Thanks

Which books should I read instead?

You don’t think it would have been in the Soviets’ geopolitical interests to draw Japanese aggression away from the USSR and towards another country?

What about German and Japanese efforts to integrate China into the Anti-Comintern Pact? Don’t you think the Soviets were worried about that?

The point I was making was that to pretend people are worse off now than they were during the Middle Ages is ridiculous

Among peer countries, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth for both women and men

A life expectancy at birth of 78.4 years for the whole population compared to 31.3 years JUST for English males who were lucky enough to be born to land-owning families

The United States has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates out of any other high-income country

According to your data, the United States has an infant mortality rate of 5.4 per 1,000 births, or 0.54%. For comparison, an estimated 30% of babies in the Middle Ages died before their first birthday and only about half reached adulthood

21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level, 20% are below 5th-grade level

These claims are very misleading. The actual share of US adults who are illiterate is closer to 12%. In mediaeval times on the other hand, the VAST, vast majority of people, including the nobility, didn’t know how to read or write. Charlemagne, despite being a strong proponent of an educated citizenry, famously was himself illiterate. Writing back then was mostly reserved for the clergy

Today, the Republican Party has a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, and when church and state cases have come before them, all six of those Republicans have behaved exactly how you would expect. That means that the Court is now actively tearing down whatever barrier used to exist between church and state

It’s certainly being eroded, but the present situation isn’t anywhere near as bad as it was in the Middle Ages. I don’t see anyone being burnt at the stake for heresy

With one-fifth of states seeing active measles outbreaks, the U.S. is nearing 900 cases

Oh wow a whole three people died from measles

Household food insecurity affected 17.9 percent of households with children in 2023. In some of these food-insecure households only adults were food insecure, while in other households children also experienced food insecurity

Food insecurity isn’t famine. There is no mass starvation epidemic in the United States and there never has been, except among the indigenous population. This is a country where over 40% of the people are obese for Christ’s sake

Things were so much better when the average life expectancy was in the 30s and every third child died in infancy and nobody knew how to read or write and there was no separation of church and state and society was constantly plagued by an endless cycle of famine and disease

They didn’t admit that Stalin wasn’t a dictator, though. That’s what I’m getting at. The document makes no such claim and is itself just a report by an unevaluated anonymous source rather than an official statement by the organisation as a whole. In plenty of other declassified CIA documents (including official memos), it is argued in great length that Stalin was a dictator

If you want to argue that Stalin wasn’t a dictator, then be my guest, but to claim that the CIA itself acknowledged this is a falsehood

The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated.

Not false, but exaggerated

Asexual people are more likely than women to be victims of sexual assault in the UK

No, I don’t think that’s necessary or even currently feasible

it’s trans men, not “transmen”; and trans women, not “transwomen”. Trans is an adjective, meaning it’s a word that describes a noun. A trans man is a man who happens to be trans. The (grammatically incorrect) usage of trans as a noun (“a trans”, “transman”, “transwoman”, “transperson”, etc.) is a dogwhistle meant to imply that trans men aren’t men and trans women aren’t women but some separate category

Bc it’s our land. Trans people have been living in Great Britain for 900,000 years. Even many transphobes will acknowledge that “transgenderism” originated in the West. The cisoid population of Great Britain are not British at all but Roman, Norman, and Saxon settler colonists who stole the land from its original inhabitants

trans ppl should form an ethnostate in great britain and expel, enslave, and/or exterminate the cis population. all the property of the cis inhabitants should be confiscated without exception and distributed among the worthy members of the Party as well as soldiers who have been accorded honours for bravery

oh wow, china encourages its citizens to work hard and they have credit scores like every developed nation on earth, super spooky

That is a fake quote

i don’t think it’s stealing; all current artists invariably owe the work of those who came before them

That’s a fair point. America has always been this way since its inception

No, that’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying that America is not a nation at all. The material basis of American “nationhood” is liberal capitalism and settler colonialism. American language, culture, and national identity did not develop organically but instead was invented to legitimise the project. The solution to these people would be to abolish America entirely

Why