How does one have a monopoly on eggs in a non-hypetindustrial country? Did grandpa invent the chicken and visit every village and start renting out hens XD

Am I supposed to feel sorry for a billionaire that made money by hoarding a basic necessity?

Yeah, I would not be surprised if they tried to escalate “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to this level.

Try sh.itjust.works. Most folks don’t notice us.

Not a word of complaint about Israeli 4k livestreamed genocide? Shooting children in the head? Blowing up hospitals? Murdering aid workers? Starving an entire population in an open-air prison?

You could condemn both October 7th and Israel but you don’t. Your “middle” is skewed as fuck.

Your opinion isn’t “radical”, it’s straight up genocide-apologist.

I don’t consider the USSR or CCP to be far left or really any form of left. They’re just red fascists.

Wow. How did you pull all of that out of your ass?

I speak zero Russian but would love to know what “western communism” entails in the mind of a Russian person who holds these opinions. Alas.

Imperialism?

Ikr I was in a similar debate. I just gave up. I was going to type this — usually said when a person just doesn’t like to find a middle ground and keeps screaming that they are right:

“ठीके बाबा. तूम्ही महान, आम्ही लहान. तुम्हाला चार पाय, आम्हाला दोन पाय. तुम्ही गाढव आम्ही माणूस.”

Translation: Ok bro. You are great, I am not. You have 4 legs, I have 2. You are a donkey, I am a human.

Uh-huh. Not like that rings the statistics manipulation alarm at all or anything.

Not really; if you read (lmao) more into it, you’d find that those scholars that I cited argue that it’s preferable to use averages rather than try to get precise YoY level numbers because it’s difficult to source consistent data for several chunks of time and regions.

Did uhhh… did you mean to paste this bit or forget to trim it before you posted? Is the US not a “modern nation?”

The “modern nation” reference was talking about the group of post-industrial nations at the time in which the USSR existed. I.e. “for all modernized, non-developing nations at that time”.

But I hear you, fam. Fair criticism. I used two different adjectives to describe the relative parity between the two countries. Silly of me.

But since you also clearly prefer to fling shit rather read a fucking book or two, I’ll distill a line for you that’ll hopefully stick:

At its peak in 1953, the estimated incarceration rate in the USSR was around 1,558 per 100,000.[1]

That’s less than the 2022 US rate calculated by the USBJ statistics I quoted in a separate post. Certainly not double the US’s current incarceration rate. I suppose you’ll bitch about me comparing current US rate to the 1953 rate, but that’s why it’s a fucking rate/per population. Moreover, the point I was making is that the US has gotten worse than the days of the USSR’s Gulags.

But sure. It’s entirely possible I’m just manipulating statistics and providing citations to nefariously dispute—** checks notes **—the guy who spams Stalin memes, gets banned from communities for calling people tankies, and who spouted a random take without any attempt whatsoever to provide supporting evidence.

«Is normal, ignore that товарисщ»

Go fuck yourself, patriot. :)

[1] E. Belova, P.R. Gregory. “Political economy of crime and punishment under Stalin”. Publ. Choice, 140 (3–4) (2009), pp. 463-478.

It’s because some parts of Lemmy are actually just psyops for Russia and China, just like all those facebook groups during the 2016 elections and all those foreign maga influencers outed during a recent leak.

USA population in 2022 was about 333,287,557

You don’t know what you’re talking about and it shows. The famine you’re referring to happened in 1931-1933, not WW2. By the late 1930s, agriculture in the USSR was collectivized almost wholly and producing better crop yields than ever in history in the region due to the rapid industrialization and usage of tractors and fertilizers.

This rapid industrialization (main reason why the Soviets pushed for rapid collectivization in the late 20s and early 30s) was driven by the geopolitical need to create a heavy industry + military machinery to fight Nazism. If it had not been for the rapid industrialization (which admittedly led to around 5 million deaths in 1930-1934 from hunger), the Soviet Union would have fallen to Nazism and tens of millions more would have been exterminated, remember that the Nazi Generalplan Ost was the extermination of the non Germans between Berlin and the Urals.

A lot of it is fear, too. Those people are raised to fear anything different.

also LOW information to. i saw some pseudo-leftist YTUBERS(whole drama behind them if you followed them) that are magats that are very low information. pre-pandemic they brought up an OBAMA era, oil pipline(canada-usa) and they could not even formulate sentences or words how to discredit the news. (but any trump related events they were immediately silent on, hmm seems like people figured out your allegiance to which party)everyone in the comments said you shouldnt comment on things you do not know.

That’s the spirit.

How about liberalism + actual mental illness, is that dangerous?

(Or any ism for that matter.)

Anarchist communistic projects in Catalonia (1930s), anarchist Ukraine (around 1917), etc.: “Are we a joke to you?”

My guess is that the majority of communist regimes were killed by external countries.

Just a hunch, can’t bother to look at numbers though, but thinking about people like Sankara.

Imagine not falling into the Orwellian hole, not perverting language with conflations and inversions.

Imagine “communism” was still used in the original sense as coined by anarchist political philosophers, at least 5 years before Marx ignored Bakunin and usurped it, stripped the freedom aspect, and handed it over to the tankies (and all the capitalists and imperialists gladly played along).

Imagine communism like Kropotkin and Bakunin would have meant it.

Fully decentralised. Maximally mutually freedom affirming.

Imagine people were so thoroughly availed education instead of indoctrination, and thus were immunized against such perversions of language and thought. Not confusing totalitarianism for [anarcho-]communism, nor fascism for democracy, just because some deceivers intentionally mislabeled them to usurp all power for themselves.

Imagine “democracy” really meant organised by the people, not re-presented by the oligarchs.

Imagine not falling into the Orwellian hole.

Imagine undoing generations of this deeply entrenched Orwellian corruption of language and thought.

*Dreamer*

I would be interested in seeing compiled statistics of how many fell without capitalist interventions.

The CIA themselves have stated how active they were in the 20th century with corrupting, breaking down, and ultimately overthrowing communist regimes and installing dictators.

But also socialism with worker owned co-ops and only infrastructure and regulations through a central government may somewhat be a good direction to go.

The crux seems to be that all forms of government are susceptible to authoriatarians because people themselves are very susceptible to authoritarian strong men and propaganda, inherently.

Good thing Americans didn’t ethnically cleanse in our history… Right.

Padme face

Ikr?

Anarchism mentioned without mentioning anarchism?

But it’s mostly sociopaths that insist on that hierarchy. Something like 3% of any population are sociopaths, and they’re not ‘mentally ill’, they just have a diminished capacity to feel empathy. Because of that, they don’t understand altruism and think the only way society can function is if everyone is in their place – if there are strict rules governing everything, because in their worldview, they see others like themselves, and they would need those rules to keep themselves in check.

It’s very similar to people who think without laws against raping and pillaging, everyone would rape and pillage. They’re mostly telling on themselves, as most of us rape all we’d like, which is never.

Billionaires are often sociopaths. That’s how they became billionaires – because it’s all me, me, me.

…so hierarchy ensures abuse of [its] power.

Very well put.

I have a discussion with my wife every so often about what our own little utopian island would be like, like how the government would be, how roads would be managed, what homes would be like, etc. I brought up the other day this exact point about how if there’s a position of wealth and power at the top controlling too much, then sociopths would gravitate towards that for the same of having power and wealth, which ruins the government system. It would have to be a heavily distributed system of government, but too distributed where it would make it difficult to implement standardizations, get stuff done, etc.

Idk how that would work exactly, because then you’d also have to make sure no greedy, power hungry Trump-likes get into a position with too much power. There has to be a way, though.

Respect to Mike C Rupert too.

And yeah, beware the overly structuralist approaches.

see also that nihilism’s origins were not in destructive apathy as the term is frequently used to mean though, but instead to mean that if someone finds themselves not believing in any pre-existing meaning they have the power to assign their owo meaning to life. we exist in a world that always tells us to find our purpose in life. nihilism tells us to stop waiting for meaning to find us and instead to determine one for ourselves

Apart from fringe activist groups, who thinks of politics as something they have to make happen on a daily basis?

Lots of people actually. The comparison you’re making between many people being generally uninterested in politics vs mental illness being criminalized by the state is, frankly, ridiculous.

The rough gist I’m getting is some poorly substantiated claim of ignorance of general exploitation as worse than overt abuse of human rights, eg

Yes, comrade, I’m locking you up and abusing your fundamental rights, but think how bad you’d have it free, doing the same work with a better standard of living & lower economic inequality while whining about exploitation!

Perhaps workers could earn better without “exploitation” in liberal democracies, but historical record & economic data show the opposite:

• the Soviet system stagnated & deteriorated behind liberal democratic counterparts at living standards & economic growth while still exploiting workers & abusing their fundamental rights
• several liberal democracies continue to achieve lower economic inequality & better living standards than communist states.

The Soviet Union gave up & dismantled itself for this reason. There was no tradeoff of human rights abuses somehow yielding a better life for a less exploited, average worker. For all its rhetoric, the Soviet workers got the worst of everything.

Per the philosophy of social democracies, socialism doesn’t require human rights abuses. Authorities abusing human rights are definitely worse than authorities not doing that & letting people fail on their own terms. In the case of those liberal democracies beating the performance of communist states, those “exploited” workers are freer & doing better than the “unexploited” ones. Given the results, it’s hard to find your notion of “exploitation” credible: I think it’s full of shit & mostly in your deluded theory that’s failing to bear out.