SevenSkalls

joined 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks for answering. That's a great reply and I'm going to save this comment.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

How do you get past the initial brainworms even bringing up the word communism? Like someone else said above, I feel like I can't even bring up an alternative path or get them to pick up a book without them yelling about China and Tiannamen Square, or Stalin and his killing a bakillion millon people, or how "communism has never worked". It's so annoying to have to go back to these basic, first-grade points every time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (6 children)

The US military says it has launched strikes on the Iranian-backed Houthi group in Yemen, hitting 15 targets.

Every time. Maybe we should start putting the word "US-backed" in front of "Israel" in every news article about them.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

What's some books with an interesting vision of the future? I don't just mean more advanced technology, I mean the way it's organized.

I find often people can't envision past the society we have now. There's that quote, "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism", and it seems more and more true, but sci-fi authors seem best equipped to actually imagine beyond that.

I've heard some sci-fi authors mentioned in this category before, like Heinlen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

I haven't read any of them lol. Would have no idea where to start within them that fits this category, or what other choices there are that people would suggest.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That seems to be what they're figuring out. The right wing candidate didn't even submit their voting tallies to the Supreme Court or participate in any of the investigations while everyone else did (including other anti-Maduro candidates). What are they supposed to use to determine popular will? Screenshot of papers printed in Machado's basement?

I wouldn't be surprised if some shenanigans happened until they publish their results by polling location, but until then all we have to go on is uncooperative opposition and US-based think tanks (the country that's tried to coup Venezuela basically every other year since Chavez).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Well that's depressing. But makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I also didn't realize Spain had a liberal government before the Civil War. I guess I always figured it was a monarchy like everywhere else, but a quick read on Wikipedia shows it was a democratic liberal government and the monarchy was deposed 5 or so years earlier. Thanks for that interesting fact and unique case.

Between this and the Russia example, I wonder if the beginning of a liberal bourgeois democracy is it at its weakest. Socialism feels so hopeless now in the US, with how strong and entrenched it's liberal bourgeois institutions are now. But then the Roman Republic fell after hundreds of years, and we haven't really had capitalism that long yet, so maybe it's possible with the right conditions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Totally forgot about that. Although in my defense, I'm still getting to that point in the Revolutions podcast (the Tsar just stepped down) and I definitely need to do more reading on that period since I heard the podcast will probably start getting pretty lib soon. I was predicting that it was going to be a more nominally socialist democratic government than liberal democracy because Kerensky was an SR and I was predicting the Bolsheviks were going to take it over from the SR's or Mensheviks or something, but like I said, haven't reached that part yet and haven't done enough reading on the period yet lol.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I forgot about the fact that the Tsar was down by the time the Bolsheviks took over. I thought they took it over from other socialists, though, because he was an SR. I'm still getting to that point in the Revolutions podcast admittedly lol, and need to do more reading on that period lol.

 

I'm watching the DNC, and it's made me even more aware of the power of liberal bourgeois democracies to let out a little revolutionary energy whenever it gets close to the edge, through concessional policies, like New Deal policies or whatever Kamala might do if she wins, or even the act of voting and campaigning itself. Do they have to go through a fascism phase first, or has there been a liberal bourgeois democracy that has successfully had a socialist revolution? Will it take new theory to figure it out?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (9 children)

Well that's not confusing -_-