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Posts
2
Comments
650
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Or Biden could change course? He's got time and the ramping up of pressure against him will hopefully reach a fever pitch that he'll have no choice but to do so. If not, then he really likes Israel more than he likes democracy, and it's as much his fault as it is the people who refuse to vote for the guy who's killing their family members.

  • It definitely isn't enough to feed the constant content addiction I had with Reddit, but I've found that kind of a good thing lol. I've started reading books and comics on my phone, getting out of bed faster, working on other projects, etc. It's like using a less toxic version to wean off, like using vapes or patches to get off cigarettes.

  • Same. To the point where I can barely stand Reddit right now. There's a couple good subs, but the front page, or every really big sub, is so charged and toxic nowadays. I can barely make it through the comments anymore.

  • Oh ya, I should have guessed. There are a couple Baltic states that did increase in living standards and make some rapid industrialization improvements, but they also made some definite mistakes with handling some things there and trying to do some Russia centralization. It made some of those places very right leaning, which is unfortunate.

    At least it generally shared technologies improvements and such with those places. It doesn't make the USSR worse than the US, for example, which ruined basically all of South and Central America even worse than the USSR did for its neighbors. I want to emphasize that it made some big mistakes, but for some reason people contribute those mistakes to communism, when the US and other capitalist countries had even worse occupations with even worse exploitation, but for some reason that never leads to people saying capitalism is terrible and awful, etc. The world is just too propagandized by the West. The difference is that imperialism and exploitation is basically required by the capitalist system, while it's a side effect of militarization under a siege mindset for communism. It happened, and will probably continue to happen as long as communism requires capitalism characteristics to jumpstart production, but it's not a constant requirement of the system like capitalism's necessity for the line to go up leading to always finding new markets and resources to take.

  • I mean yes, obviously Hamas is bad. I just mean in this very specific case, they've been asking for things like a permanent ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, freedom of movement for Palestinians in Northern Gaza where they lived, and release of Palestinian hostages (who are often held without charge, and they've often asked for captured women and children, too, not just male Hamas fighters). Those things aren't absurd.

  • The USSR did good things and bad things but reactionaries like to pretend it was all bad. There are hard numbers about life expectancy increasing, better life for women, research achievements, general quality of life and happiness metrics, and more that increased. There was lots of bad parts, but same in the US.

    There were anti gay laws on the books for the US, and towns you couldn't even walk in while black. Hell, there are still some sundown towns in places in the US. If you just point out that stuff, or if you lived in such a horrible area or had family who did spreading their stories, then it will just come off as a hell hole. The US does suck, but it's not just Skid Row, the projects, lynch mobs, coups, wars, etc. Same for the USSR. There were good things we can save and build on, and bad things we need to avoid for future socialist projects.

    It's not like the first attempts for democracy went well, either. But I wouldn't diss it in the Middle Ages and say we can only do monarchies, the pinnacle of political achievements, just because " it never succeeded. It fell in Greece and the Roman Republic and every other time it's been tried, and has never worked ever and thus is always doomed to fail."

  • Ah, I misinterpreted you. Sorry about that. But it's hard to tell exactly what you're talking about without more details. Afghanistan, maybe? I get if you don't want to dox yourself, as someone privacy minded, but it's hard to know how to respond without more context.

  • Lol it sounds like someone trying to defend capitalism. "No, it's totally fine, we just didn't implement it right. There are certain laws and regulations that can fix it, we swear!"

    Yet for some reason any flaw with a communist country is endemic to communism itself, instead of the implementation, contexts of their outside conditions, or foreign influence, or general state of economic development.

  • Even when they don't turn it into a dictatorship, they may just turn it back into capitalism, like Russia did. And when that happens, they just sell all the old estates to the highest bidder, making them richer and turning them into oligarchs. And that becomes functionally equivalent to a dictatorship of the bourgeois.

  • Are they making actual progress on that path, though? They have tons of billionaires, lots of people go bankrupt there from medical bills or are homeless (unlike some other communist countries). The state owns a lot of businesses, but then so does Norway. All their initiatives seem to be related to hurting gay people or making it harder for kids to play video games. They've arrested some rich people and cracked down on some corruption, but that also sounds like it could come from a capitalist country. I can't really find any sort of long-term plan.