Eh, I kinda like the ephemeral nature of most tiktoks, having things go viral within a group of like 10,000 people, to the extent that if you’re tangentially connected to the group, you and everyone you know has seen it, but nobody outside that group ever sees and it vanishes into the ether like a month later makes it a little more personal.
OK, lets do a reading comprehension exercise. You have identified that it would be absurd to suggest that those two are meaningful choices, so can you think of a more sensible way to interpret what I’ve said if I’m not suggesting that?
You don’t get punished if you give up your citizenship and move to another country, and then stop paying taxes to America. You don’t get punished if you decide to be homeless instead of paying your landlord 2K/mo to exist.
But realistically, you don’t have a meaningful amount of choice when it comes to the bourgeoisie/government due to the difference in power.
You’re confusing the issue. My point is that we are no more complicit in the taxes we pay than the amount we pay Jeff Bezos for the privilege of working at amazon.
All 3 circles come from people buying stuff from amazon.
Most people can tell they’re creating a lot more wealth than they’re getting, and that it’s not going back into the company.
The green bit is the bit that goes into Jeff Bezos’s pocket, it’s not used to make cars and phones.
the number goes down if slowly
It was 7% in 2017, it’s now 9%. Most progress was due to China, whom I have some hope for.
people are freer and richer and have a lot more opportunities
Wealth elasticity is going down in nearly every western nation; if you’re born poor in America, you’re more likely to die poor than your parents were.
Short of a revolution, the west is going to continue this trajectory as we struggle to afford basic necessities like housing, and billionaire mouth-pieces insist we live better than kings of the middle ages because kings of the middle ages couldn’t afford ipads.
The 90s, when capitalism was bringing the former USSR the biggest non-war-related decrease in human life expectancy? When a million Iraqi children suffered excess deaths due to the US sanctions? When the Rwandan genocide was going on?
If those bubbles pop as they’re graduating college, they might get to have homes.
Also there’s a few countries that don’t have housing bubbles, in Japan, 600/mo can get you a 700 sqft 2bd in a city of 10 million, in China 300 can get you that. Both these countries had bubbles that deflated.
That’s generally a good thing, those kids don’t need their bullshit going viral outside of tiktok. Give it 3 months for Instagram to pick up 5% of it, and then FB can pick up 5% of that.
their logistics were worse shit
highly mobile, well-coordinated force with superior technology
refining strategy and tactics in order to fight more effectively was hampered by politcs
Yeah no, again, if you didn’t get your understanding of history through memes/pop-culture osmosis, you’d understand how silly these statements were in this context; the soviets were either comparable or better at all 3 compared to nazi germany, and in the case of refining tactics, the western allies too. The USSR’s system of having the political and military officers submit independent reports is why they tend to be much more accurate when compared against enemy reports of their own equipment numbers than the western allies, or especially the nazis (though China and Japanese reports are something else). If you want I can talk about some books I read, but I really feel like you’re not interested in the actual history and it would be a waste of time.
your comparative casualty numbers seem to imply
Did you even look at the numbers? The point is that the USSR didn’t send endless waves of men any more than the germans did, evidenced by the number of military casualties being roughly similar.
Perhaps more preparation to fight the fascists
We’re talking about a country that opened it’s first tractor factory in 1930, in Stalingrad. The USSR saw the writing on the wall and was preparing for this war before anyone else, and that preparation included ensuring the western allies wouldn’t just sit back and continue to support Nazi Germany as they took care of the global threat of communism.
Stalin backed off of trying to micromanage the war effort
Funny, I thought you were going to go with the myth about Stalin hiding in his room for a week when the nazis invaded.
You’re repeating the nazi myth about Asiatic hordes and misunderstanding intentionally obfuscated things like the role of blocking brigades. In practice, the USSR didn’t have more bodies on the front until roughly Stalingrad. At which point casualty rates roughly equalized. Turns out it’s easier not to get encircled when you don’t have half the number of troops of the enemy.
Germany suffered roughly 5 million
That’s not to say that the USSR had the most competent leadership before Zhukov got his shit together, just that you shouldn’t get your understanding of either Stalin, WWII, or Stalin’s role in WWII from memes.
Stalin spent the 30s doing everything in his power to form a bulwark against fascism, the western allies also made non-aggression pacts with Nazi Germany, as they were content to let fascism be the solution to the red menace. Stalin only made his non-aggression pact AFTER every western power refused to make a mutual defense pact, or join in if the USSR committed 1 million troops to an invasion.
Then after dividing Czechoslovakia between Germany and Poland, Hitler invaded Poland and France instead of working with Poland to invade the USSR as the western allies intended.
There’s some very weird ml groups, but you just made that up, if not, you’d have said which org.
Nope, when you poll on individual policies, they’re way to the left of the democrats.
The democrats showcase healthcare bill wasn’t “subsidies for employer-based health insurance, that you have no idea what it’s going to cost and have to buy at a specific time of year by going to one of 50 sites provided by your state at a specific time of year and filling out a bunch of forms or face a tax penalty, with a sliding scale based on income, marriage status, and other factors” because that’s more popular than “free healthcare”.
Same if you ask americans about Biden (and Harris’s) policies of “loan forgiveness for PELL grant recipients up to X dollars depending on age, loan repayment status, income, parent’s income, and whether you were born on a prime-numbered date” vs “free college”
The democrats compromise their bills, not because there’s a bunch of “moderates” who are exactly between democrat and republican who will vote for democrats if they promote garbage versions of progressive bills that don’t actually help anyone, but because they know those versions are less likely to pass and be easier to chip away at, and therefore won’t piss off their billionaire patrons.
I think I see the confusion. A capitalist is someone who owns a significant amount of capital. China obviously has capitalists. Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism. China does have liberals, but there’s been some pushback over the last decade or so.
I mean you kinda can, see China.
Not really, because somehow a libertarian society where you can own slaves is less “authoritarian” than a socialist society where everyone is fed, housed, because the poor capitalists don’t get the power to exploit people.
Meanwhile a primitive anarchist commune with so little development of the means of production, a person’s only options are to fill a very specific role in society or starve becomes free again.
The term “authoritarian” is not useful for describing how much agency people in a society have over their own lives.
Don’t condescend when you are failing basic, basic reading comprehension. Middle school children use and understand rhetorical irony.
Since I obviously am not expressing that participation in paying taxes and being exploited by capitalism are meaningful choices, hence why I spelled out how impractical the alternatives are; homelessness and/or uprooting your entire life and finding a foreign country that will accept you, I must mean the opposite, that you don’t have a realistic choice in the matter.
If you’re autistic and have difficulty with this type of thing, I can give more examples, this is such a common rhetorical device, I’m genuinely surprised you didn’t understand after rereading the post. I’m certain you’ve seen it before or had other people use it in conversation.