YuccaMan [he/him]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXutg47BwEU

I gotchu bud

I cannot stress enough how much it is the year 260 CE

Worse, the US was actually like this once before. The Articles of Confederation de facto gave individual states the ability to set their own foreign policy agendas independent of one another. It was a complete disaster, and one can hope that the second time around will be no different. The breakdown of federal authority would be ugly and dangerous for many of us in this country, but it’s ultimately what we as leftists within the imperial core should be hoping for.

Actual Nazi propaganda. You get fucked

Seriously. I recently read a paper somebody linked here which went over Russian artillery doctrine. Long and the short is that the Russians can get effective artillery fires on a target inside of three minutes under optimal conditions, particularly when using UAVs for spotting. They’ve also gotten into the habit of attaching mortars to infantry units and forming them up into mortar teams ad hoc, giving such units some quite potent local indirect fire support.

Much appreciated. I could do with more specificity the next time I have to make this argument lol

My BOY how is that not better than sleeping on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk??

Anyhow, what, is every single home in China a flimsy shack? Can you dredge up one single solitary study on what percentage of homes in China are of substandard construction? Can you do any goddamned thing but regurgitate half-remembered unsubstantiated talking points from youtube from lord knows how long ago?

If you can, have it. Give us a source and we’ll have a talk about it. Otherwise, shut the FUCK up

Literally no such thing. The Holodomor is a fiction created by Nazi propagandists to paint the failures of Soviet agricultural policy in dealing with a famine as a deliberate attempt to exterminate Ukranians.

Important to note, this was merely the latest in a long series of famines which had historically plagued this part of eastern Europe. It was also the last.

Hell, I dunno. This sort of thing got through to me eventually, maybe I’m hoping I can change minds myself.

That’s not what he meant and you know it. He’s making light of an obvious double standard regarding the standing in which we hold two sources with obvious national biases.

My pleasure. I hope it wasn’t too rambling, my worst habit is to say in ten words what can be said with five.

If you’d like to know our reasons for doing that (or anyway, my reasons), they’re twofold. First, even with the rise of China and the seeming return of global multipolarity, western countries continue to dominate world affairs, militarily and economically. It’s simply a matter of scale; when they act up, it’s likely to effect the lives of millions of people around the world, directly or otherwise. Second, most of us are ourselves westerners, and of those I’m betting most of us are from the the US. As citizens of these places, our first responsibility is to point out our own nations’ crimes, both because of their widespread influence, and because of our proximity to them.

There’s also the matter of communist countries being the subject of a truly absurd amount of western propaganda. We feel the need to push back against certain narratives about the supposed crimes of communist countries because we know many of them to be exaggerated, misrepresented, and at times outright fabricated. Most of us are close students of history, some of us like myself are even academic historians, and it can be frustrating to provide reams of evidence for our claims (or more often, counter-claims) and be met with accusations of whataboutism, rather than earnest engagement. It’s why so many of us are quick to assume that the pushback we get is in bad faith, because it quite often is.

But anyway, I’m getting off track. Very few of us, I find, are unwilling to acknowledge the flaws, missteps, and yes, even crimes of actually existing socialist states, when they are well evidenced. For instance, I doubt many of us would defend the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, but we’re equally unwilling to accept the Holodomor as an example of deliberate ethnic genocide because the common narratives surrounding it rely on fabricated numbers, misrepresentations of Soviet state policy, and Nazi propaganda, to say nothing of their denial of professional historical consensus.

For real though. It’s hardly difficult to find a bunch of leftists arguing about China lmao

If you payed closer attention you’d notice that we have a range of opinions on China, and we don’t all think everything they do is correct. That’s what the term critical support means. It’s a recognition that even socialist states are imperfect, as the nation state as an institution is fundamentally imperfect and will always and everywhere undermine freedom to some degree. But a state which is undergoing the transition to socialism, particularly one that’s putting themselves in a position to undermine US imperial hegemony like China is, is well worth supporting, even as we acknowledge its flaws and contradictions.

What none of us will ever tolerate are accusations of genocide with one discredited religious fanatic as the source, or racist insults being hurled at their head of state, both things I’ve seen numerous times from users from other instances.

The CPC isn’t genociding the Uyghurs Adrian Zenz, and you wouldn’t give a crap even if they were. This is nothing but a convenient gotcha for you, you don’t know a single Uyghur person. Don’t know their names, their struggles, even their language, much less the language of the people you claim are genociding them. Which is why you’re an intellectual hostage to the fabrications of a religious whackjob.

Bruh Amtrak sucks because there’s extremely low rail density in this country generally and they don’t own any of their own tracks, so the (relatively) few trains that they do run are always getting waylaid by freight trains. Also maintenance requirements for rail companies is incredibly lax, which results in poorly maintained tracks, which limits the trains’ speeds. All of this is a simple public investment problem.

Really now, you can’t come in here with complete ignorance of why a thing is the way it is and say authoritatively that it all sucks, even in countries I’m 100% positive you’ve never been to. All generalized from a single personal anecdote.

I mean I guess you can, you did just do that, but you really shouldn’t. It makes you sound foolish.

And did you at any point ask yourself why they own these things? Why Netflix the corporate entity owns media it did not produce while stiffing the people that did out of just compensation? Or how that information slightly complicates the otherwise simple nature of property and theft?

The only mental gymnast here is you bud. The simple fact is, labor creates value, and Netflix has no part in that. I doubt they even put up any of their own capital in producing these shows.

What’s legal is not necessarily what’s moral, and there’s nothing immoral about freely procuring an infinitely replicable digital product. If anything, it’s immoral to enclose upon them and charge rents for them. No better than landlords, the big streaming companies, save for the fact that entertainment isn’t vital for living.

Not so. The people who actually produce media (actors, writers, production crew) rarely if ever see fair compensation or residuals for their work. The only people you’re stealing from are the people who already stole the value that the actual creators generated, i.e. the studio. And in my opinion, you can’t rob a thief anyway.

This logic doesn’t hold with smaller and/or independent projects, which even the saltiest pirates acknowledge should be payed for in the usual manner.

Edit: Your point about compensation doesn’t even have a completely factual basis. Numerous scientific and medical advancements throughout history have been produced without compensation, often because their creators intentionally declined to profit from them. Sir Banting is a favored example around here; he was one of the first to synthesize insulin, and he and his colleagues opted not to patent it so that it would be as widely available as possible.

Try not being such a little panzy instead

You’ve got nothing here dude, take the L. You’re clearly ignorant of what AES actually looks like historically, how it’s formed, how it responds to pressures and challenges. You’re just going by this vague, largely aesthetic conception of what socialism looks like, that you probably got from some youtuber that call themself a libertarian socialist or some other such incoherent shit, and you’re castigating a real socialist governmemt attempting to reckon with the real world because they haven’t waved a magic wand and enacted your asinine Disneyland version of socialism.