SpookyGenderCommunist

Without reading anything but the headline... Does it have to do with all of them being influenced by Helena Blavatsky?

Rev Left Radio being called "Misleading" is so fucking bonkers to me.

Breht is such a thoughtful and genuine guy. And the show has so many guests on with differing perspectives. Like, yeah ok, some of those guests might say things one disagrees with, are debated within a given field, or are otherwise occasionally incorrect. But the ethos of that show is about getting the listener to know how to think, and thoughtfully approach things, from a broad left perspective. It's not just feeding you normative claims and calling it a day.

Anyway, go listen to RevLeft, Breht is such a gift

Cool, can he stop being a transphobic shitbag while he's at it? Fuck Dave Chapelle

She posted the entire, uncut, discussion with her past self bit on nebula. I actually watched that before I watched the actual video essay, and it really knocked me on my ass

Tbh the main reason it's so bad is because everyone picks the most shocking card in their hand, even if it doesn't make a coherent thought, or match well with what's being asked.

Like, holy shit, it's just edgy apples to apples, y'all!

I only buy vinyl records of albums that I really love or are otherwise Meaningful to me in some way. Otherwise, I shoot for cassette tapes, and CDs when I wanna but physical media. I just really like the physicality of it.

The ceremony of deciding what to listen to. Taking the media out of the case, putting it on the turntable, and having to be intentional about flipping to the next side. It's all a nice break from the ethereal, instant gratification machine that is my phone

How organized is the backlash in new Caledonia? A single spark can light a prairie fire, but it needs direction too. I worry these riots are too disorganized and unfocused to really fight off the French. That's the impression I'm getting from western media anyway, so I'm taking it with a big old chunk of rock salt.

Remember in the 90s when the consumer electronics boom went bust, and no one could afford to make insane shit like Akira, that was animated on ones? And we got the original Pokémon anime, that was practically a slide show?

I wanna go back to 2fps slide show anime. That shit was so fun! Maybe the constraints will breed creativity, instead of the 80000th isekai

no freedom of movement

Source?

• constant shortage of any goods

Think about why this might be, Friend. Really think hard about it. What large geopolitical things were happening at the time?

• being a dictatorship

Yes, of the proletariat

• (contrary to your first point) a housing shortage

Again, source? Also, wondering what you think happened before East Germany existed that might have contributed to this. Surely this changed over time

• a culture so dictated by work that people had little to no free time

Because people working 3 jobs under capitalism have so much free time? What does this even mean?

• political pressure

Again, what does this mean? All Political cultures and institutions exert pressures on their population... That's how politics works.

• control over the media

I'll agree that the siege mentality of much of former socialism led to a lack of press freedom, which was ultimately detrimental, but again... Why might this have been?

• the fucking stasi

Quick, name the West German secret police!

Let's assume for a minute that everything you've said is entirely true. If we're to be thoughtful about this. East Germany was a historically poorer, agrarian, region of Germany, much less industrialized, artificially lopped off from the west (not by the USSR, btw, who wanted a unified, nonaligned Germany, like the allies had done with Austria), it was heavily sanctioned, had been bombed to shit, much like the rest of Europe, but was made to pay the USSR reparations, that it wasn't as capable of paying, as a unified Germany would have been. The USSR even dismantled entire east German factories and shipped them back to rebuild their own industrial base.

How do you expect any country to not come out of that with considerable problems?

And the GDR did have considerable problems. I think you and I would disagree on what those problems were, but in the broad strokes, that much we can agree on.

But I would contend that, even with that in mind, East Germany ended up being a much more positive socialist experiment in many respects then say, Romania, which suffered a much more severe centralization of power, and cult of personality issues, then East Germany did.

In fact, looking at the makeup of the East German Parliament and its mass organizations, there was a much greater degree of representation of various social cleavages then in some other Eastern Bloc states.

While you could say argue that this was only 'on paper', that really depends on what period of East German history you're looking at, as the electoral system was altered a handful of times.

Regardless though, this was an expression of the fact that East Germany had a more open Political culture due to its institutions being establisehed as part of an intended nonaligned, unified, German state. And due to the fact that it had received the socializing effects of industrial capitalism that gave it things like an incredibly progressive Queer movement, that other Eastern Bloc states, which were formerly feudal backwaters, hadn't developed.

Tl;Dr - this shit is a lot more complicated than listing off bullet points for "why East Germany was Evil", That I was taught in the 7th grade.

I can easily imagine a government committing human rights abuses in response to a security threat.

From what I remember, this was basically the conclusion of a UN report on the subject.

That China was engaging in this broadly successful de-radicalization campaign, that there was evidence of human rights abuses in certain areas of that program, but that they didn't amount to genocide. In fact, I don't think the report ever mentioned the word genocide.

Geoff Ramsey, is that you?

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