Send me bad puns. Good puns welcome too.

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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • It’s important to understand that 20th century communist states weren’t just “communist” (there’s no such ideology as communism); they were Marxist-Leninist, which despite the name is a rebranding of Bolshevism by Stalin. “Socialist” and “communist” are incredibly broad terms, and the idea that communist = implementing Marx’s ideas is so reductive as to be just wrong. Now Marx’s opinion would likely vary depending on time and place, but at least he’d probably condemn Stalin’s USSR as an authoritarian hellhole. Beyond that I have no idea, but many Marxists who were contemporary to the things you describe condemned them and many others supported them, so we can’t make a realistic guess without projecting our own values on him. Basically what you’re asking is analogous to “what would Adam Smith think about the current state of the US;” it’s something we can speculate about but generally isn’t as salient a point as seem to you think it is.

    PS: I suspect you don’t know much about Marx’s ideas, so you should start from there. First, the dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t necessarily an actual dictatorship (that’s not how the term is used by Marx).









  • While I do agree it’s more complicated than “money = food,” a lot of this complexity is fueled by imperialism of one kind or another, so this isn’t an “oh well that’s just life” situation. People would be less hungry if, for example, the people keeping them hungry weren’t financed and armed by America and (occasionally) China. The message of “we could fix this if we wanted” is still accurate.







  • Oil they consume nationally is oil they can’t sell.

    Its opposition has continued in the run-up to the UN Cop30 climate summit in Brazil, yet the country is now also making a whirlwind switch to renewable power at home.

    It’s kind of in their interest to decrease their own oil consumption while keeping international oil consumption high, which is kind of what they’re doing. As for your other points, good public health is good for the economy in general, but not necessarily a boon for the leadership’s coffers. They make their money from oil; other people would make money from a thriving and diverse economy. It’s that divide that fuels seemingly counterproductive policies; they benefit special interests who don’t care about everyone else.



  • Calling one of the two major parties in Canada, which almost won the last election if not for its leader fucking up to an insane degree, “unpopular” is certainly a take. Also the current senior part of Germany’s ruling coalition is the Christian Democratic Party so… yeah. More broadly, though, you have to realize that Protestantism in US rightwing politics is just a stand-in for white nationalism, while in more anti-clerical Western countries nationalism is the dominant religion with traditional religion mostly a distant second. The GOP isn’t a cult because it’s religious (they still have a hefty atheist and otherwise non-Protestant support base); it’s a cult because rightwing politics are inherently culty, far-right politics even more so. It’s not like cannibalizing fellow workers while the owner class bleeds you dry becomes more rational when you’re doing it for the German nation instead of Jesus.