Which part of this is the objectionable part? If it’s the resistance to de-nazification, I’ve always understood that as his unwillingness to render the Germans impotent against Soviet aggression more than any true antisemitic tendencies of his own.
- DPUGT@lemmy.ml
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This was demonstrably not the case in USSR. Anyone was free to join the party and move up through the ranks.
You’re free to do this in capitalism too. And you’ll do comparable amounts of backstabbing and conspiring and other shady shit to get to the top. The occasional relatively-uncorrupt person will luck their way to the top, and their personal biases will enable them to believe that it’s meritocratic too!
Sure, it’s not always been that way. We can go back to pre-1865 and say “but black people couldn’t do it!” but that’d be disingenuous.
It also makes no sense to say that party members owned industries since the productive output of these industries did not benefit them directly.
Bezos doesn’t benefit directly either. His salary is what, $80,000/year? The billions people like to talk about isn’t even real cash. He couldn’t use that to pay for anything. It’s equity. It’s illusory money. If he tried to sell the shares, the price would tank and they’d be worthless and not the billions claimed. Amazon’s revenues are not his revenues. He can’t spend that money directly.
His billions aren’t non-existent, but they aren’t money. They are power. The power to decide how Amazon acts as a business entity. He has alot of that.
Just like the communists did over their own industries. The “elite few” communists.
The only difference is that we can quantify Bezos’ wealth, where as the numbers were hidden for the elite Soviet leaders and party members.
The substantive difference is that the means of production in USSR were publicly owned
“Public ownership” is a nonsense phrase. When I own a thing, it is mine. I can decide that no one can possess it, or that one person or another can possess it temporarily. I can give it as a gift permanently. I can charge money for it, or not. I can charge for it on a recurring basis, or not.
That’s what ownership is. But there is no ghostly “public” which has a gigantic 100ft tall translucent human face that owns something with “public ownership”. Instead, someone almost certainly not me ends up owning it, even if he or she can’t use the word “own” without getting into trouble. That man or women gets to decide who possesses it temporarily or on what basis. They get to decide to dispatch it to another man or woman, who then owns it (but can’t use the word "own). I can’t even sell my supposed “share” in this, and be excluded from the public ownership of the thing (for indeed, who would want to buy it when they have their own public share of it, and having two shares gets them no more consideration?).
This man may have made promises that I can use it or can’t on some schedule. But they can rescind those promises. In all cases, if they renege on the promises, they incur no significant penalty.
This “public ownership” seems to me to be nearly identical to “some other person not me owns it, and fuck me”.
This allowed USSR to provide everyone with food, housing, healthcare, and education.
Tell that to the people excluded from the universities with coffin problems. Or the five families hot-bunking in shitty brutalist apartment buildings how they were lucky to have housing.
Lots of things allow all different sorts of non-communist systems to provide everyone with food. It’s not that impressive in the 21st century to say “but they fed everyone”.
and a retirement guarantee by 60.
With enough vodka rations to make sure only 1 in 50 collected on it.
The trouble is that I’m not a “majority” I am a person. More to the point, I am a person who is more used to not being in the majority than I am in it. “Good for the majority” in many cases has often left me out.
It isn’t in my interest to pursue strategies that are good for the majority. There are others like me.
Such states can have many problems, but they’re an undeniable improvement over capitalism.
That’s not clear at all. Let’s go with the “at least communism fed everyone”. In the United States, literally no one starves who isn’t anorexic or similarly mentally ill. Homeless people are fat.
We can talk about other metrics too (spaces races and whatnot), but capitalism seems to at least keep up with communism in those regards without some really absurd double standards.
The default state of things in the west is that monopoly on violence is in the hands of capitalists, and it’s currently being used to subjugate the rest of the population to the will of capitalists.
Which of course never happened in the Soviet Union or Cuba, or any of the the other places?
Look, I’m not even you’re opponent here. There is a profound philosophical question here, one that if anyone actually bothers to attempt to solve it, the sort of violence you think is a solution might actually become possible.
More to the point, not just possible, but justifiable. Like, provably so. Even to people like myself who don’t conform to your ideology.
Wouldn’t it be great if, for instance, we could look at some event somewhere in the world, apply the rules, and say “in situations like this where x and y are occurring, and where z does not occur, that violence was justified”? We have those rules mostly worked out for individual scenarios. We know what self-defense looks like.
We don’t have those rules worked out for group/collective scenarios. And until we do, it will always be anxiety-inducing to contemplate the violence, and politically dangerous to even talk about it (for fear of terrorism conspiracy charges). Better still, with the rules worked out and agreed upon (mostly or wholly), we’d likely see quite alot of behavior changing in a hurry when the government realizes it is inviting justified rebellion if it doesn’t… without having to resort to the violence.
The part you have to get over first is accepting that it may truly be the case that if we figure those rules out honestly, some of your heroes may turn out to have been “not so heroic” and some of your examples of good governments may turn out to have been the tyrants their detractors have claimed all along.
and max pay was capped at 9x lowest pay.
Even in the US, there are limits on the difference in monetary compensation. Because of that, for the most prestigious/lucrative positions, non-monetary compensation is offered. At the lowest rungs, it was health insurance. When you start talking higher, then there are company cars and so forth. And for CEOs, you get equity in the form of stock options, personal assistants, etc.
The Soviets had all of these for the highest positions, just like everywhere else. The only thing different is that they made the pay difference limitation explicit and lower.
They rose to their positions through their work.
No. I think higher in the thread you mentioned how Brezhnev came from a family of metalworkers. When he became General Secretary, it wasn’t because he was the best metalworker at the foundry. It wasn’t because he was the best manager of metalworkers at the foundry. That wasn’t how anyone rose to high positions in the Soviet Union.
Like elsewhere, there is a social game. And people who play it well rise high, those who play it perfectly rise higher still. Those who can’t or won’t play it, those who are bad at it, or who are visibly bitter about it, don’t rise at all.
None of it has to do with anything resembling actual work.
but it’s certainly not because the party was some sort of an oligarchy that you seem to be insinuating here.
What is an oligarchy? Sure, we all know the dictionary definition, but those aren’t very nuanced.
The “rule by the rich”. Even in places that are clearly oligarchies, occasionally one rich person loses it all, no longer rules, or another becomes rich and starts ruling. And “rich” is relative too, no one would claim that a millionaire can’t ever be an oligarch simply because elsewhere in the world there exist billionaires.
The Party was a group of oligarchs. They did not measure their wealth the way that wealth was measured in other countries, socially it was sort of taboo to even think in those terms. But they had more luxuries, nicer homes, more real estate than anyone else in the Soviet Union. To a level that, were they in any other countries, they would have been (single digit) millionaires.
And that’s without even considering the industries that they owned. Sure, they wouldn’t use that word, because again it was taboo. But “ownership” is something that can’t ever be collective. To own something isn’t to be able to use that word to refer to it, but to control it and to be able to decide who control passes to and in what circumstances. Are you claiming that Brezhnev had no power to go to some iron mill and say “you aren’t allowed to work here anymore” to some flunky he didn’t like? Just as a western capitalist could fire someone he didn’t like? That he couldn’t put someone else in charge of that factory? That he couldn’t decide to change the floorplan and expand it? Or shut it down?
Sure, he couldn’t do it by decree like some feudal king. But the western capitalist rarely does that either (and rarer still does it without it causing him headaches). He builds consensus, gets others on the board of directors on his side. Let’s the right managers know that good things will happen if they help, and bad things will happen if they don’t. Etc.
The only real substantive differences are that some words (ownership, rich) weren’t allowed to be used. But the same qualities and circumstances permeated that nation.
It’s not so much that the state has a monopoly on violence. It’s that for it to not have a monopoly on violence, it would mean that non-state actors would have to choose to do violence.
That’s not an easy choice to make, is it? History is filled with accounts of crazies who chose violence but who chose it because they like the idea of violence more than for any other reason… and they ended up monsters. It’s admirable that people would not want to become that.
When is violence justified? Against whom? How can you safeguard things so that the even initially justifiable violence doesn’t go too far, spin out of control? More importantly, possibly, is what you do after your violence succeeds… you’ve built up this paramilitary force to perform the violence, they’ve won, and now they’re de facto in charge. You end up with goons running the show, because you needed goons to beat the other guy. You might be a goon yourself. That’s nearly always bad. You almost need some separate organization afterward, of civilians, to take over. How do you keep it separate during the struggle?
It might be more accurate to say that the state doesn’t so much have a monopoly on violence as that it’s just the only group out there sociopathic enough to want to use it.
I am no socialist, but I am surprised to agree that the Soviet Union actually did something positive. Literacy did rise to 99% from some low number. That is to their credit.
I can’t tell if this is posted ironically or not. Shouldn’t it be irrelevant, considering that his ideology was “Juche” and not anything much resembling socialism?
Why wouldn’t you guys find this old copypasta hilarious? It tells the truth… heroin should remain illegal, and we need a corps of 3 million cops on the beat beating down anyone who even thinks about drugs. Any libertarian who suggests otherwise is trying to corrupt your children.
It really is the libertarians who are your true enemy. Not Republicans, not Democrats. Not authoritarians and busybodies and the apathetic. It’s the people who want to leave you alone and for you to leave them alone.
- DPUGT@lemmy.mlto
1·3 years agoDesktop usage is only kept afloat by their use in business. When you sit down in front of a desk at work, there’s a computer on it.
That also doesn’t bode well for linux, even if people could become familiar with it and comfortable with it, it’s doubtful that anyone in charge of computers in the office would be comfortable having those be linux desktops.
The age of the desktop really is over. Linux didn’t become mainstream, and now it’s completely moot. Even if you want to disagree with me emotionally, surely you see the writing on the wall? Everything I’ve said only becomes more true 5 years from now, 20 years from now. Not less.
- DPUGT@lemmy.mlto
Linux needs a time machine to go mainstream. It would have had to have happened by about 2006 or so… after that point, personal computing pretty much died. Sure, you have a desktop or laptop system in front of you, and so do I, but I contend that we are the exceptions, that we’re no longer typical.
There are people who do not use the internet with a personal computer as their primary means of using it. These people are many. These people are young, and will retain that habit their entire lives.
If it’s any consolation, personal computing is dead for all the operating systems, and no one really won.
Yeh, it’s good. But the filename scripting was always kind of difficult, glad they’ve improved that… not that it’ll do me any good, as I finally have mine the way I want.
Thank god you leftists realize how dangerous the libertarians are and how the war on drugs must continue to be prosecuted no matter how unwinnable it seems. No one should be allowed to have heroin.
Apparently you are absolutely fact resistant.
Which fact am I resistant to? I’m resistant to your conclusions, which aren’t worthy of being called facts.
But try to do the math at least once: 8 billion people and a fertility rate of 1.8
I’ll wait 20 years until it’s 1.3. Or 40 years until it’s 0.3. The rate’s not constant. You get that right? It’s provably not constant. It’s provably not going up, or fluctuating back or forth, but continues to go downward. That’s not so hard to understand.
Maybe that’s the fact I’m resistant to. Maybe the fact that it’s currently 1.8, and that you imply there it will stay without anything to corroborate the idea. But also that you only imply it, because to assert such a thing sounds so absurd even you can’t possibly say it with a straight face.
Sure you can claim it will go even lower then that, but there is literally zero evidence that people will stop having children all together. Z-E-R-O.
There’s plenty of evidence that the downward trend continues to accelerate, as it has for a century. There’s plenty of evidence that children internalize such things as social norms, and not alot to suggest that this isn’t at least the cause, in part, for the downward trend.
They don’t have to stop having children. It just has to fall below replacement. At that point you are, as a species, effectively dead. It never recovers.
And claiming to know what will happen with the fertility rate in the next thousands of years is just bullshit.
I used to say the same thing about climate. But the difference there is that we’re supposed to believe such things about holy climate science, and disbelieve those things which contradict the dogma of our ideologies.
It might as well go up again in a few hundred years,
Magically? Like, your ideology already makes some assumptions about why it went down in the first place. And I’m not saying you are wrong… what makes you think those assumptions won’t continue to hold, when all the statistics say that they are doing just that?
Dead.
Your arguments are how soon-to-be dead people think. I’m not unhealthy, so what if I’ve put on a few pounds. Sure, it was a heart attack, but just a mild one and with medicine now days. And I’m too old to do the fitness thing anyway, the medications are a better bet. Maybe they’ll invent whizbang medical technology to make me immortal and I’ll vacation on Neptune! Just dead.
Then why do you still live in such a country?
I have to live somewhere. I don’t know of any that are better, just different kinds of “bad”. You seem to believe “living better” is an objective thing, but it is subjective of course. And you and I don’t want to live the same way. If you bothered to see things from my perspective, you’d understand how silly your question is.
You have the wrong idea of what having a public welfare service means. I don’t need welfare checks to live here
You have lived so long in the system that it’s invisible to you. The welfare no longer looks like welfare. It’s just an entitlement to you. You deserve it. You’ve earned it. Just by being there. They owe it to you. Once you’ve adopted that mindset, how can it ever be welfare again? But from the other end, how can your government even engage in charity? For them, you have become livestock they have a duty to keep fed.
And my children will be able to study in any university even if I don’t earn enough money to pay for it
It used to be the case in the US. But somewhere the politicians got the idea that sending 100% of the population to university was not just an ideal or even a goal, but an absolute requirement.
Opportunity costs being what they are, the price skyrocketed. It actually costs more than twice as much to send twice as many kids to college. And so the price rose. And colleges became more competitive for those dollars, but to stay competitive they have to be nicer colleges with nicer dorms and nicer campuses and nicer amenities. But those things cost more, so the costs were passed on to the students who were indoctrinated to believe that if they didn’t go they’d be losers. And then bankruptcy for student loans was rescinded, and grants turned into loans that can’t ever be defaulted.
Perverse incentives are a removed.
I can’t tell which European country you’re from, and you don’t have to tell me, but all students don’t go to university there either. We can be honest, can’t we?
It’s bizarre that your theory is that we haven’t run out of gas when the speedometer still says we’re doing 100kph.
And even if you extrapolate the current trend it will not drop significantly below replacement rate anytime soon.
Soon for me is “anytime in the next 200 years”. Soon for you is “next 2 minutes”. We do not have the same “soon”.
Oh and there is no evidence that people (on average) have decided to go totally childless.
It wouldn’t have to be average. All it has to do is nudge things below replacement.
They usually only get one or two children, which does indeed drop the average fertility rate below replacement, but only slightly so.
And children who grow up in that world internalize it as a social norm. That becomes their ceiling for how many children to have someday. They then have the same number. Or fewer. The ones that go for “fewer” just nudged the rate down lower still. Iterate that through 30 generations, see what happens.
Even assuming the trend will last for thousands of years (nothing in human history has ever lasted that long!) we will not go anywhere near extinct.
Depends on the “we”. If by “we” you are excluding myself and my descendants, then you most certainly will.
If you are including me, then no. But the subset of humanity that is like yourself, you’re goners. Along with most of your ideology.
With 8 billion people world wide (and still growing above replacement rate right now!) it is simply absolute non-sense to talk about human extinction due to birth-rates dropping below replacement rate.
I forgot. Only climate science is allowed to think long term. The one true science. Measured in human generations, any one of which lasts no longer than about 100 years, each generation staggered with the next, and with a growing sentiment that having children is wrong, dangerous, and unfashionable that we impress upon youth… you people have less than a couple hundred years. Someday, when it becomes impossible to ignore, those of you still alive will look back to times like now, when something might still have been done about it.
I don’t know where you get your figures from, but the global fertility rate is still above replacement level,
Only when including several regions where fertility remains high (mostly Africa). If those are excluded, it’s extinction-level. But hey, you say “that’s how averages work”.
So let’s look at Africa. Their fertility rate is above replacement, but is dropping rapidly. We can measure how fast it is dropping. We know approximately when it will fall below replacement levels. And we don’t see any reason why it should remain above them, when it didn’t remain above replacement (or even just at) anywhere else in the world. It’s natural, and even smart, to assume that the same sociological forces that made it drop elsewhere are those making it drop in Africa, and that they will work the same as elsewhere (since Africans are human like everyone else). It’d actually be sort of racist to assume that it would work differently there wouldn’t it?
Once we have considered the places it’s below replacement, and the places that it’s above replacement but dropping, where else is left at all? Nowhere.
You don’t even understand the phenomenon. You don’t want to understand it. And you’re claiming that somehow it’s not even happening. It’s bizarre.
Also even at a slightly below replacement rate (where the global fertility rate is heading indeed) it will take centuries
No. The effect actually picks up speed the longer it occurs. Children internalize norms. If the 5 children who see everyone around them childless (excepting their own parents who have one), then don’t grow up to have one child also, they’ll have on average 0.2 children or something like that. Each generation shrinks faster than the last.
And if that somehow still translates into “it will be centuries before the last centenarian dies!”… how is that a counter-argument at all?
Uhmm, you realize the world population is nearly 8 billion people and still growing fast?
Let’s imagine a simpler scenario, for those who might read our comments but are bad at math. We won’t use humans (too much baggage), but little aliens we’ll call zoops.
Zoops have two biological sexes that procreate together. There are two specimens, a Y and a Z. They have two offspring, also Y and Z. The population has doubled, but the fertility rate is at exact replacement level. When the two older zoops die, there will be only two. Zoops have no incest taboos, and so the second generation procreates twice.
In this way, the population has reached a steady state. But what if, instead, they only procreated once? This population is dead. Period. Sure, it will hang on a little longer, and sure, you’ll scream “but their population increased by 50% in just minutes” as some sort of lame argument that overpopulation is a concern. No, that was never a concern, instead extinction is the real risk.
We are in the period where humans are just having the one offspring per two parents, and since the parents don’t immediately die, it looks to you as if the population is “still growing fast”.
We will not run out of “them” anytime soon
You will indeed run out of them within 25 years. Within your lifetime. This will be about the time that you personally are relying on them to be the nurse’s aids in your nursing homes and to wipe your geriatric ass.
and even if we do at some point (far in the future) that is probably a good thing as the world is way over-populated as it is right now already.
No one growing up in this world you imagine will think “ok, the population has fallen enough now it’s time to start having 2.1 children again”.
You belong to a death cult. Suicidal at the species level.
That’s actually some interesting sociology. How would you go about having an intelligent agent/actor maintain loyalty to his group if someone tries to “reason” with him?
Well, if he has been taught to dismiss it outright without considering the argument with a pithy “I don’t want to listen to your talking points” (the wording doesn’t matter, there are several variations), then he will remain loyal because he dismisses it without considering the argument but also without completely wrecking his ability to sometimes act intelligently and consider arguments (good arguments, the ones your group makes obviously).
Without it, the other side can win. Either one of their arguments is logical enough to convert him, or they saddle him with so many arguments that won’t work but that wastes his time as he reasons his way through them (a sort of denial of service attack on the brain).
We all believe that we’re intelligent and rational, but we’re just dumb monkeys who are incapable of rationality. None of you are capable of considering arguments unless first they have been vetted by your ingroup.
This is the mentality at work, and also why you are punished for your non-conformity. Conform or be punished pimento.
Define moderate wealth in a way that excludes a significant portion of the population. There are counter-examples all the way down.
Devastated all of Europe, or so I’m told. And yet things weren’t even a tenth as bad elsewhere. And that only obviates the housing issue… the coffin problems issue was completely about keeping some out of universities where they simply were not welcome. Education for some, factory work for others… like everywhere else. (Hell, even in the US you wouldn’t be kept out of university if simply by being jewish alone, the way that it was in the Soviet Union).
It’s pretty big news to you that the homeless aren’t starving? Or do you often run around confusing food with housing?
Compared to the sort of human garbage that implemented it as policy for decades? Or do you mean that I’m politically inconvenient because I recognize it as such?