politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Wow who would have guessed. Certainly not marxists who have been saying this for hundreds of years!
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-police-are-not-here-to-protect-you/
This user worships Lenin (known for killing over 8 million people). Look up their username and you'll see they're known on Reddit for posting tankie spam everywhere.
A thought-terminating cliche that has absolutely nothing to do with what I posted. "Don't listen to this person's completely reasonable point, they're [redscareword]"
You spam the same tired images praising Lenin who murdered 8 million people. Don't listen to this person because they idolize mass murderers. They're not mentally well.
Many Stalin, Mao and Lenin worshippers around here.
These have hard time realizing the crimes that these clowns committed. Must be nice to pick and choose history like that, as long as their politics stay safe, I guess. Victims were mostly eastern Europeans and central and east asiains, who cares. A small price for a western tankie it seems.
Half my family grew up in the soviet union. Czech.
You two are the ones that completely derailed this conversation into talk about lenin and other crap. I commented about cops ffs.
You brought politics into this discussion. You got called for having unsavory post history praising mass murders. If you are eastern European, that's a very weird position to take. I am guessing they didn't raise or you are too dense to realize what was done there.
I doubt any here is an ally of the pigs in blue, so really you derailed this discussion by inserted you shiti politics.
I just don't get how adult men still fall for daddy worship on either side. 21sr century problems requires modern solutions, not repeating same clown history and sinping for dead clowns daddies.
I am not a man. Stop misgendering me. This is the second fucking time in this thread.
I just said we're the ones that we've been saying this forever, and linked to some further reading.
I've never praised "mass murderers". Get a grip.
No it isn't. You have a warped view of what eastern europe believes because you see us as caricatures to use as a political weapon. I have gone over this in the past, there is a very large amount of positivity towards the soviet union here:
7 out of 11 countries believe the end of the USSR harmed their countries rather than benefited them
Hungary: 72% of Hungarians say they are worse off today economically than under communism
Romania: 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism
Germany: more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR
28 percent of Czechs say they were better off under the Communist regime
81% of Serbians believe they lived best in Yugoslavia
Majority of Russians
Americans always say this stuff about europe because their brains are riddled with red scare brainworms and are completely devoid of any knowledge or understanding of what the left in Europe actually thinks because Americans do not have any experience with a left, they don't have one.
Being an adult woman into daddy worship ain't any better but OK.
OK we are using trust me bros surveys to justify USSR crimes now?
I am sure every country will have their bootlickers. You know those regims required plenty of collaborators to operate, I am sure they would still be simping for the good olds days when they were in charge.
Serb and russian example is disingenous also since their dear 'countries" lost a whole bunch of second class citizens that they liked to exploit for profit and mass murder fun.
Proper polling by some of the most respected institutes in the world isn't "trust me bro".
You can't dismiss actual evidence when it's presented to you just because it doesn't confirm what you want it to. I understand that you have this impression because it's what you've seen far right american losers repeat in reddit comment sections thousands of times over and over and over again, but these comments that you've used to build your worldview are not actually representative of reality. They are anecdotes by either people like yourself who have been led to believe it by seeing it repeated over and over, or by people who know it's false but continue to repeat it because they are ideologically committed to spreading it as propaganda.
You are not immune to propaganda.
You take your politics way too seriously, you are entitled to your opinion. Readers can make their own minds on the issue.
Tianamen square didn't happen and Russia didn't invade ukraine but if it did, Ukraine deservered anyway ;)
I'm glad that you're privileged enough to be able to take them not seriously?
I'm honestly baffled by this statement. Politics should be taken seriously.
I've never said either of those things but go off with the strawman I guess? I will say however that tiananmen is often misrepresented as something that happened in the square when in fact it was actually several battles that took place over many surrounding streets covering several miles. Confirmed by leaked US Cables.. Not that this diminishes the event, but understanding the truth of what really happened in proper detail is useful.
I'm just curious how anyone should have known you're not a man.
From the multiple other times I've said so in this thread, and from the other times I've told this guy who regularly does this. It's not the first.
Either way you shouldn't be defaulting to male.
No body cares if you're a man or a woman. Get over it.
I care. It's not difficult to get it right.
Nobody knows what you are. Expecting people to know you're a women on a forum with zero information either way is stupid.
"Oh, thier name is Lenins2ndCat. Obviously a woman.".
Give me a break.
Come on duderino.
It takes more courage to stand up for something you believe than to give in to populism. I really do appreciate the points you brought up. I may still disagree with several things about communism, but I have to acknowledge that even in this capitalist society we have many issues that are only resolved by a "heavy handed" policy due to a lot of the greed going on in the west.
Despite this back and forth going on, you have very succinctly got some good points across and I very much hope you stick around for the discussions here. I might not agree with all your philosophy, but conversation with someone like you is a real good thing as opposed to sitting in echo chambers with narrow perspective.
You'll probably enjoy when Hexbear.net federates in 5 days time. Some of these other people won't lmao.
I don't like echo chambers. Reinforcing populism is to the detriment of us all. I'm a free speech absolutist. When you can constructively support your point of view, allow it to be challenged, and then respond with something that really taps into the basis for why your philosophy is solid ground to you, I find that compelling.
"We all want clean water", and on the same token I think a more core freedom is the freedom of expression or access to health and well being. Here we're squabbling over philosophy when there are core tenets we universally agree on, and remembering that common ground for our common humanity should be more valuable than "I told a (insert perjorative here) off". Is communism right for the west? Idk, maybe never, but I look at the countries whom spend the least on healthcare but have higher standards of living and I can't help but think these fictitious dreams of free market and eternal growth have collapsed long ago.
I mean, how about a fucking place to live? I'm amazed that anyone wants to argue capitalist vs communist when we have bizarre issues that are fucking ruining the lives of hundreds of millions of people in just the US and someone wants to get hung up on hating on tankies.
I liked you until the "free speech absolutist" remark. Nazis should have been rounded up and put through re-education a long time ago. Call it rehabilitation if that appeals more to lib sensibilities.
Liberal lack of action on this has taken it past the point of no return and now the only possible outcome is a violent one. It was possible to contain it, had sources of radicalisation been suppressed and the affected fixed, but now it's impossible, there are simply too many fascists.
I find the idea that you think marginalised people like myself should just exchange ideas with the people that want to exterminate us repulsive.
We don't universally agree on this. The capitalists do NOT believe that access to water is a right, nor food for that matter. They believe fundamentally in the ideology of "if you don't do work that enriches me, you do not deserve to have these things that you need to survive".
Yes they don't believe in that either. These aren't "bizarre issues", you're missing the fact that they fundamentally don't believe you should have these things unless it involves enriching them in the process. And that they fundamentally believe people should die if they don't want to do that. This is the core of their ideology.
I can completely understand the apprehension, but the way we tear down the walls of hate and xenophobia is by talking. You're courage to hold fast to your core tenets will eventually command respect and persuasion far more so than sequestering yourself to an echo chamber where you're popular but convincing no one. Having the temerity to stand there against the childish backlash but maintain your position is far more respectable.
As for the remarks about clean water and a place to live, I think many of us are just tricked. In the west we glorify the founding fathers, while at the same time turning a blind eye to the slavery they encouraged. John Adams was a big proponent of a concentrated federal government, and even favored a monarchy before George Washington abdicated the Presidency. Another funny thing about US history was the way we went to the French to throw off our own monarchy, only to ignore our French allies when they overthrew their own monarchy. The US turned a blind eye when they asked us for help and support.
As to the relevance of this as it relates to the ideals of capitalists, you're right in many regards. The billionaire class wants our tribute, and it's not about them wanting us dead if we don't give it, rather they just want their enrichment with the national welfare as of being just no consequence to them. It's our own apathy, and the seductive promises of capitalist monetary structure. "You'll never become a billionaire in a communist country" and the people just eat it up, knowing full well they won't become a billionaire in any country regardless.
I think you and much of humanity are actually all on the same page, if we (we as in, brainwashed pro-capitalist and free market people, not necessarily us in this discussion) can just cut the bullshit of false ideologies and just listen to what another has to say.
Getting people to listen over here in Europe is relatively easy. Getting americans to listen is incredibly difficult. After multiple red scares and a cultural legacy of immense amounts of propaganda they are far more resistant to hearing basic facts, their brains are filled with false shit, and they performatively do things to show how good and moral they are (like the tankie shit), actively helping capitalists prevent people from hearing leftist thought. There are good books that do a lot of deprogramming, Blackshirts and Reds takes like 2 hours to read and deprograms people from all that shit immediately. The problem there is also that americans don't read, and 21% of americans are illiterate making it impossible to reach a lot of them through this method. I suspect this is also responsible for much of the reading-comprehension errors I see everyday from them on social media. Video works, but is a medium that requires a far greater amount of skill than writing books so we have far fewer people doing it. The boys at /r/thedeprogram podcast being probably the best at the moment, hakim, JT/secondthought and yugopnik.
Ableism really gets your point across and makes you look good.
Worshiping mass murderers really gets your point across and makes you look good.
I don't worship them. I simply don't agree with your take that they're bad. Life was significantly worse under the Tsars and this is empirically provable with very simple data. For example a look at prison mortality rates before and after the revolution:
What you are functionally doing when you attack Lenin is say that you think the revolution shouldn't have happened. You're defending monsters yourself - the tsars.
The point isn't to defend the mistakes of past socialist endeavours of which there were certainly many, but to uphold the obvious improvements that they most certainly made over what came before them.
And you consistently ignore the fact that good people throughout history agree with me that Lenin was a revolutionary that fought for good, not a monster.
Your username betrays your very first sentence (you claim not to worship Lenin). You can't even start by making a truthful, coherent, or logical point. Look at how many images you've posted praising Lenin. You're seriously claiming that you're not worshiping him? You're delusional.
You're defending a man who murdered 8 million people. Full stop. You also defend modern day Russia and their genocide against the Ukrainian people whenever you get a chance. Everything you say revolves around supporting Russia and their unwarranted murders. You're not fooling anyone.
A revolution is not a mass murder. You just keep repeating the "killed 8 million people" line over and over again, devoid of context or historical analysis in order to repeatedly put the deaths that occurred during that revolution all entirely on one person. While simultaneously ignoring the fact that the revolution created a vast improvement in people's lives.
I do not. You are building a strawman and repeatedly make stuff up. You do not participate in good faith and if you think harrassing me over and over again will get me to stop participating you are going to be disappointed. It's been tried many times before.
Lol you claim to not defend modern day Russia, yet you constantly spout their propaganda like "Nazis are in Ukraine". Then when I told you that there are Nazis in Russia too, you completely pivoted to another argument and defended Russia again.
Are you too dumb to remember the things you've written? It's not a strawman argument if you're too dumb to remember the bullshit that comes out of your mouth.
Again you are misrepresenting a previous thread, where I said that by all means feel free to support ukraine but please reconsider using fascist slogans to do so, where I linked to the number 3 newspaper in Israel as a source.
You, "I don't worship Lenin"
Me, "Here are several images just from this thread alone that shows you worship him. Your name also proves you worship him."
You, "Uhh let's talk about something different! I can't admit when I've been proven wrong so I'm going to pivot to different bullshit"
Lol. Every time you're proven wrong you move the goal posts. It's no wonder you support mass murderers (and Russian nazis) while I support underdogs like Ukraine who are fighting Imperialist Russia to defend their homeland. SLAVA UKRAINI
What? Can you actually respond to what I say instead of inventing a comment to respond to for once?
It sounds like you're having trouble with basic reading comprehension. Sure I'll copy paste my comment responding to what you said.
You, “I don’t worship Lenin”
Me, “Here are several images just from this thread alone that shows you worship him. Your name also proves you worship him.”
You, “Uhh let’s talk about something different! I can’t admit when I’ve been proven wrong so I’m going to pivot to different bullshit”
Yes that's the comment you invented, repeating it doesn't help. You're just trolling which is about the 15th time you've broken rules here. Go back and respond to what I actually said.
Wow, I could excuse the Lenin worship for a second (his list of atrocities isn’t widely known and he did depose a despotic regime), but Putin’s Russia???
The author of that graph miscalculated and accidentally inflated the Tsarist era statistics. They were closer to this. (If I remember correctly, the original author might have misunderstood Wheatcroft when he wrote ‘These rates were extremely high in the 1880s, when they were more than five times the normal prison mortality rate[.]’)
The Tsars were still pretty awful, though, and were one of the reasons that made the October Revolution inevitable.
Evidence for that claim?
I learnt this from a commenter on Reddit’s Chapotraphouse when another user shared that same graph; the comment explained how the author miscalculated. Unfortunately, the comment vanished when Reddit deleted Chapotraphouse years ago, so now I don’t have the evidence.
However, one of the sources in that graph, The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System, does not really support the miscalculation:
That is unfortunate.
This doesn't imply the figures in the graph are wrong. It implies that the later soviet figures had higher numbers. The graph is not of total numbers of deaths it is of the mortality rate, providing a comparison of the overall conditions. The soviets undoubtedly had massively more raw numbers, particularly in ww2 when they held many millions.
Your comment didn't bring anything meaningful to this discussion either. All you did was post a website link.
Maybe your post could actually include some meaningful discussion and comments that can stand on their own. Maybe next time?
Maybe try clicking it and reading next time?
Seeking as you did not post any meaningful comment, no thanks.
(Also I'm not a guy, you've been told this before. Stop intentionally misgendering me.)
http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/2002/021028_lenin.htm