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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • There isn’t really a single form of communist government, same as there isn’t a single way to do democracy or capitalism. Every country does it different, experiments a different way. For all we know, the perfect way to do it is just waiting for us to discover.

    For example, I’d say the US’s form of liberal, bourgeois democracy is one of the worst ways to implement it, but it was also an early experiment with it and deserves credit for at least trying it and helping us learn what to do and what not to do.



  • Same, man, same lol. I’m still patriotic during the Olympics, but if we’re going to be funding genocides, assassinating leaders, and starting wars and shit, fuck it, I hope we lose them all lol. Let’s just start over on the whole project.

    I invite US balkanization at this point so I can go hang out in the new sovereign state of whatever CA, WA, and OR will be called. Hawaii can come, too.


  • You should compare countries of similar development. That’s a good thing. People always compare the richest capitalist countries with the poorest communist countries, but by doing that always ignore the mass amount of poor capitalist countries, ones that are poor specifically because of capitalism.

    Russia, for example, was extremely poor and behind. Comparing them to other majority agrarian societies during the Tsar makes way more sense than comparing them to countries that had been post-Industrial Revolution for awhile already, like Britain, Germany, or the US. That wouldn’t make any sense. They were trying to catch up but they were still only just getting a proletariat from their burgeoning heavy industry and rail industries when the Revolution happened. They were way behind the West otherwise. Yet in a short period of time they managed to catch up.

    China even more so was basically all peasants. Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, etc all the same, extremely poor, small, or both. So they should be compared with countries of relative equal development, which tends to be the countries in the global South, like Africa or Latin America.

    Then there’s the fact that they are kept at low development through purposeful exclusion from global markets, via sanctions, propaganda like the “Radio Free” programs, coups, support of separatist or terrorist groups, taking of national resources, being kept in debt by the IMF, and so on.


  • The USSR had to deal with a civil war, rising up during WWI and being sabotaged by the Germans, more civil war, foreign meddling, and all while being the first successful communist revolution. Yet they still managed to raise literacy, raise health outcomes, raise average life expectancy, gender equality, science and technology, end the cycle of famines (after the first one or two they had when they were still building up), had faster growth during that period than any capitalist country (except maybe the US, which was doing imperialism at the time and the biggest hegemon), all while helping sustain other socialist countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea.












  • Well, there’s a difference between settler colonialism (which replaces the indigenous population) and the sort of imperialist and classic colonialism in a lot of parts of this map, where people move in and resources are extracted, but you’re left with a traumatized population instead of a genocided one, like in North and South America as well as Australia, so we’d expect the results to probably be different.

    Not that I think religion helps these matters, as the US which is slowly turning Christo-fascist and reversing LGBTQ rights, probably not coincidentally, shows. I just don’t agree with the Islamophobia part. Christianity looks pretty draconian on these issues too in some parts of Africa.


  • Idk about the others, but for Afghanistan, it’s probably because it was taken over by religious fundamentalists trained, supported, and armed by Pakistan, Iran, and the US in order to fight off Soviet Union influence, along with some other countries (China, UK, probably some others). They basically invaded because they were called in by the local government afraid of these terrorist groups, who also called problems in the Soviet Union (similar to the US invading after 9/11). (Interestingly enough, the Pakistan influence can also be said to be a result of colonialism since it’s existence is basically a result of English colonialism in India and the Middle-East.) After this, Afghanistan was basically a civil war zone between religious fundamentalist warlords fighting each other, the most extreme being the Taliban, but the other US allied ones weren’t great, either, and were all still fundamentalist Muslim.

    The official anti-LGBT laws were vague when the Republic (the Soviet friendly government) was in charge, all of the terrible attitudes were probably still there but under religious rules and unofficial, and being invaded by the USSR for years never helps those kinds of things, either. It was more intense when the US friendly war lords were in charge and made Sharia more official, making LGBTQ laws worse as a sort of collateral. It then got even worse when the Taliban officially took over, now it’s even more explicit and the punishment even worse (death). I haven’t read the article yet so not sure if it talks about any of these things, or if I got anything super off, but I’ve just been listening and reading stuff about this lately and felt I could contribute lol.