Tesla's European car sales nosedive for fifth month as customers switch to Chinese EVs
AES_Enjoyer @ AES_Enjoyer @reddthat.com Posts 0Comments 355Joined 5 mo. ago
AES_Enjoyer @ AES_Enjoyer @reddthat.com
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Surely people going to jail for the wrong reason is something exclusive to the Soviet Union and not to all countries with a legal system? Like, damn, I feel sorry for your boss, but in dire circumstances such as those of the late 30s / early 40s in the USSR, excesses and abuses were sadly made because of the overwhelming conditions.
Your boss may have spent his teens in a gulag, but the fact that he lived to tell you that is because the Soviets managed to miraculously defeat the Nazis and prevent them from genociding the Slavic peoples they categorised as "Untermenschen" according to the infamous "Generalplan Ost", which implied genocide of almost all people between Germany and the Urals. If it wasn't for the Soviets, your former boss would have been murdered in a concentration camp by the nazis.
Electing officials is mostly complex in capitalism, where the interests of the poor majority are in direct contradiction with the interests of a wealthy elite.
If you can only understand monetary motivation that's your fault. Most people who spend 10 years in med school + residency don't do it because of monetary incentives, they do it because of social and personal incentives.
Most research actually comes from the public sector (universities, research institutes...), where people work not because they hope to get rich one day through patenting something, but because they get paid to do research. 99 scientists in the public sector will do 99% of the work towards a technology, then a private company will take the final 1% of progress, patent it, and prevent everyone else from accessing the mostly publicly-funded development. For fuck's sake, we saw this literally 5 years ago with the development of the COVID vaccines, it was predominantly based on university and institutional research that hadn't been commercialized, and then some companies took all this research for free, got a ton of public grants on the side, and then made the vaccines at an absurd profit. For a counter-example to that, tell me, if the profit motive from private companies is what drives research fastest, why was Cuba the first country to vaccinate all of its population from COVID using state-funded research and production?
Cause the Uyghurs, amongst other ethnic groups, have something to say to that
What do they have to say? Have you seen polls in Xinjiang or Tibet of degree of satisfaction with the government? I guarantee you they're much higher than in Catalonia, Quebec, Scotland or any of the Chinatowns/Chicagos of the US.
You mean, only the ones they care about?
Come on, tell me the economic growth in Xinjiang compared to the rest of the country, and now do the same for Scotland. Give me the actual data, and then tell me, to my face, that the Chinese government doesn't care about its ethnicities more than western governments. For fuck's sake, have you seen the rate of incarceration of black people in the USA? About one in four black men in the USA go through the prison system in their lives.
let’s not forget that they also repress like hell
That's your perspective as a westerner. My country, Spain, has political prisoners such as Carles Puigdemont, a so-called "Ley Mordaza" (mouthgag law) has been implemented for 15 years against protestors, and if you go to the USA they have masked agents kidnapping people, putting them in unmarked vans and deporting them. I seriously don't think china is significantly more repressive than that. Unless you're willing to concede that Spain and the USA are fascist, why would you say that for China?
only allow one party
Then why are there multiple parties in the National People's Congress and its standing body the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress?
jail political opponents
Again, a strategy used all over the west.
stop issuing economic statistics
Then what's this?. I literally don't know what you're talking about.
The trend is toward openness in China?
Yes. China is progressively opening up, allowing things such as IShowSpeed to do livestreams of the country wherever he wants and granting him honorary visas, and spreading the contact of Chinese people with westerners through for example XiaoHongShu (RedNote) or TikTok, which is why the US wants to ban access to these apps. I'm not a US citizen either, I'm European, and the EU itself closed access to Russian media some months after the war started. You may or may not think that this is justified, but it's quite literally the definition of "closing up", and China is engaging in exactly the opposite.
Those proxy wars are the example of it not getting hot
I beg you tell the same to a Ukrainian or to a Vietnamese.
You won't dignify me with a response because you're simply replicating propaganda that you've heard on Reddit, and you can't argue from knowledge but from vibes.
Now let's imagine the opposite in Berlin: what if, instead of a group of old men wearing weird wigs, it was actual representatives of the people chosen through democratic centralism? It's not like there's no way to know what people wanted, there was literally a referendum. Why would I want separation of power if all power in my country should be democratic? Separation of powers is a tacit admission that the powers aren't democratic, hence needing different people to create "checks and balances".
In a form of a piece of lead
You could literally open up a book someday and check your info, gulag inmates were paid. Wages were lower than those of a free worker, but nothing like the modern slavery that the USA uses in its prison system for example.
Where did I say ALL gulags were in Siberia
By using the cliche of "forced labor to the cold Siberia", you're propagating misinformation about the system, willingly or not. The fact that the majority of Gulags were in fact not in Siberia is kind of a strong statement in that it shows that the intent of gulags was not that of mass-murder of dissidents (which is the claim anticommunists like you normally do). The vast majority of gulag inmates were actually not political dissidents, but normal criminals. The gulag system was the prison system of the USSR for all crimes. Why would you send your average criminal who stole from another person to a death camp instead of trying to reform them? Why did most of the deaths in gulags coincide with a famine that affected the entire Soviet Union during a war and not before or after that? Why did the Gulag system, at its peak during the mass hysteria against nazism, have a number of prisoners similar to that of the modern USA? Maybe if you weren't a propagandized misinformation spreader you could answer any of those questions. But no, you can't, because you haven't lifted the cover of one book in your entire life.
Stalin was alive in 60s?
I brought up the 60s because the Soviet Union was essentially industrialised by then. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks get to power, the former Russian Empire was a predominantly agrarian country where 80+% of people worked the land and the life expectancy was <30 years, there was no industry to speak of. The civil war which the fascists started, and in which England, France and the USA invaded Soviet Russia for the sin of being communist and gave material aid and troops to the pro-tsarist fascists, and which came right after WW1, left the country in a state of utter destruction, and the economy didn't recover to pre-WW1 levels until 1929, the year when the first 5-year-plan was adopted. Industrialization of the Soviet Union was FAST as lightning, with GDP growths above 10% per year, the fastest industrialization process in history up to that point (and only surpassed by China to this day). But in 1941, as you may know, the Nazis invaded the country, and murdered about 27 million Soviet Citizens and essentially leveled the entire country west of Stalingrad. After 1945, the industrialization progress continued to its previous speed together with the reconstruction of the country, but it isn't until at least the 60s when you can say the country was properly industrialized. This is why I said the 60s, because comparing a predominantly feudal country in terms of food security to our modern standards is an exercise of either ignorance of bad faith. So tell me, are you arguing from ignorance or from bad faith?
The thing is, how much of a hurdle has the separation of powers been for fascists? I'd say not a whole lot. In my opinion, it's been much more of a hurdle to pass progressive policy instead, e.g. the rather recent case of the Berlin rent cap repeal. The democratic will of the people of Berlin, via direct referendum, was repealed because a group of old men in a tribunal said that it's illegal. American politics, as an outsider, are essentially like that: democrats making progressive promises in campaign, and then "we didn't get to do it because we didn't have a supermajority :(", whereas characters like Trump will just get there and say "yeah, no, I'll do whatever the fuck I want".
Sure buddy, China has a lot of fascist traits, such as being extremely sensitive towards different ethnical groups in the country (go to a history museum in China and you'll see that they have specific signs discussing the different ethnicities at the period), lifting a billion people from poverty, land redistribution, quality social services and no use of militarism for the past half century. But I guess that, for you, not getting to vote once every 4 years for the lesser evil who will regardless defund the social services and pursue austerity policy is the highest expression of anti-fascism.
If you had actually read anything on the "decriminalization" of homosexuality in Soviet Russia after 1917, you'd know that there was not really any social movement on the side of legalizing homosexuality. The fact that its criminalization was repealed is mostly due to Bolsheviks wanting to repeal essentially all Russian Imperial law.
Homosexuality wasn't even well-understood at the time, they conflated gender and sexuality, which is why only male homosexuality was criminalized. The Soviet Union, due to it being heir to a very patriarchal society, wanted "stronger men and workers", and lesbians were seen as a more masculine version of men (which was accepted) whereas gays were seen as "feminized men", which was seen negatively.
Even then, my point is that after the 40s most of the theorists of socialism were fucking killed at the hands of Nazis, and that's one of the biggest reasons why social policy didn't develop sufficiently in the Soviet Union. But even so, the criminalization of homosexuality for the most part wasn't particularly prosecuted compared to many countries, there's a difference between something being illegal and something being prosecuted.
All in all: yes, they should have done better, but the material conditions of the moment didn't really allow for much better.
But wait, I arranged atoms in this order before you did! Now you're not allowed to arrange atoms in this order unless you pay me!!
Here we go again with the false claims of hunger directed particularly against Ukrainians.
The Bolsheviks gave Ukrainians for the first time in history borders of their own, representation of their own in politics and the right to study for free and in their own language. There are literal letters between Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin in which Rosa argues against Ukraine getting its own representation as a nationality, and Lenin argues in favour of it (which ultimately was done).
The president of the Soviet Union after Stalin was Ukrainian. There is no precedent, no continuation, and no following episode of hunger spiking particularly in Ukraine as it more-or-less did in the early 30s. And millions died outside Ukraine too during that hunger episode, primarily in southern Russia and Central Asia.
Trying to make the 30s famine about Ukrainians is a propaganda exercise first invented by the Nazis to draw Ukrainian sympathy during the Nazi invasion, and it's picking up strength again as it's used in Europe to stoke Russophobia and anti-communist sentiment.
Let me get this straight. To you, a famine produced unintentionally through policy that spiked class war and originated primarily from rich farmers sabotaging the crops and livestock as a response to their lands being collectivized in the first successful collectivization of a country in the history of the Earth, is to you as morally depraved as the English colonists literally starving Irish to death because of colonial and racist beliefs?
This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of patent practice. Patents exist not for inventors, but for companies. Destin, from Smarter Every Day, has a recent video trying to make a grill scrubber in which he talks with many people about how Amazon for example constantly avoids patent claims from small inventors.
Humanity progressed from hunter-gatherers to the industrial revolution without the need for a judge to determine whether I can arrange atoms in a given way or not without giving a canon to someone else who decided to arrange atoms like that before me.
Holidays for "enemies of the people" were unpaid
Not true. The GULAG system, which is simply the prison system of the Soviet Union at the time, did pay inmates a wage while they worked there, this is common knowledge and you can check it up if you want to.
and in a quite cold climate of Siberia
Really? The Gulags were all in Siberia? How about you actually check what you're talking about instead of spreading misinformation? From the Gulag museum:
www.gulag.online/articles/mapa-taborovych-sprav-gulagu-a-pribehu-ze-stredni-evropy?locale=en
Wow, a ton of Gulags were actually to the west of the Urals, not in Siberia, who would have thought. If only this information was widely available and public...
They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food
Huh? Life expectancy in the Soviet Union rose exponentially, it was below 30 years of age before the Russian Revolution and 60 by the time Stalin died. The diet of the Soviet citizen was by the 60s healthier than that of a US citizen. The CIA itself says this BTW, check out on google "CIA USSR nutrition", you'll find a 1983 document claiming, and I quote, "American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of rood each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious". Almost as if centering food production around the needs of the population instead of around the profit of food producers, gives a better result...
Just admit it: you don't have any fucking idea what you're talking about. You're repeating talking points you've heard on Reddit or TV without actually checking anything.
The Soviet Union didn't particularly treat homosexuals any worse than most countries at the time. Sure, it should have done better, but there are limitations to ideology when lessentially your entire ideological base members die in the struggle against the Nazis due to being the first to volunteer.
In which historical occasion has a fascist risen to legislative power, and the rest of powers were like "nah get outta here" and just kicked them out?
In what world do you think that not separating powers can have a more democratic outcome?
Would you agree that China doesn't have a fascist problem? Would you agree that China has separation of powers?
If democracy patently doesn't work under the separation of powers, what compells you to believe it's an essential principle to maintain democratic institutions?
According to SCMP, "The urban jobless rate among those aged 16 to 24 – excluding students – fell to 15.8 per cent last month, down from 16.5 per cent in March, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday". What's your point? It literally says "released by the National Bureau of Statistics", what's the government hiding??
Can you source this claim, please?
This is a nothingburger made up by western bad-faith actors. There is no such thing as a social credit score in China. Unlike in the US, where you can go into your bank account to check your "good citizen meter" and see how likely you are to get a mortgage.
Nothing compared to ICE kidnapping people from their literal homes masked, putting them into unmarked vans, and deporting them without due process or putting them in prison.
So, China forbidding western media is oppressive and dictatorial because western press good, but the West forbidding Russian media is cool and based because Russian media bad? You're only showing your bias here if you think western media has any semblance of objectivity, especially when it comes to international politics.
Not than Russia, Russia is further advanced towards fascism than the EU, so it's worse. But China is getting better and the EU is getting worse.
It's clear that you only care about deaths if they take place on the first world. You want to avoid "direct confrontation" because you care more about Europeans and Americans than you do about Vietnamese, Korean or Iraqi. You take pride in how much the "military expenditure in the cold war prevented direct conflict" without caring about how much more conflict it stoked outside the west.
False. The invasion of Ukraine is a policy pursued by the Russian goverment as a way to preserve the sphere of influence that the west is eroding each day through NATO and economic/soft power. You can condemn it, it's cruel and abhorrent, but it's not exclusively Russia to blame, and in 10 years from now this will be clear to everyone.