Agreed, but then I wouldn’t frame it as “let’s learn from Labour and overpromising”, rather as “let’s send the old fucking neoliberal socdems to hell and become socialists”

Or, you know, let’s elect actually progressive socialist parties who won’t claim “whoops budget holes back to austerity” on day zero?

I’m literally a Spaniard, not a Yank… Oh, sorry, you’re from North American Country #2 in genociding native populations, not from #1, my bad!

Great job disregarding the difference between economic sanctions meant to starve people with the explicit purpose of regime change vs. lack of trade in general due to self reliance or response to US sanctions. You’re illiterate.

For broader economic power, real dollars (or renminbi or pesos or whatever unit you like) is best

For broader economic power you could measure actual industrial output: tons of iron, amount of ships built, energy consumed, any actual metric and not an arbitrary accounting unit. China’s central bank artificially devalues its currency in the international market to boost exports and productive capabilities, if you knew literally anything about economics you’d be aware of how this impacts GDP measurements in dollars.

GDP in USD is a bad metric, try GDP PPP.

they have tried to coerce policy changes with trade threats a bit. If you live here, you know we’ve gotten a few rounds of it.

Responding to US sanctions tit for tat is not equivalent to China starving other nations to enact regime change, are you arguing in bad faith or do you truly believe those two are comparable?

only Han Chinese are people

What on holy Earth are you talking about? You live in the worldwide capital of Atlantic trade slavery and you believe China is more racist than you somehow? 1 in 4 black men in the US are put in jail at some point in their lives, you’re literally accusing China of things that are only true in the US lmao, nice projection

“the Eastern bloc did much more coercive trade policy than the West”. Since they didn’t trade freely with the greater world at all

And didn’t enact international blockades such as the one the US is enacting on Cuba or like US+UK enacted in 1950s Iran to destroy the economy and remove the democratically elected president Mosaddeq.

Your argument is so incredibly flawed that you’re having to conflate “China responded to US sanctions tit for tat” and “the Eastern Block was mostly self-sufficient” with “the US forces international embargos on other countries with the explicit purpose of starving the population to push for regime change”. You are literally seeing in real time how Gazans are fucking starved by the US-supported siege of their population which blocks aid and food from entering (let alone trade) and you feel compelled to defend the genocidal USA anyway

Please explain to me how weak and isolated China is, the producer of half the industrial products of the world. Please explain to me how isolated and weak the Eastern Block was in the previous century as the second world power.

It will worsen conditions, but that’s a pretty typical tactic to put pressure

It’s only “typical” by western nations. The US explicitly started the blockade over half a century ago with the following justification:

“to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Literally, google that sentence.

A scathing criticism! Hopefully next month we can get a stern letter!!

Hey! I’ve spent the past days reading modern historiographical books, and I’ve done an extensive writeup on my findings. Since I’m an ML and I criticise anarchist positions in the writeup, I’m not sure whether I should post it here as a post, but if you wanna have a look at it and respond, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

So far I’m just learning to code harder in C getting into the nitty-gritty of the hardware. A simple but challenging enough project is a mini LED light that I can tie to my thumb in order to use my eBook better. Regulable light intensity through PWM, low-power mode for low power consumption when off, interrupts from button to power-up… Quite a few different peripherals to touch!

I installed Linux Mint and I’m having fun with some extremely cheap RISC-V microcontrollers (ch32v003) using the open source toolchain of ch32fun. Having a blast!

That’s by definition of propaganda, though? The word “propaganda” doesn’t imply “false”, it just implies that it’s propagated with a political goal in mind

I can’t understand how there are people who genuinely believe this argument. “Newspapers can publish anything with no responsibility as long as it says the word opinion”

Counterpoint, you can understand the core points of socialism very quickly

Disagree. We have been subjected to 100 years of anticommunist propaganda, you need a lot of study of theory and history to overcome that

God, I’ve been reading your exchange with ThirdConsul and it’s painful. I’m sorry you have to endure this shit.

If you want an additional reference to the USSR actually subsidizing the Polish economy, Szymanski’s “Is the Red Flag Flying” goes in detail about this, and proves with economical data that 1955 onwards the USSR subjected itself to the short end of the stick of unequal exchange and provided raw materials to the COMECON countries at international market prices and below in exchange for industrially manufactured goods. Some nationalist Poles are to a certain degree aware of this and instead of framing the exchanges as “dismantling of Polish industry” as this clueless user is doing, speak of “the USSR giving us useless iron and taking finished industrial products from us”, completely devoid of any understanding of high value-added goods.

Also, the user is outright lying. The USSR absolutely warned Poland not to get into loans with the IMF, and Poland ignored it anyway, proving again Poland’s political independence within the Eastern Block.

You may wanna stop trying to talk sense into ThirdConsul, they’re a Polish nationalist who threatened me with violence when I gave evidence that the USSR subsidized Polish industry after 1955.

Surely training exercises on invaded territory in which you train forces locally have nothing to do with the invasion :)

NATO Training Mission - Iraq:

Tell me how many of the countries involved don’t start with U

Iraq wasn’t NATO, it was just a coalition made entirely of NATO nations :D

And Russians are bloodthirsty hordes looking to murder civilians. Your country’s Nazi legacy is poking out when you speak like that

Yeah yeah every European war is awesome and epic, unlike Russia who purposefully murders civilians all day despite having a much, much, much lower civilian kill rate in Ukraine than NATO in Iraq.

All 6 million of those people made an ego-driven mistake

“It’s not the Democrats failing to win elections, it’s the 6 million stupid voters!”

Unhinged shit