally incompatible with authoritarianism.

I don't know about labor camps, but none of that has any bearing on a moral & political philosophy.

Moreover, the fact we know it & discuss it openly puts that government far beyond repressive governments that suppress & deny their failures ever happen.

Like all governments, liberal democratic governments lapse into illegitimate authority. More importantly, however, they correct their lapses due to the people exercising their inherent liberties to induce reforms. That's the design lacking from authoritarian governments like communist states: transparency & accountability to the people exercising their liberties to induce reform. Nothing short of a revolution or dissolution keeps communist states accountable to the people: they repress such liberties & send critics to labor camps as anti-revolutionaries.

don't cite resources contesting my thesis

whatever 🙄

I honestly have no issue there. My issue is the claim that such atrocities don't happen in democratic institutions.

I can't recall any democratic countries, fragile or not, that can hold a candle to the atrocities committed by Joseph Stalin.

Can you point out the equivalent that we should look at in this case of whataboutism? Since we're talking about millions being killed by Joseph Stalin, what are the comparables?

My issue is the claim that such atrocities don’t happen in democratic institutions.

But that's the point, they don't. Atrocities can happen, but not as bad as such.
Just give one example of a democracy where an atrocity remotely close to that happened.

Keep making assumptions.

Because lemmy was created by one of them.

I would love someone to figure out how to stop capitalism from transforming into dictatorships first, since we're already doing that one, and it also is not going great on that front. Or maybe realise that so called dictatorship of the workers might be preferable to dictatorship of the very few people who never actually worked, since, you know, most of us are workers.
But personally I would like to go away with the concept of dictatorships at all, and communism is actually exactly that. Not, like, for me, but definitially.

You're discussing with a tankie. They'll "whatsbout" any bad things the soviets did. It's like a blanket excuse for them.

1.68% compared to the USA’s current 0.7%.

Firstly, assuming you don't simply discount 5M parolees as "not imprisoned" and exclusively fixate on the 2M active inmates, that's 3% not 0.7% dealing with the baggage of a prison sentence.

Secondly, as of 2015, about 55% of people imprisoned in federal or state prisons were black or Latino. despite making up only 32% of the total population. The statistics get even worse when you throw gender in the mix. When you recognize that the goal of the American prison system is to target and press gang as many Colored Men as possible, you realize we're talking about a full 15% of black men.

And that's actual imprisonment, not the harassment of arrest, jailing, and release that so many people have endured. Half of black males, 40 percent of white males suffer an arrest by age 23. I've experienced being arrested twice in my life, once all the way through the booking process only to have a DA decide it was waste of time to prosecute someone with enough family resources to hire a lawyer and fight the charges.

The USSR had about 3 million people in these camps at its height

How many people are in ICE detention centers right now? We have no idea. The information is not publicly available and the current government has gone out of its way to conceal who is being arrested, where they are being held, and whether they are even still in the country.

Also, I think China would probably be leading in total.

I mean, at the very least that is on brand for stalin