Invoking Vaclav Havel, he said it was time to stop pretending that what the western powers called a rules-based order was not a self-serving sham.
“Great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating,” he said
“Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else,” he said.
“If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, and that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy, it’s your dignity.”
The only solution to fascism is to move towards socialism. Anyone who tells you otherwise is fucking lying to you.
This asshole finally admits what I have been flamed for saying on this website, but he only says it after a whole load of “fuck socialism” beforehand, because SOCIALISM IS THE SOLUTION. HE IS THE POISON. He does not want you to have the cure.
Rule of law is fucking FAKE. It always HAS been. Any semblance of comfort or security you get from the idea that you have rights and legal protections IS A PHANTOM.
YOU NEED TO JOIN A UNION, NOW.
YOU NEED TO ORGANIZE, NOW.
YOU NEED TO ARM YOURSELF, NOW.
Idk, sounds like Tankie Talk to me
Well, the USSR does have the high score when it comes to killing fascists, to be fair.
There’s a lot of unions that are literally white supremisist gangs and there’s literally no accountability for that fact. I know because I’m blackballed for standing up to union officers threatening to lynch black apprentices on the job in California so until that is fixed “join a union “ as a blanket statement is ignorant
Unions are just a vehicle for worker organization. Workers don’t have to be leftist, they can be fascist too. But either way, they are stronger together. The union was successful in strengthening white supremacy in your case.
The solution then would be to form a stronger union counter to the entrenched one aligned with your beliefs system (as daunting as that may sound) or switch careers I guess
White supremisists gatekeep a lot of the high paid construction unions
Not trying to contradict anything you said, I am interested in socialism as a model, generally speaking, but I don’t know much about its economic or social model.
As someone very close to socialist countries that have done rather poorly, I have a few questions about it.
What exactly is pushing people and producers from tending towards mediocrity in socialism? I hate capitalism and how it affects us culturally, but the one thing I think it can succeed at (when monopolies are properly combatted), is using competition to push for excellence. Of course, I know nowadays it’s not the case because anti-trusts have been gutted so we’re full of monopolies and duopolies everywhere. But generally speaking, why would anyone make any effort for excellence under systems that don’t reward it or punish mediocrity?
I’m not saying we should trend towards capitalism where mediocrity is punished by starvation or death by exposure to the elements, but isn’t mediocrity, lack of consistent maintenance of common goods, etc kind of a huge problem of public and social governments etc?
They seem to be very good at equalising the playing field and providing for the needy, but it seems like persistent deterioration of common goods, infrastructure, etc is a pervasive issue in most communist governments that have been tried. Which leads to a lot of losses, inefficiencies and oversight. How would a new socialist model address these common issues? They’re not minor things that should just be hand-waved away either.
People want good things - people like it more when things are better. Put people who live and work in a community in charge of that community and the incentive to make that community better is self-evident, no? Capitalism has so many disincentives for quality, it absolutely beggars belief in me that people think it encourages innovation, especially when it’s so obvious that most innovation happens from people who never see any profits from it. Look at tech, all the innovation and advancement happens in academia where people are underpaid and overworked, then industry comes in and milks the shit out of it.
Socialist countries are constantly undermined by capitalist nations, like the US and Europe. I think that is one of the main pain points in the past for socialist countries, so really the key is building a global movement, and ensuring that capitalist counter-revolutionaries are consistently crushed
I think you’ve got your adjectives pretty crazily backward about academia.
That’s probably a matter of ignorance on your part. LLMs for example were innovated in academia, the world wide web was invented at CERN, I could literally go on for paragraphs
I ran a research lab in a university for 15+ years. I guarantee there’s no money in it.
Companies pay pennies on the dollar to research groups to solve problems with undergrads, grad students, and a bit of project manager time and to stay afloat, you have to over-buy projects as favors and to get publications. It is not unusual to run 7 or 8 projects at a time all on shoestring budgets in the lab. With a PhD I never broke 100k.
Maybe there’s some money in the business school, but nobody is getting rich quick for no work in academia.
Edit: reducing the wall of text
Uhh… I think some wires got crossed here, because my point was that academics do the innovative work without financial incentive to do so, and that the industry profits off of that work.
edit: I am stupid, you’re right, my adjectives were backwards… sorry about that 🤦
Aha I will modify my last in that case. No harm no foul, but it’s got a little more background in it than necessary if you weren’t doubling down lol.
Ahh sorry, my bad, my inattentive commenting was so bad it got you to dox yourself
I’m sorry but that sounds almost naive and equally idealistic as what you’re criticising. Communities want quality, but people overwhelmingly also don’t want to work, because let’s be honest, work sucks. What incentive is there for someone to clean and maintain the sewers when they don’t have to do it? What incentive is there for someone to fill in inventories? There are a lot of tasks that are needed in any human society but that no one wants to do. The way feudal societies dealt with that was either with slavery or caste systems. Putting people down so they will have no choice but to do what no one else wants to do. Capitalism is no better, it creates castes as well but based on generational wealth. Of course we also have slavery under capitalism. I’m not advocating for these systems, but I think communist and socialist models need to account for this, and so far I have never seen it addressed in any way. How do you even fix that at first?
Who is going to be doing what nobody wants to do? And not just the most extreme examples, but also the most invisible ones. Is someone really going to be checking that the floors of the community centre restrooms will be clean and tidy? Is someone going to be calling in and supervising the workers who need to repaint the walls?
We’ve seen this even in the USSR but also Cuba and Venezuela. The first few years under socialist systems bring along a very big boom in well-being and social advancements for the country, but with the decades, infrastructure starts decaying, productivity goes down, wealth decreases and food shortages become more frequent. It happened to Allende, the chavistas, Fidel, Mao, the Kims etc. I don’t think this inherently means that socialism can’t work, but it needs to be less idealistic in some way. Everyone wants a pool at home, but almost no one wants to be the one digging for days under the sun too have it.
Yeah I don’t want to do the dishes but I do them because the alternative is that there are no clean plates. I really do not think this is the big problem you seem to feel that it is.
Then how come every single time a country has attempted to adopt a heavily socialist model it fails to maintain its infrastructure and starts to see constant decay in productivity and wealth after a couple of decades?
It never seems to be able to maintain its initial momentum of a boom in improving living conditions and wealth inequality reduction, and eventually major infrastructure projects and even entire industries start falling into disrepair or cutting down due to lack of maintenance.
You say it’s not a big issue, but ask anyone who lived in the USSR between 1970-1990 or in Venezuela or in Cuba, and they’ll all say the socialist revolution brought some very needed structural changes at first, but then started letting the infrastructure and services they themselves built decay quickly and by the end almost nothing seemed to work well, everything was poorly maintained and major industries had become small, inefficient and slow.
I’m not advocating for capitalism, I understand what our lives look like and where their shortcomings are, but it doesn’t feel like the push for socialism is ever able to address the problems that precisely have turned people away from socialist models in the past. At some point surely it makes sense to learn from the mistakes of others, so, what implementation of a socialist model prevents us from slowly letting everything decay?
I personally think the European and Northern European models of regulated capitalism are preferable over any example I’ve seen of a socialist model. And I also think it’s way better than the bullshit they have in the US. Arguably all those European countries still have far too much concentrated wealth, and it makes sense to redistribute that.
dude both cuba and venezuela got massive trade embargos. that’s what caused issues, not because cubans and venezuelans don’t give a shit about their communities, come on man you gotta do some more reading or something
Ehem… I’m from Venezuela but my family escaped and moved to Colombia when I was like 15-16
Trust me, I know exactly how the entire shit collapsed, my family saw it first hand.
Trade embargoes or not even ignoring the rampant corruption, the entire government was far too inefficient and bloated. Nothing was managed properly, there was a bunch of waste and eventually not enough administrative oversight. Oil production went to the gutter not just because of trade embargoes but also because PDVSA was just terribly mismanaged. People stopped trying to get into the business and studies on oil and management became less and less common, there were far fewer qualified workers than there were during the initial boom.
I know pro-Socialists from first world countries love to imagine Venezuela went to shit because of US imperialism, and the US absolutely didn’t help, but it was bound to happen either way.
I compare Venezuela to Colombia consistently. Colombia has a lot of the same social and cultural issues and structures as Venezuela, but in Colombia if you don’t bust your ass working, you’re royally fucked. It’s brutal, and arguably it means being really poor in Colombia is worse than Venezuela to this day, but also I know Colombians who have found a professional niche and grown into their professions because their work is equivalently rewarded. That is not possible with Venezuela, and it’s not because we can’t trade with this or that country, it’s because there is no infrastructure to push our local economy, there are no mechanisms to protect up and coming businesses, there is no legal recourse to sustain anything viable. The government never managed to redistribute resources or use them to create more wealth. Instead they slowly let our institutions and infrastructure erode, failed to reinvest in education or new infrastructure and let corruption take hold of most official positions. At some point they were just trying to save themselves and the military cúpula.
I really want to believe something like socialism is viable, but I have seen absolutely no proof of it ever managing to be sustainable in the long term. Humans need some degree of incentive to push themselves to improve and to improve their own communities. The belief that humans are inherently motivated to innovation and creativity when they have their basic needs met is just not something I fully believe. Some people are like that, but I don’t think it’s enough of them to sustain a functional society.
Y si quieres hasta lo podemos hablar en español para que veas que no estoy aquí para hacer propaganda barata ni soy ningún bot ruso ni gringo ni nada.
what’s your opinion on Trump’s regime change in Venezuela?
Right absolutely gathering all the heads of all the countries together and telling them “what we need now is unfettered socialism” is going to go over SO WELL. They’ll definitely listen to that. In that Canada isn’t socialist and neither are they.
But maybe if you post bigger it’ll happen, idk
The US was perfectly positioned to adopt socialism about 15-30 years ago. The boomers blew that right out of the water, though. “More for me and mine, and fuck everyone else” according to them.