axont

I got faith

Of the heaaart

flashback to my college days getting asked on surveys what my politics are on a scale of liberal to conservative

they'd always mark me as "independent" since their scale had nowhere to put communists

i outright use the word communist to describe myself to liberals and that usually cuts off any potential liberal camaraderie pretty quickly lol

I think at this point the average American conflates "liberal" with simply an attitude on how much you hate or don't hate queer people, regardless of any other political sentiment. One time a chud told me the only real political issue is abortion.

us americans are not, to put it lightly, an intellectual country

Maybe it won't be your thing, but I really really like Haibane Renmei. It's more melancholy comfy, and some moments are a little intense, but it's overall very sweet and meaningful to me.

I'm a communist. I don't win if there's a Democrat or a Republican in office. Someone who has cast two ballots for Trump has a dead rat for a brain and should be promptly sent to reeducation, not given some military bozo to vote for.

The civilian equivalent of his position was CEO of a fortune 500 company

He was the civilian equivalent of a huge piece of shit? Ok.

Invincible. It's pretty good, but really violent

I know this is just a forum and the libs are always confused by nuance, but exploitation does occur in socialist countries, just in a vastly different character and at a much smaller scale. Cuba for instance does have private land owners who employee workers, and China of course has various large corporations.

However these are symptoms of the positions the nations find themselves within. Socialist nations tend to find themselves in the middle of capitalist encirclement. Until the last capitalist is extinguished, class based exploitation will continue to exist.

I think perhaps you should read more of what Dr. King actually advocated for and said. He didn't endorse violence, but he didn't condemn it either. He typically didn't come from it from this moralizing angle either, most of his emphasis was his belief that violence was first and foremost a poor tactic, but at the same time he understood why violence happens. You've probably heard his 1967 statement "a riot is the language of the unheard."

When is violence permissable or moral then? Absolutely never? You have to imagine the types of situations people in the world face. I know a person from Gaza who was nearly finished with his university studies, now he lives in a tent with his mother and his little sister is dead. When I'm able to talk with him, he expresses almost nothing but violence and hatred against the Israeli state and the IDF.

Are you saying my friend Ali is in a bubble he should get out of? Or are you simply talking about your own experiences? Because even if so, you should at least feel some inclination of rage towards the people who did this to my friend.

If you just want to limit it to Haiti, Cuba, and the USSR, then yes each of those revolutions led to a vastly more humane society than the previous one. It also depends on who you're asking. Tsar Nicholas II certainly didn't see the Soviet Union as an improvement. Cuban plantation owners with dozens of slaves didn't see socialism as an improvement. There are winners and losers in history, the losing side usually isn't going to be pleased.

And who loses in a revolution? In a successful socialist revolution it's the capitalist class, colonizers, slavers, the previous bureaucracy, regional landlords. The USSR went from a backwater literal peasant kingdom to a space faring modern country within a single generation, despite a famine and despite the brutal loss of life in WW2. It's very easy to say the country that sends women to school to become nuclear engineers is not as brutally oppressive as the country with a monarch that forcefully sends women to become nuns. How do you determine oppression? Go look at things like literacy, child mortality, education, home ownership, access to clean water, and what kind of occupations women have. By those metrics, socialist revolutions typically and vastly reduce oppression.