Cmon, don't fuck this one up

  • Tervell [he/him]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Well There's Your Anticommunism, a podcast about never learning any lessons, with liberals

    Okay I just skipped to a random point in the episode and heard the line

    the Stasi was a couple orders of magnitude more effective than the Gestapo in WW2, like it was the worst police and fanatic police really

    like Jesus fucking Christ. And the amazing thing is, in literally the next line the guy points out the contradiction

    at the same time, when it came to it, when push came to shove, they didn't shove and they didn't push, which is just really kind of strange 'cause you would have expected them to shoot at people in the end

    Yeah, you would have fucking expected that since you're comparing them to the Gestapo - maybe the fact that they didn't do that ought to make you rethink your evaluation of these supposedly authoritarian and highly repressive socialist states, but no, you just move right on, no light bulbs going off in your head or anything, just blob-no-thoughts

    another sort of context lesson here, that it is important, if you wanna do a socialist movement, to have, like, an interest in the next generation of it instead of torturing all of them

    oh fuck off Alice

    there were a lot of off-ramps where the Soviet Union could have created a more sustainable version of socialism, and they just chose not to

    THE FUCK DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?? like, this isn't talking about Gorbachev's fuck ups or Khrushchev's reforms, it follows the previous quote so I guess "sustainability" is "not repressing people"? Like, this is what you're pointing to as the reason they collapsed, they were just too mean to their populace?

    the Soviet Union was a shitty alternative, but it was an alternative, you had someone trying something else, maybe it wasn't working but they were trying something else

    industrializing in like 20 years? massive increases in living standards? massively powerful industry? technological innovations? actually winning the Space Race despite what the Americans might say? um, sorry, that's not working apparently

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      THE FUCK DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?? like, this isn't talking about Gorbachev's fuck ups or Khrushchev's reforms, it follows the previous quote so I guess "sustainability" is "not repressing people"?

      it's one of my more controversial opinions here but I think Khrushchev's reforms were actually necesary he just fucked up the implementation

      • star_wraith [he/him]
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        1 year ago

        Yep, I think there were roughly 3 issues at play:

        1.) Khrushchev’s implementation sucked and had a mix of good ideas and bad ideas.

        2.) The bureaucratic structures in place from before him pushed back on any significant changes to how the economy was to be run. I think the Brezhnev era was in part a response to these attempts as Brezhnev largely just tried to keep things as they were (even though the Soviet economy desperately needed some changes).

        3.) I believe a fully centrally planned socialist economy was not possible until the 1970s or maybe even the 1980s. Central planning is more efficient than the free market, but you need the computers and the math behind you. The 60s were a period where you reach a level of significant complexity in the economy but the computer tech and the math just wasn’t there yet to match the task.

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
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          1 year ago

          leontief's models are pretty good and they're from the 30s but yeah the economic calculation problem was only recently solved with computers

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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        1 year ago

        There were many different policies and some of them were just decent while others were fundamentally malignant (and many in between).

    • Grimble [he/him,they/them]
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      edit-2
      1 year ago

      How self-absorbed and attached at the hip to your own conservative upbringing do you have to be to talk like this jfc.