☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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Cake day: January 18th, 2020
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I don’t think the crisis has been averted. It’s going to take a long time before energy prices get back to normal because restarting production can’t happen overnight. Just clearing the backlog of tankers in the gulf is going to take over a year. I also don’t see Israel stopping attacking Lebanon which means the fighting is likely to restart soon.
Trump wants to get out desperately, but he has no way out because Israel won’t play along. From Russian perspective it makes sense to play along though because it drives Europeans up the wall. And I don’t see what leverage he has left either.
And completely agree that strikes just serve to remind people in Russia why the war is necessary. The overall situation on the front won’t change, but it will help with firming up public support to remove the threat.
It does look like Russia is ramping up deep strikes on infrastructure especially now that the US ran out of patriots during their Iran fiasco. I think this will be significant over time, and affect logistics going forward which will accelerate the events on the front.
I saw a video just yesterday of some kid beating up TCK cause they took his dad. Yes, public is definitely starting to turn on them.
And American style propaganda does in fact have its origins with Goebbels, I might’ve sent this before. It explains everything very clearly. https://royallib.com/read/artemov_vladimir/psihologicheskaya_voyna_v_strategii_imperializma.html#0
8·23 hours agoIndeed, I really hope Iran puts a stop to that finally.
We’ll definitely have to wait to see this all shakes out in practice, but I do think we’re starting to see material reality catch up with the empire. Iran proved to be too tough a nut to crack, and now the empire has no good options left. The fact that there are serious talks happening on Iranian terms shows that Iran is in the dominant position here.
1·1 day agoYou can disagree all you like but the facts are not on your side.
Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
- https://wid.world/document/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-property-russia-1905-2016/
- https://wid.world/document/appendix-soviets-oligarchs-inequality-property-russia-1905-2016-wid-world-working-paper-201710/
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
- http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PubEdUSSR.htm
- http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/anglosov.htm
- http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000013/001300eo.pdf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union
- https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html
USSR ended famines under Stalin https://artir.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/the-soviet-series-from-farm-to-factory-stalins-industrial-revolution/
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:
- https://books.google.com/books?id=x8JYjwEACAAJ
- https://web.archive.org/web/20210509140019/https://b-ok.cc/book/2669908/77497f
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:
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https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
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Had the 2nd fastest growing economy of the 20th century after Japan.
The USSR started out at the same level of economic development and population as Brazil in 1920, which makes comparisons to the US, an already industrialized country by the 1920s, even more spectacular.
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Free Universal Health care, and most doctors per capita in the world.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/newsholme/1933/red-medicine/index.htm) 42 doctors per 10k population, vs 24 in Denmark and Sweden, 19 in US.
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Had near zero unemployment, continuous economic growth for 70 straight years. The “continuous” part should make sense – the USSR was a planned, non-market economy, so market crashes á la capitalism were pretty much impossible.
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
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https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-you-get-by-on-the-average-americans-retirement-income/
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Combatted sex inequality. Equal wages for men and women mandated by law, but sex inequality, although not as pronounced as under capitalism, was perpetuated in social roles.
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Soviet power production per capita in 1990 was more than the EU, Great Britain, or China’s in 2014.
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0735675784900482 (use sci-hub for access)
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The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://web.archive.org/web/20240218132709/https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf
Now let’s look at what happens after the USSR collapsed, and what came with capitalist privatization:
- Life expectancy decreases by 10 years. 2. 7.7 million excess deaths in the first year. 2
- 40% of population drops into poverty.
- GDP instantly halves.
- One in ten children now live on the streets.. Was 29.3 in 2003 which is around (current) Syria and Micronesia, 7.9 in 2013. Infant mortality in USSR was 1.92, literally the lowest in the world.
- 1996 election rigged by the US, Yeltsin sends in tanks to disperse the supreme soviet.
For an overview of the soviet experiment, watch this brilliant talk by Micheal Parenti, or read his article, Left anticommunism, the unkindest cut.
Also read this great article by Stephen Gowans, Do publicly owned, planned economies work?. Audio on youtube
And here we have some academic studies on USSR
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possible:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Romania, the inustrialization of an agrarian economy under socialist planning
Making any sort of equivalence between that to the hellscape that liberal capitalism has created is both deeply ignorant and dishonest.
the term is semantic drift
17·1 day agoActually, ReactOS and Wine have historically worked together and share significant technical overlap in the goal of reimplementing the Windows API, though they have different approaches and end goals. They’re separate projects now, but a lot of work in wine happened thanks to ReactOS.
yeah that’s true
looks like
And now everybody saw how the US can just cut access to their model at any time too.
And what’s preventing other countries from subsidizing their own essentials again?
If you think Stalin is worse than Musk or Bezos there’s really no point trying to have a discussion with you. I grew up in USSR, and it’s always hilarious to watch ignoramuses try to tell me what life there was really like. You’re like a poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect buddy.
We talked about this before, lack of a good selection process that allowed people of low competence to get into positions of power and created a bureaucracy which was largely concerned with preserving itself rather than solving problems was the ultimate cause of the decline. Simply telling people everything is great while you’re unable to produce substantive change they can see tangibly deligitimizes the system. And that’s precisely what we see happening in the west today, and why there’s now public disillusionment with liberal democracy.
And you’re absolutely right that Europe has been propped up to prevent genuine socialism from taking hold. The US didn’t pour billions upon billions into rebuilding western Europe after WW2 out of sheer altruism. They used it as a way to deligitimize communism in the east. Look how great Europeans are living, look how much faster things develop under capitalism. That was the whole narrative. This is a great read on the subject incidentally, confirms everything you said http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27c/046.html
This is a caricature from a Soviet newspaper from 1955. Absolutely nothing has changed.
Yup, that cartoon is ever green, and just as true as the day it was made.
It never even crossed my mind that someone might try to harm me.
Exactly, there were just not thoughts people had back in USSR. It’s destruction was the biggest crime of the 20th century.
I really can’t see how relations with Europe could be restored at this point. There would have to be a revolution in Europe before that happens.
And I’m just going by what Zelensky said when Blumenthal visited. They openly stated that they’re going to be shuffling Syrsky out by fall, and it’s clear the directive is coming from the US. It could be that Americans are hoping to transition to something like Chechnya soon.
Yeah, LaTex has been a pain to set up historically, so making it more accessible is very welcome.
This is not a theoretical debate, we have direct example from USSR. There is no guarantee that a start run system won’t have elite capture, but the dynamics are fundamentally different. For example, people like Musk or Bezos simply didn’t exist in USSR. You could have status if you were high up in a party, but that just meant having a bigger apartment. Max salary was capped at 9x the minimum, and it was actually scientists and engineers who had the highest salaries. So, the way you advanced within the system and got higher status was by contributing. And we can also see how this quickly changed after a transition to capitalism when an extractive oligarch class appeared overnight. It’s a clear example of how systemic incentives directly affect the outcomes.
Also, a single party state actually has a far higher incentive to be seen as legitimate by the public because everybody knows that when things go wrong the party is to blame. The power of the party is directly derived from social stability. Meanwhile, in liberal form of democracy, parties can just play hot potato with responsibility. If they lose an election they then somebody else gets to run things for a while, and then they get back into power like nothing happened.
that’s cause it’s literally what it is, legalized bribery
it sure does, the US is just the most blatant about it
Might also pave a path towards governments moving off windows if it can run existing software they use.
I think Stalin was largely correct in what he did, the problem was that he left a system which failed to ensure strong leadership going forward. A stable social system can’t depend on a single strong willed individual being in charge and making the right calls. Continuity of competent governance, especially in time of plenty is the hardest problem to solve in my opinion.
And completely agree, China quietly outplayed the west. A lot of it was inherent in western hubris too. They really thought that theirs was the only way to develop, and they figured that China would have to become like them eventually and they’d fold it in. But it didn’t work out that way. Turns out people with 3000 years of continuous civilization under their belt know a thing or two of their won. Also, don’t know if you saw, but American media has now realized DPRK is doing rather well. https://archive.ph/b9zrS
The west really is starting to look like the final days of the Roman empire now. I expect we’ll start seeing provinces getting cut loose next and imploding economically. The UK looks like it might be the first to pop.