• nolikeymachine@lemmy.zipBanned
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    1 day ago

    You realize that all of those are a massive failure right? Living in those places was and is a nightmare. You know that right? If not, then you’re not smart enough to be replacing any form of government.

    • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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      19 hours ago

      You can tell the terminal reddit shitlibs by the combination of extreme smugness while also being completely wrong

    • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      God, what a nightmare

      But maybe I’m just not smart enough to read this graph correctly. Maybe it’s actually upside down.

      • nolikeymachine@lemmy.zipBanned
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        22 hours ago

        Yeah because they expanded their healthcare system in 1949 as well and actually started heavily using vaccines and antibiotics. Common sense is just a simple Google away lmao

        • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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          18 hours ago

          So what you’re saying is that the CPC siezed power and then life in China immediately, rapidly improved to the point where their life expectancy is now higher than America’s? Excellent, glad we’re on the same page.

          and actually started heavily using vaccines and antibiotics

          Oh, did they not have those things before the evil communists took over? How interesting

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      It’s much the opposite, living in those places was and is very good, especially when viewed over time and not as an individual snapshot. The USSR, for example, managed to double life expectancy, provide free, high quality healthcare, education, and low-cost or free housing for all, lowered working hours, and had one of the fastest growing economies in the world while democratizing society. The PRC is on track to become the world’s indusputably most advanced country in the following decades. What’s going on is that socialism and socialist countries have been systemically demonized in the west to prevent the working classes from seeking an alternative.

      I’m not a genius by any stretch, but I’ve studied these countries, engaged with theory, organize in real life, and more. I’m smart enough to understand this, which I’d say everyone is if they put in the effort. Intelligence isn’t nearly as striated as liberals would have you believe.

      • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        Cowbee, you have an amazing ability to defend socialism and explain the same concepts day after day while never allowing frustration or anger to taint your replies. I salute you, comrade. 🖖

      • nolikeymachine@lemmy.zipBanned
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        1 day ago

        You clearly have NO idea about how bad the USSR actually was. And you clearly have no idea how many of its citizens were killed by the government or died from starvation or cold. Not do you have any idea as to how much funding it was given from the US and other countries just to stay afloat (especially in WW2) because they couldn’t organize their own factories that were useful etc etc and the US has to send OUR tank building teams over to them just to show them how to efficiently build tanks, and we sent them 13,000 tanks, 400,000 jeeps and trucks, and 14,000 aircraft. Aka the USSR couldn’t even stand on its own 2 feet against Germany and we had to send them an insane amount of firepower to ensure them not falling. And about the life expectancy thing. It did double life expectancy between 1915 and the 1960s as did most countries around the world including the US due to improved birthrates and better sanitation and vaccines and antibiotics. However from 1960-1980 other countries like the US continued to go up while the USSR actually started declining again. So yes please continue to spread your false lies. And let’s talk about how every one of those countries you spoke of couldn’t survive without support from other countries. Meanwhile the country that you hate so much (the US) continues to survive and thrive while heavily supporting a dozen of other countries and are contributing some form of assistance to over 175 countries worldwide.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          1 day ago

          No, lol. This was like a bingo-card for generic, lazy, unsourced anti-communism. I’ve heard every one of these arguments before.

          1. Deaths by the state - Capitalists, fascists, sabateurs, Tsarists, landlords, and kulaks were targeted by the state. These weren’t random killings, but targeted attacks towards classes of people that had taken up arms against the people, and as such this was popularly supported. The communists weren’t butchers, nor were they killing people willy-nilly.

          2. Famine - Prior to collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, famine was common in Russia. The kulak system of farming, itself a bourgeois model, was extremely exploitative and very inefficient. The 1930s famine was the last outright famine outside of wartime, and was caused by a combination of weather disaster (which collectivized farming was capable of resisting better) and kulaks killing their crops and livestock to resist the Red Army.

          3. Life Expectancy - Life expectancy climbed not just because of general sanitation, but because housing and employment were gaurunteed, healthcare and education were free and high quality, and millions were directly lifted from poverty. Housing itself didn’t just increase in quantity, but quality, as prior living conditions outside of major cities were in horrible shacks. Deaths due to hypothermia went down dramatically thanks to improved soviet housing.

          4. Lend-Lease - The soviets are understood to have been capable of beating the Nazis without lend-lease. Lend-Lease was very helpful, no doubt, but it arrived after the soviets had turned the tides on the Nazi onslaught. The Red Army was responsible for 85% of the combat against the Nazis, and their large investment in heavy industry prior to the war was crucial in their success, despite coming into the 20th century far behind the rest of Europe.

          From 1941 to 1945, total lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union accounted for only 5% of the Soviet GDP in total. And it is a salient point that the majority of the aid was received after the tide of the war had already turned against the Germans on the Eastern Front. The Soviets had already won the critical battles of Moscow and Stalingrad. Germany was already losing the war when Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union had any significant effect, and that effect was minuscule compared with Soviet production at the time. By the time the first Sherman laid its tracks on Soviet soil, the writing was already very much on the wall for the Third Reich.

          Although Stalin, Khrushchev, and other Soviet politicians were very complimentary about the Lend-Lease program helping them win the war, the statistics tell a very different story. The noted historian David M. Glantz points out in this regard,

          “Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941–1942; that achievement must be attributed solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates….”

          He further states that without Lend-Lease, the Soviets still would have won, but the war would have taken 12 to 18 months longer.

          Source.

          1. Foreign Aid - In all reality, the USSR, Cuba, PRC, and Vietnam don’t recieve much, if anything, in aid. The US Empire is the one that relies on aid, though it doesn’t call it that. The US Empire runs on imperialism. Through export of capital, setting up comprador regimes, and outsourcing while maintaining monopoly on tech, the US Empire plunders the entire global south. Unequal exchange with the global south keeps the south underdeveloped, it’s equal exchange with fellow global south countries like the PRC that is causing actual development in the global south.

          You have no clue what you’re talking about.

          • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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            1 day ago

            Surgical Dissasembly of a Proud Cultist, Cowbee, oil and pastel, 2025. Acquired by museum same year

          • nolikeymachine@lemmy.zipBanned
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            22 hours ago

            Oh I know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re just brainwashed. Too far gone for anyone to talk sense into. And if you truly think that the USSR and Cuba didn’t get much aid from other countries including the US, you really are just dumb. I do not have the time nor do I care enough to educate you. All I can say is, you really need to learn how to research FACTS not myths and lies. Also I have one more truth for you. COMMUNISM HAS NEVER WORKED. I know I know, maybe just another 20 or 30 genocides and world wars from now and they’ll get the kinks worked out. But I doubt it. And maybe just maybe one will be able to survive without the help of a capitalist system and not end up being a 3rd world country with a shit economy. I personally have friends who grew up in Russia (it was still the USSR when they were about 10) and China and south Korea and Mexico and Vietnam. Every one of them will tell you how much better the US is than where they grew up. Communism is perfect on paper, but it will never ever work because it requires people to be perfect in order for it to work properly. And people will never be perfect. That’s why capitalism and democracy works better because they at least somewhat keep that in check. My olive branch and honestly my best idea for what the US could become would be a socialist democracy similar to Sweden. That would actually be able to work and would be very beneficial for all the citizens.

            • davel@lemmy.ml
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              18 hours ago

              You’re just brainwashed.

              You just arrived here on Lemmy, parroting every Redditor talking point, and we’re brainwashed? Sorry to pop the corporate media bubble you’d been living under.

              Also brainwashing isn’t real, in fact it was a CIA cold war psyop. The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America

              “Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing,” [Timothy] Melley writes in a 2011 paper for Grey Room. “The concept began as an [O]rientalist propaganda fiction created by the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up. This fiction proved so effective that the CIA’s operations directorate believed it and began a furious search for a real mind control weapon. The search resulted not in a miraculous new weapon but a program of simulated brainwashing designed as a prophylactic against enemy mistreatment. This simulation in turn became the real basis for interrogating detainees in the war on terror.”

              Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”

            • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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              19 hours ago

              Good Lord, imagine rattling off all these stale, pre-programmed thought terminating cliches, and trying to call other people brainwashed

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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              22 hours ago

              This is another ridiculous comment.

              1. The US being “better” to live in - As I explained, the US is an imperialist country that plunders the world for its resources. It isn’t a closed loop with a system that works, it’s a global parasite.

              2. Surviving without aid - Socialist countries recieve sanctions, embargoes, coup attempts, and genocide from capitalist countries, not aid. The US Empire has committed genocide against Koreans, Vietnamese, and far more to serve its own interests. Socialist countries do often start in the third world, not as imperialist countries, and develop on their own labor and not via imperialism like the US Empire.

              3. Communism on paper - There’s absolutely nothing about communism that requires people to be in perfect order for it to work. I genuinely have no clue what you mean by this, I’ve heard this before but it doesn’t actually make any sense.

              4. Communism and democracy - Communism and socialism are more democratic than capitalism can be, because the working classes are in control, rather than private capitalists.

              5. Sweden - Sweden is a capitalist country that, like the US, depends on imperialism to fund its safety nets. Like the US, Sweden is a dictatorship of capital.

              No, I’m not “brainwashed,” I’ve just done far more research into the subject of socialism and communism both in theory and in practice. It’s like you’re trying to be someone’s hyper-conservative uncle right now, I’ve heard all of these before and none of them are valid.

            • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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              21 hours ago

              genocides

              Big fat 0, unless you mean the genocide communists thwarted in 1945

              World wars

              Holy shit lmao, the sheer desperation and illiteracy it takes to try and pin the world wars on communism when ww1 started before there were any communist countries and ww2 was started by genocidal german capitalists. You are flailing, my guy. Red, mad and nude in the extreme.

              Also, format your shit