= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gjm comments on The outline of Maletopia - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (86)
Because the only communists famous enough for you to think of them (as famous communists) are famous for being in charge of big important countries, and people in charge of big important countries tend to be male and often kill a lot of people.
(Famous communists who so far as I know didn't kill a lot of people by any reasonable definition include, e.g., Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Plus any number of people who lived in the Soviet bloc and were probably communists but are famous for other things; the USSR produced a lot of people who were famous as chess players, scientists, musicians, etc., but those aren't so relevant here.)
[EDITED to fix garbled sentence structure.]
This certainly explains the maleness, and admittedly I don't know what the gender ratio of communist theorists is like. Nevertheless, communist countries have been responsible for a disproportionate number of massacres.
To be fair, I seem to remember that women are more left-wing on average, but the effect size is pretty small. Equally, 'angry young men' are often very socialist because they want to 'fight the power'.
And yes, I'm clearly not saying all communists are killers, that would be crazy. And if you are communist because you live in the Soviet bloc, then that's due to completely different causal factors.