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Notes -
Soviet levels of power were not granted by God of Thought Experiments from above, they were achieved by mobilizing large numbers of people to violence with arguments such as "this guy over here is better off than you - it was at your expense, go lynch the kulak". I do not think shrimp welfare is as persuasive an argument.
I think you're vastly underrating the earnestness and good will of communists. People very rarely start with murderous intent. That tends to proceed from the grinding of relatively benign dictums against the realities of power.
Moreover, please don't do the whole "it's just a few kooks on college campuses", one loses use of that argument after their first SBF. You and I are not beyond lynching kulaks, there is just a precarious set of incentives that allows us to maintain the moral rectitude to not do so. And I'm arguing that most EA people have, as part of their utilitarian construction, jettisoned important parts of those incentives.
To wit, I recommend rule utilitarianism and a higher degree of humility before history and the human condition.
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