UN, get your own shit together. Why did you do about the Haiti sexual violence committed under your own fucking flag

Absolutely repulsive. White supremacy masquerading as communism.

Squeee!

It’s not hatred alone. The most optimal strategic plays are uniting with each other because Trump is playing his hand in such a way as to make it so.

Think of it this way, do people hate street fighter players who only low kick? Yes. But if you have someone who just spams low kick, people are going to choose aerials way more often, not out of hatred, but because that’s what the meta demands.

Mysterium and gravitas, you mean?

Dunking on the democrats. showboating even

The USSR was definitely NOT settler colonialist, that’s easy to argue. But I, too, have unanswered questions about the nation of Russia and its history.

Clearly there were Europeans who went East, and clearly there were and are indigenous peoples East of the Urals.

What I haven’t done is the research to understand what the actual history of Russia is regarding these indigenous peoples and the analysis of that history through a colonial/decolonizing lens.

Thank you for asking this. I hope some good discussions and resources come out of this thread.

It’s generally not true. What is true is that every single person in a society organized to kill you through neglect is motivated to find some way to making a lot of money and escaping their plight. The way you do this in a capitalist society is you make some rich people much richer. So you try to come up with ways to make them richer.

Sometimes that means solving problems that the masses will pay you for, if only you could scale it (investors show up to scale it, take 70% of the value, you become a millionaire).

Sometimes that means solving a problem for industry that reduces their costs, if I only you could overcome the upfront costs (investors show up to build it, take 70% of the value, you become a millionaire).

However, what people who have never done this don’t realize is that the real problem being solved is the problem of making rich people more money. Literally anything that makes them richer will get there investment, regardless of it solves social problems or creates social problems. Inversely, if you solve social problems for the masses but it can’t make the rich richer, then your solution never gets any traction.

The selection criteria is fundamentally whether or not it makes the rich richer. That’s why in the US such a massive percentage of GDP is artificial markets - copyrighted art and media, digital rights management, digital locks on tractors and machinery, digital locks on printer ink and Keurig cups - or total wastes of time - billions in rebranding, billions in consulting to merge and then divest - or in terribly damaging social engineering - billions in pink taxes, boys vs girls branding, manipulating beauty standards, manipulating children, sugary cereals, endless plastic toys, chemical engineering to create food cravings and suppress satiety, etc.

So yes, competition creates a frenzy of activity, but the activity is poorly directed, often negative value, innovative and novel ways to harm people, and ultimately not geared towards anything useful.

Meanwhile, look at socialism and compare where it actually matters - the Soviets dominated space exploration compared to the West. During COVID, the US spent billions racing for a vaccine and Cuba developed one on the same timeline without the massive grift while under the most brutal and long-term collective punishment regime in the history of the world.

At the end of the day, purposeful, intentional, directed effort will always beat the mass chaos of random actors all frenzily trying to save themselves out of desperation.

This sounds like the DreamWorks remake of Boondock Saints

The revolutionary way of thinking about meditation is the same as the revolutionary way of thinking about working out.

However, thinking about meditation is just as useful as thinking of working out.

Meditation is not some external magic that will transform you against your will, just like lifting weights won’t make you an accidental meathead.

Meditation is about you, not about something else. Working out is about you, not about something else. You are actively participating in it at all times. There is no risk of becoming numb to the injustices of the world unless that is what you are actively pursuing. There is no risk of becoming lost in escapism unless that is what you are actively pursuing.

I never said the USSR didn’t do anything bad. They did tons that was bad, many things that communists today study from both the perspective of “this was wrong headed and should not be repeated” like wholesale banning religion and from the perspective of “the conditions at the time were so severe, this is the best they could come up and we need to learn so we can do better” like the relocation of Koreans.

But we don’t have to argue about that because what you have presented shows a lot of misunderstandings of history and political analysis that needs to be corrected before we can proceed on making judgements on any country or leader.

First off, falsifying documents is not imperialism. Banning political parties is not imperialism. Imperialism is a process value extraction by nations over nations that allows one nation to continuous acquire the value produced by another nation through structural force and use that value to maintain this exploitative structure.

Second off, “after the war” is a really critical important time period. For some reason, all the Russophobes seem to think that when the war is over then everyone should just pick up their jerseys and head home and leave the field to its own devices. War has never worked like that. The reason the USSR turned a free country into its satellite is because that free country no longer had a functioning military to defend itself and the region from further fascist/capitalist incursions. That includes lacking a counter-intelligence capacity.

And now we get to Nazis. There was absolutely a fascist movement in Czechoslovakia that lasted basically until the Nazis came in and occupied the country. And when they came in and occupied the country, they were the fascist movement in Czechoslovakia. At that point, Czechoslovakia ceased being a free country.

The Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia has to contend with multiple threats. First, the Third Reich had purged the government and as much of society as possible of anyone with communist, trade unionist, and anti-fascist sentiments. Then they installed fascists in the administration of the country and elevated and armed pro-fascists throughout the country. This is the first problem. The Soviets couldn’t just liberate and leave because they would be leaving behind a fascist power structure that would never stop trying to find ways of destroying them.

The second problem is after the war. It was clear even before the war started that the Western powers would rather have fascism than communism. Multiple attempts by Stalin to get the Western powers to stop the spread of fascism failed because the West understood fascism as an extension of capitalism and communism as the antithesis of capitalism. By the time the war is ending, the West is making this abundantly clear with their show of force nuking Japan, their occupation of Korea, the creation of the Western European Union and ultimate NATO. NATO was staffed by hand picked Nazi officers, a clear signal to the Soviets that there was no chance for real peace. Then those Nazi officers in collaboration with Western leadership planned and executed Operation Gladio which set about to connect with all the pro-fascists groups across all of Europe in an effort to organize a non-state militia movement to continue the fight against the USSR that the Nazis had advanced.

Under these conditions, the USSR could not simply leave all of the countries it has liberated as it matched to Berlin. The countries were economically devastated, their administrations had been purged of anyone remotely friendly to the USSR and violently populated with Nazis, ultranationalists, and fascists, and every country had fascists in them that were now being organized and armed by the West to continue fighting the USSR. At this point, the only option the USSR has is to take on the task of rebuilding all of these nations at every level: social, economic, and political. Anything less than this would create the conditions for violent fascist uprisings and continued war and bloodshed.

So what is there to do but use the political tools available. The USSR is a union of socialist states, with political structures for how each member state could express its own culture and localized needs and development. Unfortunately, this had never been tried at such distances and the Soviet leadership needed to come up with a way of achieving the goals of peaceful codevelopment without having the Western-most states being formally SSRs. Their solution was to ensure these states were independent but that they were heavily managed by the USSR in the social, political, economic, and military domains to prevent the emergence of fascist militias and fascist movements - things that were not only possible but were literally being actively cultivated by the West.

Religion was not banned in Czechoslovakia nor was all of Western culture. The Catholic Church was particularly targeted by the Soviets for purging from their sphere of influence and with good reason, the Vatican was the core actor in helping Nazi leadership escape the Soviet sacking of Berlin. The Vatican was relocating Nazis all over the world and the US joined them through Operation Paperclip. As the Soviets, it would be obviously suicidal to allow the unfettered operation of the vestiges of the Holy Roman Empire who were actively supporting the Third Reich and deliberately relocation their ranks with obscured histories and names. Can you imagine anyone leaving that alone on the basis of “well it’s religion”?

As for C.S. Lewis, have you read his work? It’s all pretty out and out Christian Nationalism. I don’t blame the USSR for banning it. But all Western work was not banned. Plenty of French and Italian media was widely popular in the Soviet bloc. What you’re mainly referring to is the fact that much of Anglo media was banned. And again, for good reason. The UK was the largest must brutal empire on the face of the planet. They weaponized culture in ways no one has ever done before. But they were already being ecclipsed by the USA who continued that tradition and amplified it to it’s most extreme. The US was literally manipulating the art market via dark money under the direction of the CIA. Nothing is sacred to the anglosphere. They corrupted everything they touched for political purposes - religion, parenting, education, journalism, literature, music, art, theater, technology, language, politics at all levels, community organizing, etc.

The Soviets were very clear that they did not want war. But the Americans were very clear that they would do anything it took to create the conditions for more war. The Soviets were trying to build a never-before-seen society and they needed peacetime to rebuild after the devastation caused by the West. Meanwhile, the USA had been untouched by the war and was taken the post war period as a major opportunity to expand its empire. It launched a massive campaign in Korea that made Blitzkrieg look like a walk in the park. Korea, by the way, shares a border with Russia. Watching the US completely level half of an entire country after WW2 is over while the Soviets are dealing with millions dead and war-induced famine makes it very clear that the US has every intention of creating conditions for a war of devastation with the USSR.

Did the Soviet leadership do bad things? Absolutely. But were they just an evil imperialist regime that made up lies and punished people for sheer control? Absolutely not. Everything they did was based on the structure of conflict with the West and the realities of Western empire, including the thorough integration of fascism, faith, culture, economics, and politics.

Another heavy blow to the US banking industry

China lifted 800 million peasants out of abject poverty. In fact, China accounts for nearly ALL of the world’s net positive poverty alleviation in the last 50 years, as capitalist countries have produced more poor people over that time.

So, hate to break this to you but it’s been almost 20 years since you shouldn’t just open ports directly to your computer from your home router AND it’s been about that long since ISPs just don’t allow traffic to customers on standard ports like 80, 443, 21, 22, etc.

The way to do this is actually to have multiple computers, with the first computer acting as your firewall, IDS, and IPS. That computer should run no other services and should be heavily locked down after it’s setup, as in most things should be made read-only except the few variable files that are required for operations.

That computer should then route traffic to computers behind it that provide services like https, ssh, etc. This setup makes everything much safer.

But you’ll still have to contend with your ISP and they don’t usually budge, so you’ll have to run services on non-standard ports.

It’s amazing to see. I mean, on the humorous side, it’s an obvious own goal.

In the sombre and cynical side, it’s a decoupling in advance of war.

Lol

Here’s the first paragraph.

It was a cover-up.

The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time. It even has multiple names thanks to its peculiar chronology. From 2016 until April 2019 — while Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations that would topple Donald Trump — it was generally known as the Trump-Russia scandal. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments, attention began to be cast on the scandal’s fraudulent construction, how it was propped up by political spying, illegal leaks, and WMD-style intelligence fakery. Trump and others began to call it Spygate or the Russia hoax, but the name that stuck was Russiagate.

This is hardly word salad. It’s pretty straight forward. Sentence 1 describes the topic - a scandal, a news story, convoluted, hard to follow, superlative. Sentence 2 sets up the rest of the paragraph - it has a weird timeline, and also a bunch of names by which it’s been called in the news media. Sentence 3, despite using an aside demarcated by em-dashes, is very straight ahead - it was called this from when to when. Sentence 4 establishes the setup for Sentence 5 in which another name will be revealed - the setup is that there was fraud, spying, and spy games. Sentence 5 closes the thread by revealing the second name was spy-related, and concludes by bringing it back to Sentence 1 and says this is the name that stuck.

World salad? Absolutely not.

But, I can imagine why you think it’s word salad:

• Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations
• Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments

These 2 phrases are emotional and they indict any reader who felt these emotions. The author is speaking directly to the emotional manipulation that so many in the country (and abroad) were put through and not attempting to soothe the reader in any way.

And this type of writing is so slippery to the closed mind that they end up not being able to make sense of any of these words, imagining instead that the author is both rabid and vapid, as a defense against having their minds changed.

The rate of profit…

This creates the conditions for India and China to develop better relationships