What I have seen in this thread is an amazing collective display of this.

Every single claim like that ("but Soviet gdp is not real", "what about East vs West Germany", "what about Stalin killing millions of people" etc. etc.) is refutable with modest effort. What will have no effect on anyone, as in any context only one of the claims is refuted, so people look at their lists of arguments - most still unrefuted - decide by proportion that Communism must have been an economic disaster, and forget about that particular problem and their original extremely low prior probability they attached to it.

As for life expectancy, I'd bet you on intrade the data is self-consistent.