• nyankas@lemmy.world
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    58 minutes ago

    This is a fantastic example of using selective information to mislead people. It‘s completely omitting important details like

    1. France‘s much older population (malnutrition deaths are much more common in the elderly)
    2. Data reliability (France‘s data is very comprehensive, while data from countries with authoritarian governments is less reliable; the IHME tries to (opaquely) compensate for that, but that‘s only possible by imputation and modeling, which is less reliable by definition)
    3. Differences in recording deaths (France has a multiple-cause-of-death recording system, while many other countries only record a single cause; this means malnutrition as a result of another disease is much more likely to be recorded in France)
    4. Counterexamples (include Germany, the UK, Austria, New Zealand or many other countries with a capitalist system and suddenly it doesn‘t really seem like there‘s any correlation between a country’s system and malnutrition deaths)

    Sorry, but this graphic can only be seen as plain propaganda, if you actually look into the data it‘s based on.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      44 minutes ago

      Regarding point 1, this is relatively true.

      Regarding point 2, all of these states are “authoritarian,” the difference being which class has authority, and which classes has authority imposed upon them. Cuba, the PRC, and Vietnam are all socialist countries with the working class in charge of the state, while France, Europe, and the US are all imperialist countries/regions where capitalists control the state and impose their authoritarian rule upon the working classes.

      Regarding point 3, this could be a possible explanation but requires actual backing.

      Regarding point 4, it’s important to compare not just systems dogmatically, but against peers, and what came before. Germany, the UK, Austria, etc. are all imperialist countries, and thus have greater access to resources. It matters both how much resources you have, and what you do with them. Socialist countries have more pro-social policy that stretches resources farther.

      In total, it certainly is propaganda in that it’s trying to convey a specific point for a specific aim, just like your comment can be considered propaganda. You offer some decent ideas of how to improve the data, but you also insert your own biases without backing them up, and run into metaphysical errors regarding how these are compared (such as ignoring levels of development and imperialism).

    • m532@lemmy.ml
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      28 minutes ago

      “Data from authoritarian countries is less reliable”

      Uh-oh.

      Please tell me, which countries/peninsulae on the graph are authoritarian, and which are not.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        43 minutes ago

        A bit odd coming from the instance currently trying to fake a Neo-Nazi takeover of an anarchist instance just because Feddit.org and Lemmy.world admins got outed as Zionists.

      • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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        47 minutes ago

        westerners – americans in particular – live in a strange world where reality is treated like propaganda and propaganda is treated as natural human reality; i know this to be true because i also once believed it.

    • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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      6 minutes ago

      Probably because France counts their colonies as part of France. Mayotte specially has to be contributing to this

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Be aware, very old people die from this as a secondary cause from a primary of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. They just stop eating. It’s a misleading statistic to use to identify poverty based malnutrition. It’s a very common diagnosis in terminal patients. And the way US billing works, getting the most diagnosis codes recorded is important for reimbursement. It’s likely the cause for this disparity.

    Edit: yeah 2015 is when ICD-10 adoption and cms billing changes went into play. And then the rate quadrupled. This is an artifact of the US’s dumb private/public insurance model for end of life as more people gamed the system for reimbursement. The spread of billing practices over time.

  • MarcPG@lemmy.zip
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    1 hour ago

    Comparing western countries with countries like Vietnam and treating it like reliable data.

    If you’ve ever seen basically anything about rural Vietnam (or most other Asian countries), you’ll know that it’s basically impossible for the state to actually count deaths, let alone death causes.

    • hanabatake@lemmy.ml
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      1 hour ago

      I am french. I already saw these figures and tried to understand why it was like that. The figures might be technically correct but it doesn’t make sense to compare them with other countries. 5000 people dying each year of hunger, it would be revolting.

      We do not let people die of starvation in France, unless we think it is the best thing to do. We have this concept of “sédation profonde et continue”. Assisted suicide is prohibited in France. So people that suffer from uncurable decease can stop receiving food and hydratation until they die. They continue to receive painkiller or are even put in coma because letting them die that way is legal and considered the most human thing to do. A french christian newspaper wrote an article about it End of life: Are we really letting patients to die of hunger and thirst in France?. They are really opposed to assisted suicide and even them are OK with this process. So technically, we are letting people die of hunger.

      About people suffering from hunger, we have food bank to help them, meal costs 1€ at university… It is far from perfect but we are not letting people die like the figures would let imagine.

      About overseas regions, it is not that poor. The poorest overseas region, Mayotte, has been mostly destroyed by a cyclone two years ago. Both public services and NGOs thanks to a lot of donation reacted quickly to avoid famine. The situation is still bad but people are not starving.

      Hope I answer the question

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      2 hours ago

      How exactly is this cherry-picking? Communists wanting everyone to have food and be taken care of are entirely different from capitalists that want to suck the surplus value out of every worker. Horseshoe theory is wrong.