about it you ignorant racist imperial peon.
Chinese people feel both that their country is more democratic, and that democracy is more important than USians do.
Because in the US, the average person’s support for a policy has NO EFFECT on how likely it is to be passed, whereas the opinions of the ultra-wealthy are basically already law.
The optics of having to kill dozens and dozens of zombies that were formerly African civilians, in scenes reminiscent of the horrid racism of Black Hawk Down, are pretty hard to get past… but the actual story is of a western megacorporation, owned by a council of fucked up ultra-wealthy eugenicists including several aristocrats, coming to Africa to steal a local resource, ignoring the warnings of the locals as to its danger, then performing horrific medical experiments on the locals culminating in giving all of them the zombie virus by lying that it’s a vaccination program.
In RE4 the threat was native to the area of the outbreak, but in 5 the villain is very clearly plundering, racist, capitalist white guys trying to advance their genocidal ambitions.
First, I would say: same, way more money goes in subsidies and pseudolegal tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy than on welfare.
Second, I would try to explain that that’s not actually how taxes work anyway. The government doesn’t gather all the tax money into a big pile, count it all up, and then make a budget to decide how to spend it. Instead, money collected as taxes basically just ceases to exist - it’s deducted from your account and disappears. Separately to this, the government simply creates as much money as they want to fund their budget. (At least, any government with currency sovereignty does - this excludes Eurozone countries and many local or municipal authorities, who actually do have to make a money pile, or else borrow it from somewhere.)
Printing too much money can have inflationary effects - prices increase because there’s more money around to buy things - so taxing away and destroying some money is necessary, but if the newly printed money is spent to develop economic activity then you can actually safely print more than you tax by quite a large margin. Neoliberal economists are incapable of/choose not to understand this because it leads to higher wages, lower unemployment and increased bargaining power for the workers, which could ultimately lead to greater political power. Instead they preach austerity doctrine, telling the lie that governments need to cut services and reduce spending to ‘reduce their deficit’, selling off public goods and services to the private sector so they can extract a profit - at the expense of the nation’s people.
There was German resistance to the Nazis too.
No, and we probably never will for sure, but it ran away and really that’s embarrassing enough.
Damn, cause from here it seems kinda like all their Nazi shock troopers got smoked
What do you mean? Now the brave Ukrainian resistance can use those Schutz Staffel Storm Shadows or whatever the fuck to not only blow up grocery stores in downtown Donetsk, but also blow up grocery stores in downtown Belgorod too!
Violence is the only thing that has ever destroyed oppression.
Violence, and the threat of violence, is the only way to make someone who is persecuting you for their own material benefit stop.
There was another post somewhere with the calculation of the actual explosive warhead mass converted into TNT equivalent, and it was around 6kT total, just over a third of Little Boy which was 15kT. Which is still absolutely fucking insane.
No it cannot, because the Ukrainian army and regime is filled with nazis that want to ethnic-cleanse the Russian speaking population.
Here is a video of a Ukrainian nazi conference on the 5th of February 2022 (!) discussing the end goal of a dismembered Russia, which these nazis expected to gain a large share of the spoils from.
The Chinese Nationalists thought that military power should decide that they were in charge of China, right up until the People’s Liberation Army fucking bodied them and they fled to their little island with their tails between their legs (and then conducted massacres against the native population and anyone remotely leftist).
This “”“independence dispute”“” would have been resolved seventy years ago had the US Navy not stuck their fucking imperial beak in and stopped the communists chasing down these fascist war criminals and finishing the job.
Everything that exists takes its shape from a balance of opposing forces internal to its structure, and everything that exists is either coming into existence or fading from it.
For the first point, imagine a suspension bridge. The shape of the bridge is formed from the opposing forces of its wires pulling in opposite directions, but instead of cancelling out or one force winning over the other, the two opposed forces result in a synthesis - the structure of the bridge holding up against gravity.
For the second point, consider a mountain range. It is either rising up due to tectonic shifts or it is weathering away from wind, rain and frost. Either it’s rising up faster (as the Himalayas are today), or it’s weathering away faster (as most other places) - if the two rates happen to be exactly equal for a time then you have a moment of equilibrium, which are very rare in nature and only ever exist as a dynamic equilibrium. This is the complete opposite conclusion to the kind of ‘mechanistic’ materialism that underpins liberalism, where stasis and stillness are assumed to be the natural state of any system. With a dialectical understanding we can see that change is the natural state of a system, while equilibrium is fleeting and even the most seemingly ageless mountains will inevitably become dust in the wind, indeed are already becoming dust.
Consider also the suspension bridge again. While it’s being built, it’s coming into being, but the instant that construction is finished it begins to suffer the decay of entropy. It starts to rust and crumble away, and will fade out of existence unless it is actively maintained - unless energy is expended ‘bringing it into being’ once more and restoring the balance of the opposed forces that make it up. Otherwise, if one force begins to weaken (one side of the cables begin to rust) the forces may become so unbalanced that the structure disintegrates.
Now to combine these two points, think of fire. Fire is a particularly good illustration of a dialectical process, because it is a process that abolishes itself. Fire has to consume fuel to exist, in fact its existence is nothing but the consumption of fuel, but once it has consumed the fuel it disappears: its existence inevitably destroys the very conditions that allow it to exist. It spreads, rapidly bringing more and more of itself into existence, until all available fuel is being burned and it starts dwindling away. And this happens not because of “conscious will” (neither God reaching down to snuff it out, nor the fire ‘choosing’ to burn to ash), but because of its internal structure and the resolution of its internal contradictions.
Another such example would be yeast turning sugar into alcohol, inevitably poisoning itself to death… and a further example would be capitalist society creating the conditions for a socialist revolution. The capitalists cannot do away with the workers, their labor is the only thing that allows capital to be expanded. But competing in the market obliges the capitalists to drive their workers into such miserable conditions that they inevitably ask things like “Why is this happening to me? What has caused this situation? And how can I stop it?”
And in answering those questions, they are brought face-to-face with stark reality, they are driven by necessity to seek a true understanding of the world’s historical development. They are forced to learn how the currently existing society rose out of the previous social structure, which, due to its internal contradictions, caused its own abolishment - the workers with the greatest understanding discover dialectical materialism, and thus finally they are able to understand the process by which they were inevitably forced into discovering dialectical materialism. So the process of capitalist society’s development leads, inevitably, to the existence of the communist workers that will overthrow it.
Yeah, clearly they just post any kind of Russian propaganda over at the… checks notes Kyiv Independent
Why are you defending the rump state of a fascist dictatorship?
I hope the “Republic of China” can someday be peacefully dissolved and the province of Taipei reunited under the mainland government.
They joined a civil war in progress on the morally correct side
It doesn’t “make me feel better”, it’s the objective historical truth.
There is a true sequence of events that actually happened in real life. That sequence can only be determined by the evidence left behind, the collecting and interpreting of which is a painstaking and fallible process - but through rigorous investigation the true history of the world CAN be reconstructed.
However, if you’re not the one investigating, then you have to assess the reconstructions presented by those who do. What biases do they have? Who is funding their research? In what context have they chosen to present it? Who disagrees with them, what are their alternative conclusions, what is the difference in quality of evidence and analysis?
And so I have to ask you, how did you come to your understanding of history? How many books have you read? By who? What have you heard and where? Who was telling you? What evidence did they present?
WHY ARE YOU SO SURE YOU’RE RIGHT?
What evidence have you personally been presented that gives you absolute confidence in your worldview? I can show you why I believe what I believe about history, can you show me why you do? For western anticommunist leftists, the answer is usually “No”, because your understanding of the history of existing socialism has been carried over whole-cloth from your lifelong capitalist indoctrination.
If any of this jogs you into a realization that your historical understanding is not based on any kind of solid evidence or research, I’d be happy to recommend some sources. More than happy in fact, I’d be thrilled! Read! You have to read history! If you don’t, your attempts to change the world will fail! Would you try to build a house without reading about the properties of wood, steel and concrete? How can you try to build a movement to improve the world without investigating those who went before you? Do you think you can just ‘freestyle’ it?!
Anyway, I’ll leave one book here in case it piques your interest - Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti - which was crucial to developing my personal understanding of the actual place of the USSR in world history, as well as understanding the material basis of fascism in capitalist society and why it is the direst mortal enemy of communism. You can take my suggestion to read it or you can ignore it, but either way at least be honest and don’t lie to yourself about the sources of your beliefs.
Okay, regardless of what political tendency you end up at, you really have to understand that none of those things are true. This is just a matter of history.
The USSR was not fascist, it was as far from fascism as any political system can possibly be. It was fundamentally anti-imperialist and was by far the most important actor in the defeat of European fascism in the 20th century, as well as in supporting national liberation movements across the world afterwards. Its collapse was devastating to workers’ and indigenous peoples’ rights globally.
Similarly, the USSR not only did not commit any genocides, not only was not antisemitic, but was essentially the only thing standing in the way of the total extermination of every single person from west Poland to Siberia by the German Nazis’ genocidal colonial expedition. Red Army prisoners of war were the first to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and Red Army soldiers liberated it and stopped the Holocaust. The idea that the USSR committed genocide, whether by ‘intentionally causing famine’ or by any other means you may have heard, is a lie that provably originated with Joseph Goebbels himself, and was amplified by the media empire of US fascist William Randolph Hearst.
If you want any books or articles to read about any of this then I’ll happily provide them, but understanding the real history of the first socialist nation is absolutely crucial to both understanding the world as it is now and imagining how it can be changed for the better in the future.
Also, the word they translated as ‘massacre’ was actually also ‘liquidate’, which obviously has a different meaning when talking about organizations, but then you can’t expect journalistic or moral integrity from the BBC.
(But also I fully support massacring all the scum they’ve been financing)
Stamping out copies of each street sign in Simplified Chinese