☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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That’s fair, there’s still a lot of work to be done there. At least most libs, like the one in this thread, fled Russia now, so the healing process can begin.
Yup, and I think you’re completely right that United Russia is basically propped up by Putin’s personality. Once he’s gone, there will be a power vacuum and KPRF only keeps getting more popular. They’re not without problems, but they’re way further left than anything in the west.
I’m 13 and this is deep.
It also helps that DPRK, China, and Vietnam are some of the main Russian allies now. People used to look up to the west and wanting to become like the Americans and the Europeans. Now, they’ve been cured of that thanks to the war, and they’re increasingly looking at what’s happening in the socialist states they’re allied with and realizing Russia could’ve been developing like that as well if the socialist path wasn’t abandoned.
I’d argue that full on central planning was the wrong model. I can highly recommend reading Thinking in Systems to understand the problem. But the gist is that any large system will have noise, as information travels through it. So, when you do central planning the way USSR was, it becomes very difficult to balance things. You make a plan, the directives travel down to the factories and farms where production happens, there’s delay in the information arriving, mistakes in transcription, and so on. Then the same thing happens on the way back up, so the picture at the top is divergent from the situation on the ground. And that leads to things like overcorrections, and plans based on false data, so the system becomes unbalanced over time. And that’s what we saw happen in USSR.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the idea of central planning itself is wrong. The problem is with micromanagement which just doesn’t work. And this is the problem China figure out by using markets as allocators within the centrally planned system. The planners still set five year plans, they still control the commanding heights of the economy, and give overall direction on what types of things should be produced, but the details are left to market mechanisms to work out dynamically at the appropriate level. And this type of a hybrid system is proving to be highly effective.
Yes, it’s very important that they are being surveilled by a capitalist regime. That makes all the difference.
So the big difference between Paperclip and Osoaviakhim comes down to the US welcoming German scientists to the team versus Soviet get in the van approach. In the US, Operation Paperclip was basically a recruitment drive where guys like Wernher von Braun and his crew got sweet deals to come work for the military and later NASA, and over time they ended up as big shots with real political sway. For example, von Braun famously became the faces of the space race. The US government scrubbed their Nazi pasts and they were treated like VIPs, they got to live normal lives and integrated into American society and power structures.
On the flip side, the Soviet Union’s Operation Osoaviakhim was more like a forced relocation program where over 2,000 German specialists and their families were rounded up in the middle of the night and shipped off to the USSR. They weren’t exactly thrown into Gulag labor camps, but they were effectively put in isolation, like on the island of Gorodomlya, and kept separate from the general population under strict supervision to work on Soviet rocket and tech projects in what was basically a gilded cage. While the Americans were rolling out the red carpet, the Soviets were treating these guys like captive assets rather than future citizens.
Some people were so terrified of having apartments that they made up a guy and then got really mad that their made-up guy died.
People really don’t appreciate how people in the Soviet Union never had to worry that they’re gonna lose their job and end up on the street or that they couldn’t retire in dignity. Pretty much everybody in the west lives under the gun. No matter how good your job is, something could happen tomorrow and you end up unemployed, and then your whole life can be turned upside down.
bye fash
2·5 days agoyeah the trials are happening
This kind of stuff takes money away from important things like murdering brown people on an industrial scale. Genocides aren’t going to do themselves you know.
132·6 days agoand yes, it’s a real article https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/ditch-the-40-ounce-water-bottle-youre-probably-hydrated-enough-c62affd9
I agree, the whole view of life being a binary is kind of silly in my opinion. It’s a continuum from inorganic matter that simply reacts to the environment to self organizing living matter. Living things take input energy and then instead of resolving energy gradients directly as basic chemical reactions do, they channel this energy through metabolic pathways which allows maintaining some internal state. So, in a sense, it’s kind of like a battery which facilitates delayed energy gradient resolution.
at this point the only time I see ads is when I go outside
nuclear reactors are basically fancy steam engines
The US is a fascist police state that has mass surveillance, builds stuff like data centres that nobody wants, has next to no public transit, and atomizes people in suburbia. Yet, Americans think they live in the best and freest society possible.
5·12 days agoIt was pretty clear to me that Trump would likely become president, and there’s very little to be surprised about the US retrenching and trying to secure resources right now. Seems to me that you just haven’t been paying attention to what’s actually going on in the world.
couldn’t have put it better myself