Sodium_nitride @ Sodium_nitride @lemmygrad.ml

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2 yr. ago

The name was never thebproblem. You can spend a million years coming up with the best name possible and it will still be dragged through the mud by the media.

How? With a nuke? In that close of proximity with the Israeli mainland?

The reading comprehension devil strikes again.

The convention says that these acts must be committed with the intent of destroying an identity, and not simply committing them against a group with an idenity

This is not true. Israel is most certainly America's crucial ally. Are American politicians funneling money into Israel (more so than any other country in history even ukraine) just for fun?

Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years dating back...

Completely and utterly irrelevant. Claims made on the basis of things that happened thousands of years ago should be given absolutely 0 weight on current decisions.

What Zionists want is the same thing that Palestinians want and the same thing that Chinese people already have (and Japanese and Korean and many other groups have): a homeland.

Absolutely incorrect. The Chinese people and Korean people did not fight for a homeland, they fought against colonial invaders and capitalist forces and won. The Palestinians have a similar goal. Zionists are fighting to be the colonists, believing that some land belongs to them because other people thousands of years ago vaguely connected to them lived there. Their goals are the complete opposite.

The conflicts between Jews and other groups in Palestine (including Christians who migrated there in the Middle Ages) goes back centuries.

No it doesn't. It dates back to Zionist incursions and crimes in Palestine. This is not a religious conflict in way, and religious groups aren't the primary actors in history to begin with, that would be classes, in this case, the settlers and non-settlers. Zionists have only claimed religion as a convenient cover.

I want the violence to stop but I have no idea how that’s going to happen.

The violence will stops when one side wins permanently. Either the Zionists succeed in ethnically cleansing the area (they will likely act aggressively against other countries in the region though) or the Palestinians succeed in having a stable secular multi-ethnic state established.

At one time even Nazi Germany had a side in it, supporting Arabic Palestinians.

If you want to do good hasbara, try to not associate Nazi Germany with the Palestinians. That is how you make your malicious intentions impossible to hide.

it’s so difficult to imagine a scenario where it will stop.

Skill issue, or I guess in this case, ideological issue.

It is simultaneously the most admirable and frustrating aspect of their foreign policy

Your experiences are very similar to mine (I am indian) haha. You are definitely not lying. I even remember before coming to college I had a romanticised view of the west. "If I get to Europe everything will be better for me" was the mindset I was operating on. And then when I came to Europe I had to live in practically a slumhouse for months before finding stable accommodation. Today, I leave my house at 6 am and come back at 8 or 9 pm. These past few years have seen a major cultural shift in all of the global south countries I think.

car factories really aren’t that different from APC/tank factories.

What is this bs?

Forgive me if I seem overly pedantic in this reply, but you seem to know quite a bit, so I would like to extract as much information as possible.

Have you been to meetings with management? I used to work at a government-run place in Belarus. The meetings were precisely as what I described them.

Did you go to a government run place when the soviet union existed? I mean, it seems strange to me that you specify "government-run" for a workplace that existed during the soviet times. And even if you were there, I imagine that the late soviet union worked differently from the early soviet union. I cannot say if this applies to the meetings themselves.

Those who are in favor of accepting this proposal, please raise your hands… Please lower them. Who’s against it? No. Who abstains? No. The proposal is accepted.

That doesn't sound any different from what one would say for voting as it is done in other situations. Who votes, who is against, who abstains is common. Do the "no" parts mean that no-one abstained in Russian? Because in English it doesn't make sense. Did you mean to wrote "no one abstained"?

1rst convocation

Part of this maybe that during these years, the soviet government was heavily focused on war aims. 1937 incidentally is the year when the soviet government switched to focusing on preparing for war. Another part of it maybe the small sample size (maybe you just looked at the wrong section). And another part maybe that the stwnographix reports aren't capturing all of the discussions. From whay I know about the us government, most of the discussion for policies happens outside the official convening times. Legislators negotiate with each other, they discuss bills in committees before even presenting them for a vote, etc.

Not all of these things I would expect from Molotov’s report itself - but I would be appalled if there was no other delegates to point at least one of the things I’ve outlined.

I can imagine nobody in the supereme soviet taking objection to such statements. They had relatively recently been subject to a brutal war of aggression from these states. Certainly their opinion of Britain and the United States would be very low enough that they would blame everything on them (especially since these were actively genocidal empires at the time). On the other hand, I believe attempts were made to form an alliance against Hitler previously, which the British and French rejected. It was also a widespread belief at the time that the treaty of versailles was responsible for the rise of Hitler. Certainly, the French could be blamed for their occupation of the rhineland and rural valley.

Having a referendum to ratify constitutional changes is a thing in a large number of countries. It’s not out of the ordinary.

Does a mechanism need to be out of the ordinary to be democratic?

The Congress of Soviets was removed with the 1936 constitution. Supreme Soviet took its place. Supreme Soviet was elected directly

Apologies, I had gotten confused since that period of soviet history saw many restructurings in the government. But this only means that all along, you knew a little about how the soviet government worked, and yet you still have many comments wasting everyone's and your own time with nonsense and tangents.

but all ballots had only a single candidate. You can try to look up a picture of a ballot - they all have a single name on them.

I know this

The candidates in the ballots would be nominated on meetings of industrial plant and factory staff. Meetings are not elections.

Yes, that is the point. The bolsheviks explicitly abandoned liberal parliamentarianism. Despite calling other people liberals and saying that I had liberal ideas about democracy, are you now going to turn around and say that elections, the most liberal of liberal ideas about democracy are the way to go? Anyone who is not a liberal can easily recognize that electoral systems are undemocratic. Even the best of electoral "democracies" have elected representatives that are deeply unrepresentative of their constituents. I would not say that the system of meetings was the best choice exactly, but it was both the result of the democratic centralist philosophy (evolved partly as a result of the needs of the civil war) and of seeing electoral systems utterly fail both in liberalised Russia and the other parliamentary countries.

Meetings is when you sit and listen to the management read out their decisions.

Yeah ... totally. All of the gains in the worker's rights and living standards happened despite the workers having no input. By some miracle, the democratic mechanism which was just for show produced one of the most equal and highly industrialized societies of all time. By arguing that the USSR wasn't democratic, the only thing you are arguing for is the idea that democracy is not necessary to achieve equality and standards of living. No matter how much you deride welfare as an indicator of democracy, your whole narrative doesn't make sense. It also doesn't make sense how the Russian working class, which had very recently launched a revolution could be disarmed so easily, or at all.

There Supreme Soviet would convene a few times per year for a week or less. All other time there would be ~40 guys from the Presidium who would take on its duties.

As opposed to doing what? Representatives cannot manage the day to day affairs of the government. No government on earth does that.

There are stenograms of sessions available in Russian.. I can read Russian. What I’m reading is:

And I cannot comment on whether or not you are cherry picking or misrepresenting anything from the reports.

All of the decisions I read through have been accepted, ratified, voted on completely unanimously. No “nays”, no abstentions. This whole thing is just a glorified green stamp.

Can't comment on this, even though I smell bs.

A lot of time is spent on speeches

This is a problem because?

None of those speeches show any dissent.

I neither trust that you have actually read and remember the contents of that many speeches, or that you understand the all of the contexts or nuances of those speeches. Furthermore, during conditions of wartime or near wartime (as your only example is in), there naturally tends to be less disagreement. You can see how quickly factions unite under external threats.

E.g. when Molotov is talking about friendly relationships with Nazi Germany and Italy in 1940, there’s zero dissent.

What is this supposed to mean? I assume you bring this particular point up specifically to play on the "USSR collaborated with nazis" trope (straining your credibility), but what does "talking about" mean exactly? For example, if he mentions that the government has stabilized the situation (stating facts), why would that generate dissent (unless he was factually incorrect)?

Your original statement - “compelled to by democratic forces” - was implying (maybe accidentally), that those forces have at least partial power in the government. It sounded similar to the social democratic idea of “The workers have a say in the government, so they vote for things they desire”.

In the case of the USSR, it was almost entirely workers. Workers (and non-working lower class folk) who voted in representatives for their local soviets, the local soviets who then voted in representatives for higher soviets and so on. The soviet structure, which existed for the workplace as well, although higher level government bodies still had some say in how the workplace was run (necessary to ensure coherence in the economic plan). It was common for people to personally write letters to Stalin or other officials, who would then be required to respond to their requests. I have even heard stories from non-communist eastern europeans who say things like "my grandmother once wrote to Stalin to ask him to transfer her to a new unit because she thought the commander was hot. And that's how my father was born". This level of extreme intermingling between the citizenry and the leadership is surely a strong mechanism of democracy. Another democratic mechanism existed in the USSR whereby the 1936 constitution was crafted with suggestions from the populace and had to be approved by a vote from the population. It is in the context of these democratic mechanisms that my comments about welfare become "proof" for the USSR being democratic. If it wasn't democratic and all of the mechanism I listed above are lies, how would that square with the USSR working to abolish surplus value or having income distributions orders of magnitudes more equal than countries with comparable levels of industrialisation. It wouldn't.

Your original sarcastic comment had other possible interpretations: “democracy is a meaningless term”, or “democracy is secondary to well-being of the populace”, but these are even more reactionary than the welfare-democracy one, and your following response suggested that was the one you intended.

No it didn't. It went "In the despotic east, the people are forced to ..., in the democratic west, the people choose to starve in the streets". The idea that in a democracy, a population would choose to impoverish and immiserate itself is the whole joke to begin with. When I was writing that comment, I was operating under the assumption that you were the type who would defend western "democracies".

The first point you're wrong on, as I have explained.

No you haven't. Bismark only implemented his policies to placate a working class as you yourself claim. You only need to placate and disarm a class if they become a threat to your power. Your examples only further reinforce my point that states in general have to be compelled to provide welfare policies. It takes some level of success in class conflict to win concessions.

Both proofs and indicators serve similar goals rhetorically, I don't see the point of your distinction here. I also didn't say "proof" when criticizing your point:

They do not at all. If you drank a soda that tasted sweet, that would be an indicator that it had fructose in it. But it would not be proof as the soda could have artificial sweetners like sacharine instead. The implementation of welfare policies are the result of an intermingling of factors, and each country has its own circumstances.

That is correct, however; both figuratively and literally.

So far, you have yet to explain how exactly the USSR under Stalin was not democratic, which was the whole thing I was mocking your views over.

Correction: by the need to disarm and pacify the proletariat, when class rule becomes too threatened. German Empire is a good example. Nobody would dare to call Bismarck’s rule “democratic”

You have managed to miss both the point of the joke and my explanation of it. I was being sarcastic in my comment and not writing a thesis on democracy. The joke was never meant to accurately define democracy. As for my explanation, you have somehow missed the fact that I explicitly say that welfare is an indicator for the strength of democratic forces, and not "proof" that a country is a democracy.

I agree, MLs have long abandoned what communism was supposed to mean.

Are you being purposefully obtuse?

However fascists often define “democracy” as the ruler following the will of the people, which is shown through fulfilling certain needs of the population, like food, healthcare, housing

Oh, was the USSR under Stalin fascist then? Was it simply "placating" and "disarming" the working population? Or was it liberal or monarchist? Because that is the original topic I replied to. Nobody but the most dumbass of ultras can pretend that the USSR under Stalin was not socialist. Certainly did not achieve higher stage communism as it still had a large peasant class.

So democracy to you is when a state does SocDem welfare policies?

A state only does welfare policies when it is compelled to by democratic forces. After WW2, western masses were both militarised, and the threat of the USSR loomed large. This new power balance favoring the labor movement was the only reason they won their welfare states. As soon as the power balance shifted, western governments started dismantling the welfare states. In other words, welfare policies, and the distribution of income are an effective gauge of the level of democratic power in a country.

The USSR, unlike the SocDems went well beyond mere welfare. Rents were capped to 5% of your income, and most people didn't even pay that, as home ownership rates were well over 90%. Food was subsidized to such a degree that in many socialist countries, it severely distorted the economy (and was likely a contributing factor to their downfalls ironically). Transportation and many forms of entertainment were virtually free (soviet citizens had access to community spas, theaters, an opera house in basically every city, iirc). Income differentials in the socialist states were orders of magnitudes lower than in SocDem states.

Now obviously, these policies aren't "proof" of democracy, but are certainly a strong indicator. And my statements were never meant to prove anything really, as it was a joke.

But that tie-in would clearly be hard to accept if you wanted to argue for USSR being democratic, as it was far from a stateless classless moneyless society.

Ah, the timeless technique of using a different definition of a word that a community clearly does not use, purely to generate confusion.

unless you tie the idea of democracy to the liberal-fascist “will of the people” concept. But that would imply very bad things about your views, friend.

I don't remember making any references to "the will of the people", but even if I did, thinking that would make me a "liberal-fascist" (what I think you are implying) because of that borders on asinine.

It's sarcasm about how you think the USSR was not democratic despite it being able to feed, clothe and house all of its citizens even under immense economic pressure. Things which the so called democracies of today, despite being orders of magnitudes wealthier still choose to not do.

In the despotic East, the people are forced to have free housing and highly subsidised food despite having sanctioned war torn peasant economies, in the democratic West, they choose to starve on the streets despite having more wealth than any other countries in history.

It's really quite a conundrum.

In your scenario, if some of the people who think there is no genocide still supported a pro Palestinians candidate (likely that there are at least some), then the number of people who believe there is a genocide, but still wouldn't support a pro Palestinians candidate would be even higher. My scenario is actually the most optimistic one.

Only social media users said they’d be more likely to support a candidate who supported Palestinians (33-19 percent). Just 15 percent of cable news viewers said the same, even though 31 percent of cable viewers agreed that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians.

Does this mean what I think it means? That roughly half of the cable news watchers who believe that Israel is commiting genocide literally do not care?

What will they influence American youths to do? Not support genocide?

Spook is from the german "spuking" which means haunting. Its use in this context comes from the german philosopher Max Stirner who is infamous for the memes where X is declared to be a spook.

Understanding what exactly spooks are is somewhat challenging, and plenty of people get the wrong ubderstanding about what is meany by spooks. But at least in the meme way of using the word, a spook is anything you think is a fairy tale, or nonsense that you don't care about.