• 33 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: September 18th, 2020

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  • Honestly, I get the sense that you already know a lot of what’s in the article. It’s definitely worth a skim but I don’t think you’ll find much that is news to you.

    This article is a good one to throw at the people who are engaged and who are open to reading or research but who haven’t really wrapped their head around the situation and are taken in by the western media narrative because that’s all they have had exposure to.

    You might like it still but I think you’re sorta beyond the target audience tbh.


  • BobsonDugnuttOPMtoLongformWhere do Tanks come from?
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    4 years ago

    I couldn’t agree more.

    I have recently taken to asking anarchists what makes them believe that they are entitled to the undying, unreciprocated allegiance of the communists, particularly when they whinge about Makhnovia or Revolutionary Catalonia being “betrayed” (you can throw Kronstadt in there too) and they never for one moment stop to consider that those movements might have been betraying the communist revolution.

    Of course, they never have a reply.

    Though there is more to the Revolutionary Catalonia issue and I am considering drafting a short piece in defense of the actions of the USSR framed around the writing of George Orwell, of all things, so I might come up with that soon…




  • Excellent article.

    I recently had an exchange where a Yankee told me that China is in dire economic straits because of the fact that their economic growth has slowed.

    1. That’s because of the pandemic and the CPC has explicitly abandoned their economic targets for the year in order to prioritize the wellbeing of the people of China and to implement the best COVID mitigation strategy they can

    2. Their economic growth has “slowed” from often double-digit annual growth to a mere 6.5% approximately

    3. As economies develop and mature, it becomes a mathematical improbability to be able to maintain such a staggering rate of growth consistently, if at all

    4. The last time America reached 6.5% growth was back in the 60s (from memory) and these days it can only muster 3 or 4% when recovering from a prior economic downturn, but it effectively only manages to muster roughly 2%, especially when this is averaged out

    It seems like US exceptionalism literally knows no bounds - not even hard economic data can restrain it.

    Btw I’d also like to see much more investigation into Laos and Cambodia but I think I’m stuck the western bubble :/


  • I guess it boils down to the fact that the authors who are motivated enough to do proper research are also going to be motivated enough that the limitations that Twitter imposes won’t be enough to stop them.

    Some time back I regaled my partner of a story where I painted a picture of pre-/early-internet days where university students and academics literally spending their days in libraries assiduously chasing down sources and publications and authors and trawling through the archives manually. Those were a different breed but I suppose that these sort of people are still out there in the world and they’re just the kind of people to screenshot a dozen pages of sources and write extensive twitter threads like this today.























  • Ah, shit. I was wondering if it was some sort of connection issue problem :/

    Surprisingly, I just discovered the MiUI native browser handles this situation without a hitch and I need to update the main post but that aside my connection is dogshit. Indonesia and Nepal have better internet speeds than I do.

    I did make sure that the connection was clear and that I didn’t have anything else using bandwidth but it’s probably just a terrible internet connection. I’ve never conducted a speed test because I know it’s awful and knowing just how awful it is with particular details and statistics is only going to make me feel more miserable about the situation lol.



  • I don’t know enough to make a solid call on this but they are moving to a model of providing food subsidies to people instead of providing the people with subsidized food, so this is an attempt at addressing issues of hoarding and speculation on necessities because each person will have access to limited subsidy rather than unlimited subsidized products.

    There is also the devaluing of the CUC which is a move to shift the concentration of wealth from the hands of the tourism and tourist-adjacent industries and operators back into the general population, which I think is a good thing and it’s necessary for the benefit of the people of Cuba because it will mitigate the uneven development that the tourism industry brought about.

    It looks like they are also shifting their economy to focus on domestic production over imports as a way to keep wealth circulating in their internal economy where possible rather than being bled dry by heavy reliance on imports, like you see happening in many developing countries around the world.

    I would expect to see some radical economists coming up with deeper and more comprehensive analysis in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for that, take my analysis with a grain of salt, and I guess the only way that we’ll really understand the impacts is with time.