AlbigensianGhoul

So you're telling me that, not only are federal elections decided by states rather than votes, but each individual state has their own set of laws to prevent you from appearing in the ballot? And it's somehow still fine because "you can just do a write-in vote"?

My favourite one is the Texan one, where you need to have gotten boatload of votes in order to appear on the ballot.

For a registered political party in a statewide election to gain ballot access, they must either: obtain 5% of the vote in any statewide election; or collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast in the preceding election for governor, and must do so by January 2 of the year in which such statewide election is held. An independent candidate for any statewide office must collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast for governor, and must do so beginning the day after primary elections are held and complete collection within 60 days thereafter (if runoff elections are held, the window is shortened to beginning the day after runoff elections are held and completed within 30 days thereafter). The petition signature cannot be from anyone who voted in either primary (including runoff), and voters cannot sign multiple petitions (they must sign a petition for one party or candidate only).

In Democratic America, you can only win elections if you've already won the elections.

The story seems to be the usual slow week "news" about North Korea, but their alleged reasoning of "the empire is overextended" doesn't sound too unrealistic this time.

And it gets extremely weird by the end. He spends some 70 episodes just between 1905 and 1917, but then the timeline is horribly compressed to the point where 1922 to 1938 are all told in just some 5 episodes.

There are constant grammar mistakes and names keep being swapped around (at multiple points he even says Trotsky wanted to be "Stalin's heir" when he meant Lenin), to the point where I had to keep going back and check to make sure I wasn't going crazy. The best example of this, on the very conclusion, he cites a Bakunin quote as though it was said by Bukharin (link, at 49:45).

In one episode he is very critical of Trotsky's arrogance, but then in the following episodes calls him something like "most important revolutionary after Lenin". I'm not sure if he ever even mentioned the existence of the Fourth International even though he followed Trotsky all the way up to the icepick.

And the whole history after the civil war just boils down to a multiple hour and episode-long of Stalin Bad, without even putting any effort to dispel common myths. Stalin also becomes basically the only character with agency, and things just happen to any other named individual. Not to mention how Stalin was barely mentioned during the entire narrative except being introduced for the Tiflis bank robbery, and hardly ever directly quoted (as is tradition with anti-Stalin historiography).

Foreign policy ceases to exist (except for one off-handed mention of the Chinese civil war to contextualise Trots trotting), Stalin is portrayed as "delusionally paranoid about foreign powers" in the same episode where it's casually mentioned the Nazis took power in Germany.

Gulags and the GPU are mentioned multiple times before they are even formed. He even does a thing where he sneaks in a "Black Book of Communism"-style section where he talks about all the death toll that happened in the period of the revolution, including those of the first and second world wars.

No actual opposition is ever actually mentioned after the end of the civil war, from either inside or outside the Union, and apparently every single problem in the USSR was purely self-inflicted.

Sometimes I think he even forgot that Stalin was Georgian and not Russian to try and pin Russian chauvinism on him too.

Best part was when he actually did a somewhat reasonable explanation of natural and economic causes of the 1931 famine, but then ends with something like "some people call it Holodomor and say it was intentional because Stalin hates Ukrainians, but maybe the whole famine was intentional because Stalin hates everybody, I don't know, I'm no expert."

Not gonna lie, all of this, combined with the sudden decrease in writing quality and getting sponsorships from a literal (digital) bank got my inner "paranoid Stalin" a bit concerned that the script was having to go through a final sponsor pass. Though I think he was just tired and wanted to end it, and trusted his Anglo sources and general social-liberal predisposition too much.

I've recommended this podcast in the past due to being fairly entertaining and accessible, and I still think the first part of this series is pretty good (up to the february 1917 revolution), but the last few episodes really soured the whole thing for me. I'm not particularly well-versed in soviet history, so I wonder how much less obvious nonsense I didn't notice.

Anyways, just had to get that rant out of me there.

Estou tentando cultivar um hábito de ler notícias em brasileiro, mas não quero depender de motores de recomendação tipo o Google News.

Antigamente dava pra montar um leitor de RSS pra poder dar uma passada em só o que interessa, mas olhando agora não consigo achar os links em sites como o operamundi, só assinatura por email (ou pior, aquelas pagas!).

O RSS está morto no brasil? Já que tô aqui, algum leitor de RSS (não-app) que vocês recomendam.

The realization that led us to develop PeerTube is that no one can rival YouTube or Twitch. You would need Google’s money, Amazon servers’ farms... Above all, you would need the greed to exploit millions of creators and videomakers, groom them into formatting their content to your needs, and feed them the crumbs of the wealth you gain by farming their audience into data livestock.

Named after Iskra, but not a single book by Lenin, 3 by Trotksy and even a couple anarchists. This is the trend among university "communists" over here. If a revolution was successful, it must've not been a real revolution, except for the aesthetics.

Turns out if you define a third of your pale population as "Latinx" instead of white, very few white people remain.

Even the 2020 census had the sense (heh) to finally drop the "Hispanic race" and have it as a separate label, but the "researchers" felt like going out of their way to redefine it as a "race" again. Not sure why race is even treated as a scientific thing to begin with in their census, but such is the Amerikkkan way I guess.

Edit: don't even want to think about the causes of this "age gap"