Right?? No, there ideally shouldn’t be gouts of flame spewing from the enclosed top of a grill like that. 😆 That optical illusion is near perfect lol.
But there’s a ton that’s just a bit unsettling about this picture. Like the super bloodshot wide eyes for instance. For some reason “and also the smoker’s on fire” seems mundane.
“1791 was the year it happened. I was 24, younger than you are now, but times were different then. I was a man at that age: the master of a large plantation just south of New Orleans.”
Also victims of communism: anyone aged 1-99 who happens to be the wrong family, who practices wrong think, who has family members who practice wrong think, who have an opinion, who like to be different, and I can go on for a while…
People like you should maybe watch 'the chekist". Once you’re done and not crawled up in fetal position while crying maybe you can think for a little bit about what it is that you really want.
Seriously, you tankie types are nauseatingly naïeve.
Rent seeking behavior is wrongthink. Being Royalty is practicing wrongthink. Communism is built on Critical Theory making criticism of society its bedrock. I dont consume propaganda, I try to stick to primary sources as close as possible and make my own.
Seriously you Capitalist Apologists are so brainwashed by literal Cold War Propaganda its pathetic.
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."
My problem with people citing those metrics is that they are true for Russia itself while ignoring that a large reason for those improvements was colonialism done to the occupied regions. Industrialisation was another thing that improved those metrics but that was hardly unique to the USSR. Some of those regions may have had benefits but here in Estonia it was pretty much all around bad. After the occupation ended the quality of life here improved rapidly.
As far as examples for socialism I’d say the USSR was an all around failure but people still defend it and even Stalin who basically guaranteed it’s failure as a socialist project. In the baltic region the word communism is basically poisoned because of the USSR.
You need to look at the referendum to maintain the soviet union before you say shit about imperialist Russia. Non-russian SSRs were most enthusiastic about keeping the USSR around.
The one boycotted by 6 of the 15 territories? Or the ones that followed in each that led to them declaring independence which in turn led to the collapse of the soviet union?
The baltics were 3 of those boycotting territories and we had similar referendums for independence which, I’m pretty sure, all got over 70% support.
That’s the one, where Russians had less interest in the USSR than the participating territories.
Or the ones that followed in each that led to them declaring independence which in turn led to the collapse of the soviet union?
Sure, and not the presidential coup. Get real.
The baltics were 3 of those boycotting territories and we had similar referendums for independence which, I’m pretty sure, all got over 70% support.
And the Baltics are doing so much better now.
I’m reminded of a story of Lithuania charging holocaust survivors for fighting as partisans against the nazis in WW2. It happened in 2009. They’ve gotten more fascist since. Wonder what itd be like if the USSR was never overthrown.
And a lot of attempts have also been great at raising the standards of living for the general population, as well as for economic development in a relatively quick amount of time.
In the USSR those improvents were for Russia, not so much for their colonised regions where they exported resources from. Industrialisation also helped but that’s not really unique to anything.
And socialist nations like the GDR were better on gay rights in the late 80s than capitalist nations are now.
And Cuba has the most lgbt equality of anywhere right now
And China is opening state sponsored trans Healthcare clinics, including for children
Meanwhile in the US if you’re trans you can’t live in half of the country and you’re worried about getting hatecrimed in the other half. And you have pundits of the capitalist class calling you pedophiles and “the jews of gender”
Also, gay liberation movements in the imperial core were mostly led by communists, you can’t give credit to capitalism for being forced into granting concessions.
Somehow I assume you don’t associate capitalism with chattel slavery and apartheid. But you do associate corrupt authoritarianism with economics when it is system that you don’t like.
I think they are very much capitalist. And then surely the Civil War that poors fought on plantation owners’ behalf should also be blamed on capitalism?
What is it with people here thinking that earning a wage is slavery? That requires either a complete lack of understanding what slavery or just some serious impressive mental gymnastics.
I associate corrupt authoritarianism with communism because it’s an inevitable outcome. Communism only works of you remove individual freedoms and force people into it. This, by design, requires a dictatorship. Dictatorships foster corruption because you can’t have transparency.
I was in my early 20s when the Soviet occupation collapsed here, the victims here were everyone not high up in the party.
Sure, capitalism fucking sucks but pretending the USSR was anything other than just bourgeoisie rule is delusional. The oligarchs were just called the communist party then.
Not really. You’re talking about what happened after the USSR. Which yes, was horrible for the quality of life of people who lived in numerous countries all over the globe, but that’s more of an indictment of capitalism than communism. The looting of the government coffers to privatize everything and create oligarchs was a result of the post-USSR shock therapy.
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.
Estonia but it’s not like that was not the case elsewhere in the occupied areas. Russia mostly exported resources out of there to benefit itself which is a large reason how it raised quality of life in Russia itself.
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 never said the US was better than the USSR, I don’t really give a shit about the US. One shit country being slightly better than another one does not make it good.
I like how you characterised it as “some mistakes” . The whole famine business that ravaged the USSR was caused by sheer incompetence. A guy appointed by Stalin to manage agriculture came up with a fun idea of “communist crops won’t compete for resources” and forcing farmers to plant crops way too close. I’d say that was one of the greatest mistakes. There was also some killing the gays and some ethnic minorities but I think those were intentional.
I also don’t attribute anything to communism, only the USSR, communism hasn’t existed. I also attribute being the worst advertisement imaginable for communist to the USSR. They kinda ruined it for everyone else by calling themselves that.
You should look into south america in the 70s and 80s. The CIA’s unrestrained human experimentation in the regiom perfected this ideological soft power superweapon or “strategic ideological construct”. Trying to find exactly what these kinds of things are called.
I don’t understand why anything anti capitalism these days is automatically communism. It’s such a large swing from one side to the other. I just want my taxes to pay for healthcare, infrastructure, and education instead of wars and prisons. I want to stop getting fucked by corporations that have infinitely more money than I can ever imagine. I don’t think that makes me a communist. I’m just anti-fucking-the-people. Capitalism can fuck people. Communism can fuck people too. I support Corpo-Politico-Celibacism. Stop the fucking.
Edit: Okay, fuck the people. You guys must have this figured out.
Not sure if it’s just me but personally Boss in general feels like an anti status symbol. Whenever I see someone wearing clothes with an obvious Boss logo on it I cringe a bit and think of them having a very low self esteem and poor spending habits…
You could extend that remark to any clothes prominently displaying pretty much any brand as far as I’m concerned. You’re paying extra for the privilege of being a walking advertisement.
Don’t they do both? Like they have the big-logo stuff for the wannabes that is just overpriced H&M, but don’t they also make actual nice suits and stuff.
Isn’t that true of anything that is actually low quality textile with a big logo on it? If you actually care about clothes and the way they look you don’t want some big dumb word written on your body. Unless. You are like the guy in the picture and being paid to wear a shirt like that, don’t do free advertisement for these sweatshops.
Ubisoft has released many games that require constant Internet access the past decade and then just shutting off the servers making the game completely unplayable. This just happened to The Crew last month. This will happen to:
The Crew 2
The Crew Motorfest
Steep
Riders Republic
Star Trek Bridge Crew
Skull & Bones (A AAAA game)
Newer versions of Just Dance
Newer versions of Rocksmith
And more…
Pirating doesn’t solve the game being completely unplayable when UbiSoft decides to shut down the servers.
The Crew could be played all the way through as a single player game. It made no sense for a constant Internet connection. The Crew’s credit screen for the final version of the game lasts over 45 minutes. Thousands of employees across the entire world worked on that game and now it is just gone with only gameplay videos being the only record of existence.
Pirating doesn’t solve it, but It fixes the problem at hand for now. The next thing would be sth. Like the internet archive to legally archive it when ubisoft decides to delete it from their servers.
If Ubisoft kept the crew (and others) on your account post-shutdown, people could create community servers much like they have for Titanfall and others.
Piracy allows software to be controlled by users, not publishers, in a way that if there was legitimate support for it people can still reverse engineer these games to support them.
Gran Turismo 4, for example, can only be modded and given online functionality through piracy (mods require a version of the game used as a beta test for some features so it wasn’t widely sold).
Piracy isn’t the only tool in maintaining discontinued games, but it’s fundamental to people who may want to develop alternative servers for them.
The sadder thing is that Chinese social credit hasn’t actually even been implemented, and doesn’t seem like it’s going to. There are only limited local experiments, most of which are allegedly largely irrelevant.
Whereas there are multiple credit score companies currently tracking literally everyone who has a bank account.
It has been implemented, just not at the full scale they originally planned. It started in 2014 and was supposed to be finished by 2020, but has received a lot of pushback and controversies. There are people who are not allowed to fly on a plane, take a train, make a large purchase, or attend certain events in China, that is an undeniable fact.
One of the most well known examples is Xu Xiaodong, a MMA fighter who set out on a journey to expose fake Kung Fu Mystics by challenging them to fights. He relies completely on other individuals to travel, and has to send his videos overseas to be uploaded online because otherwise they get censored by the CCP.
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