Cass Eris (cognitive psychologist, succdem/liberal) has a playlist going through the book. She brushes part of outright accepts some anti-communist horseshit, but those should be obvious to you when she does. Other than that, she shows that holding JPB to any reasonable academic standard is a futile endeavour, from sharing information from his patients doing little to protect their identity to making absurd propositions and comparisons all with little to no citations. She also makes it a point to point out all the Freudian and Jungian poppycock Beterson has incorporated into his work.

It’s a lot of videos averaging 40 mins so you could limit yourself to 1-3 rules and probably still be far more in-depth than your friend. I don’t suggest trying to go through the whole thing quickly, Dr. B’s work is quite frequently a mindfuck to think about with any depth, far too much quackery to take at face value.

And the next one of course.

This is not a case of Trump having done bad things and Biden doing nothing. An analogue is if trump were firing a minigun on a bunch of people, he left office, Biden took over and resumed firing.

Also, sanctions by the richest country in history need to be proven to have adverse effects on the imposed in the same way the theory of gravity needs to be proven again: only flat earth type loonies need it so it’s merely an exercise, not an academic necessity.

Ebil sissypea making hardworking bosses pay their parasite employees after closing the shutters. (they didn’t even take the risk) This would never happen in free^TM countries, where you’re allowed to not pay the proles for a year, sell off all the company assets and pocket the difference. Obviously the individuals clever enough to defraud their employees, who have no recourse, should be rewarded.

It’s irritating that we won’t get to see Biden fail to string up sentences together on the debate in September, but I’m far more annoyed at how quickly all the morons trying to get people to vote for a corpse turned around to sing a different tune. Previously people who didn’t want to support a zionist zombie were against democracy or whatever the fuck, now Biden is laudable for realising his flesh will have fallen off by November.

You are absolutely correct, picking stats and indices in alignment with our views isn’t something communists are immune to. We’re nevertheless decent at it.

This post is an indication of that. OP’s proposition is that western media says Chinese markets aren’t attractive to investment, and that the FDI index shows otherwise. This holds up, and here’s the description of the index:

The FDI confidence index is calculated as a weighted average of the number of high, medium, and low responses to questions regarding the likelihood of making a direct investment in the market over the next three years. Values are calculated on a scale of 0 to 3, with 3 being the highest level of confidence in a market for Foreign Direct Investment, and 0 being the lowest level of confidence.

Biggest reason, I can still use Boost after the api shit. If I were forced to use a browser or shudder the official app, I wouldn’t even consider it.

Most of my scrolling I do here, my Reddit use had become more specific even before I became more active on the 'grad. I don’t use twitter or any other social media, so Reddit is my only source of news on the series and mangas I follow.

For my part I don’t use the wider Lemmy either. I’ve got 2 subscriptions from hexbear and that’s it. Other instances feel like knock-off Reddit so I don’t browse them for the same reasons I haven’t browsed r/all in years.

This idiot really is pissing herself that she’ll be governed by Labour aristocrats instead of blue blooded Etonian pig fuckers. Worst case scenario, TERF island will saunter into the sea instead of actively sinking, more likely nothing will change.

All this needs is to make the indigenous person a golden eagle, may not be such a direct relation to the supposed ancient ancestors but certainly more of a descendant than a lizard.

I hope the Tories don’t stop coming up with policies just because they’ve been relegated to the shadow cabinet, otherwise sir Keir might not know what to do and accidentally enact something half decent once a year.

I looked at only one comment, the highest actual comment on the first link. The cited books don’t lead me to believe this guy’s well-read at all, not only because of the weird format, but also they’re not the useful kind of citation that backs up central claims.

Parenti’s work speaks vaguely about “less inequality”, “public ownership of the means of production”, and “priority placed on human services”, but these statements say nothing about the real, systemic experiences of Soviet citizens, particularly industrial workers who were explicitly supposed formed the basis of Soviet society. Saying that there was “public ownership” of industry is a truism. It tells us nothing about what state ownership and management meant for ordinary Soviet industrial laborers in terms of wages, working hours, factory management, social mobility, and more broadly their participation in Soviet society. It’s a “socialist” history of the USSR with the working class’ real, material experiences written out.

I know this feels right to people who haven’t got a grasp on the fact that they live in a capitalist society. All manner of improvements can be made to the superstructure of a capitalist society, it won’t become equal. How do I know the USSR was socialist? For most of its existence it didn’t have a class of people with an overrepresented influence over its administration or the functioning of its society. Specific statistics and policies that indicate prosperity or democracy aren’t immaterial, but they are only ancillary.

Parenti spends no time engaging with the vast academic literature on Russian and Soviet workers and labor history. Most of these works are written by socialist scholars interested in examining the role of class and labor in Soviet society.

The poster has to know this ain’t true. Western historiography on the subject of the USSR and other worker states is notoriously devoid of first-hand accounts and documents. Grover Furr calls attention to this in many of his speeches and writings: a medieval historian who doesn’t have a good grasp of multiple languages used in the region they’re studying is rightly a laughingstock, yet how many historians of the USSR speak (or just read) russian? How many historians of seeseepee know mandarin?

… In none of these works is the Soviet state itself a producer or unfiltered transmitter of worker’s “class interests”, inasmuch as scholarship nowadays accepts the idea that such a diverse group - in terms of gender, background, geography, and profession - could have a coherent set of interests.

I’m not sure I’m reading this right, but I think the dimwit is proposing the proletariat doesn’t exist because intersectionality makes class interests too complicated, which would be as correct as the dodo population is numerous. We’re who we are here, we’ve at least skimmed Capital, we’re better than to believe added factors change the core of a system.

Parenti largely avoids engaging with the question of how “socialist” the USSR was in a substantive way. He skips description of what the USSR “was” for excuses about “why”. Certainly its leaders were convinced Marxists, and this set of beliefs pervaded every aspect of the USSR’s existence. …

And so on and so on. How someone could read Blackshirts and Reds and come away with the singular question “Why didn’t the author prove to my satisfaction that the USSR was communist?” is beyond me. I might be convinced they never read a word Parenti wrote considering their entire comment, it’s filled with stuff they may have gotten from reviews.

This is under the telegraph video on YT. The only value this person can provide humanity is by facing the wall.

It’s less that and more “ohh, it’s fine when they say it, but when I say it, it’s racist” which isn’t reasonable in the first place for the n-word, but doubly so in this case since we know there’s a lot of racism going around in the HK independence “movement.”

Fascists are often cowards, I’m not saying they wouldn;t callously kill people during their retreat, rather that atrocities take planning and coordination, ergo time, time they wouldn’t have if they wanted to flee and they would have,

If your logic held up there’d be little stopping them from committing these light-speed atrocoties between the second bomb and the surrender.

Not much since there’d be quite few of them. Japan would be on the retreat at that point and would have very limited capacity to carry out further atrocities.

What would you tell people that lost their families in the Korean war to support the atomic bombs, since Japan surrendering to the US instead of the USSR all but guaranteed that war?

As though it had any power as an uncommon insult used by trots of all people. It had as much power as their newspapers.

Jesus fucking christ. It’s the “Am I allowed to participate in society?” all over again. No, it’s not some huge hypocricy to have an extra flat that you rent out, or to work a high salary job. It’s also not a crime to want some comforts and even luxuries.

The landlords in pre-revolution China were essentially feudal lords, not people with a bit of extra wealth that still laboured for their living. There’s no point in looking down on people over what is little more than pittance for an actual capitalist today, those arseholes take trips to the bottom of the ocean for the money your parents accrued over their lifetime.

I feel I would’ve been a lot softer if I hadn’t read the comments. I also struggled with this when I was younger. If you truly can’t fathom being petit bourgeois, just sell it when you inherit it, though be wary that the buyer may be another leech looking for investments. Otherwise I’d say it’s sufficient that you keep in mind that as a human being your interests lie with the preletariat. It might be even better if you used your money to support revolutionary activity.

Should I quote Lenin in Socialism and the War and Imperialism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism, on that? Do I need to remind comrades that Lenin saw Tsarist Russia as a nascent imperialist state with a mix of feudal colonial elements and modern imperialist elements all that tied to it being dominated by British and especially French capital? The excuses then that today’s Russia, an advanced capitalist state with sizeable capital export and control in its immediate region (larger than under Tsarist Russia to be noted), is therefore not imperialist is lazy. We must remain consistent. We must remain scientific, but very importantly we must remain clear eyed: The fact that the current war is an inter-imperialist one does not mean that we must ignore that the primary aggressor is undeniably western imperialism and its war dog the NATO “alliance”.

We indeed must remain scientific. That requires us to consider things that happened post-1924. This idea of labelling Russia imperialist, a shaky argument to being with, and then asserting that this makes the sides similar enough to not proclaim support is little more than idealism.

If we’re throwing out quotes, let’s also being in Stalin, Litvinov, Molotov. Why are we even pretending war between capitalists is happening for the first time since 1918, why are we ignoring the monumental though largely fruitless efforts of the USSR to rally the imperialists against Nazi Germany? Why pretend we’ve never allied ourselves with the US and UK when so many people’s movements received assistance from them, even if for the purpose of fighting their enemies?

Since multipolarity today depends on PRC not making moves to become yet another hegemon, it also depends on one’s position on China.

You may have a point in who leans in which direction, in that comrades that have been organised for some time have a bias against China, but that’s not a clever value judgement. Since older comrades lean this way, and the leadership are older in many parties, unions etc, it makes sense that this bias would be made official policy.

It might read like I’m devaluing it calling it bias, and that’s exactly what I am because that’s all that it is. I say this having talked to many of them and seen the clear contradiction in the party policy. Old leftists are quite often parroting anticommunist tropes re China, such as no freeze peach, no free thought, or direct quote ”They run people over with tanks over there." These people aren’t stupid, they just come from a time when China didn’t respond to western misinformation.