The majority of people have 2 arms. So why bother with prosthetics or research into biofeedback?

See, it’s flawless logic /s

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Is the absence of socialism capitalism? Is the absence of capitalism socialism?

I’m asking you to take a higher level philosophical view of being tied to defending a human-made economic model.

Why even waste the energy? Never mind the fact that socialism requires authoritarianism as the starting point. You don’t even have many models of success to point to. Have even half of counties that tried socialism survived? It’s not much different than wearing a Confederate flag on your shirt and shouting “The South Will Rise Again!” Even China went to a hybrid system. Why spend you limited life defending a proven mediocre idea?

You don’t want countries to chose for themselves based on their own priorities? You really think you have it all figured out and should force it on everyone?

“Better” can also be defined as simply not going through the total collapse of one’s country. Stability, not economic power, has value. Humans do a lot to maintain homeostasis and low risk living. It’s a looooong timeline to unfuck a country. Generations, in fact. Not limited to post-Soviet bloc counties either. Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, the US after the Civil War, Germany, Italy, Spain, Iraq. Take your pick.

How many East Germans “regretted” the collapse of the Nazi regime simply because their currency ceased to buy them food?

Stop thinking that an economic model of governance solves or causes all problems. Humans cause problems. They’ll use any economic model to show you how easy it is to fuck it up.

Right. You’ve got it.

The economic system means nothing for the nostalgia to work. The nostalgia is not for socialism. It was for anything else.

Anything. Not socialism specifically. Anything else.

So why lean so hard on a misunderstanding of those surveys you admit yourself is wrong?

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Well, I appreciate the attempt to engage in conversation by throwing someone else’s biased work at me, but there’s a number of problems with this article. Not the sources, though. I will say that these opinion polls are reliable as opinion polls. There’s just a lot more happening.

This article sounds great to anyone that’s never talked to a single person that lived under a socialist government listed here about the actual day-to-day of life, or the countries that they neglected to mention.

First off, nostalgia is classically an unreliable metric for all humans. A guy that loved the Tito era for entirely sexist and exploitative reasons explained it to me like this: “You know why everyone says they liked it back when Tito was around? We’re old. Back then, our dicks worked and we were strong and the girls were pretty!” Gross, but he has a point.

Not that you can have reliable polling from the socialist era to compare. Literally – people couldn’t trust the government enough to give their honest opinion. Most people were afraid they would will suffer at the hands of the government if they give their opinions. Sounds swell. (https://yorktowninstitute.org/purposeless-polls-how-soviet-citizens-rebelled-against-a-regime-that-rejected-open-communication/)

Nostalgia is generally not accepted as an accurate form of analysis of the past or assessment of the present because humans tend to only remember the good times. Called “Rosy Retrospection" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection). And that nostalgia is triggered by the unhappiness of the present – not that there wasn’t unhappiness back then, too. Just that people ignore that part. (https://allaboutpsychology.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-nostalgia-why-everything)

Personally, all the Tito- and Stalin-loving people I’ve met have been the most racist, conservative fuckers alive in any of these countries listed. The ones that say ,“the gays ruined Eurovision.” That’s a direct quote from a former co-worker that loved Tito so much because it was a dictatorship of personality that her parents aligned with (another word for this: corruption and preferential treatment). My partner and I say “the gays ruined Eurovision” sarcastically now when watching Eurovision because of her.

Hungary – case in point. The same proportion of people that put Victor fucking Orban in office are selling you on Ye Olde Socialism? Are you kidding me? My friend, it’s not a 1:1 relationship of “socialism was lovely and everything was great” and “old crusty fucks know what they’re talking about.” Holy shit – did you not even remember Orban existed and is Trump’s bestie?

Let’s look at the glaring omission: Albania. And use the same exact source as the Serbia survey, Balkan Insight. As it turns out, a lot of people in Albania didn’t enjoy socialism because Enver Hoxha turned it up to 11. It was North Korea levels of brutal. So when some people who simply don’t hate that era, it pisses off the people that suffered immensely under socialism.

https://balkaninsight.com/2016/12/12/albania-struggles-to-fight-the-root-of-communism-nostalgia-12-09-2016/btj/

perfect quote:

“The main reason for this is because in the last 26 years there has never been a thorough process of de-communism. Young people in the schools don’t get any information about the atrocities of the communist regime. On the other hand, right-wing parties have also much abused anti-communist rhetoric,” she said.

Oh, look – another connection between the far-right and nostalgia for the socialist era. Hmm….

Speaking of Albanians, you know who else didn’t love the socialist era and Tito? Albanians (and many other ethnicities) in Yugoslavia. The problem with socialism is its authoritarian structure lends itself perfectly to ethnic cleansing and marginalization. Albanians in Yugoslavia were more or less forbidden from participating in the economy. The Albanian reputation for sketchy shit is because on one side of the border Hoxha made life hell, and people that escaped had to hustle to survive outside of the regular economy.

All that Serbian nostalgia seems nice and lovely to you? Those Serbians also want to take back Kosovo and get rid of the Muslim population entirely. Remember? They fucking TRIED that already once. Did you forget a literal genocide in Yugoslavia as it collapsed? Ah yes, because we forget the bad things with nostalgia.

Let’s also look at how “Communist” Tito really was. Answer: Not very

Stalin and Tito got into a big fight because while Tito kept the word “socialist” in the name of the country, be liberalized the economy a lot. Which pissed Stalin off. It was the only thing that kept Yugoslavia from collapsing into an economic travesty that even the USSR couldn’t pull out of itself. https://schoolworkhelper.net/tito-stalin-dispute-1948-timeline-analysis-significance/

Part of this was economic relations between Yugoslavia and non-aligned movement countries in Africa. (https://afrinz.ru/en/2024/04/titos-african-diplomacy-how-yugoslavia-conquered-the-continent/) Tito engaged in trade – something not very socialist, right? Because he needed to to prop up the country’s economy. It’s a hard truth, but still a truth.

The result was that Bulgaria, Albania, and the USSR all saw Yugoslavia as something between threat and pariah. Albania built thousands of bunkers on its border with Yugoslavia as a jobs program utilizing Chinese cement imports, and used Yugoslavia’s “non-socialist” economic policies as a reason to paint them as a threat.

But doesn’t Bulgaria rank high on the nostalgia list? Sure, and it’s because joining the EU led to inflation and young people going to Germany for work. But shit – Bulgaria’s roads are nice. It’s not all bad.

Speaking of bad, the old guy that grounded the Tito love explained to me once why the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians didn’t get along back then or today. When this old guy was 18, he would get some blue jeans and like $20 in Yugo dinars and go into Bulgaria in his Yugo with some records and a full tank of gas. He would trade the jeans and records for Bulgarian Lev, and spend the weekend with sex workers and pretty much exploiting economic disparity at every angle. This is the nostalgia you think is so valid – people from one socialist country going to another that had it worse off and exploiting the people. Same thing the Russians did to Ukraine and Georgia.

I’m not saying that everything is nice in the post-European socialist world. It’s not. But accepting wistful nostalgia as honest truth is entirely foolish. Do I trust old white guys that loved the Jim Crow South to give me an honest assessment of the time and place as well? Fuck no. And because humans are humans, that’s a lot of what you’ll get.

But don’t take my word for it. Try reading books from people who recall the absurdly fucked up times.

Most books set in the USSR by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Secondhand Time — Svetlana Alexievich

Anything by Ismail Kadare

Gabriela Adameşteanu — Wasted Morning

The Truth That Killed - The Diary of Georgi Markov (killed by Bulgarian Secret Service for talking about life in soviet Bulgaria)

–Have you ever noticed how few books there are by people who just fucking loved living under any of these regimes? –

Now downvote away out of spite because I didn’t say you were right. It’s OK, I expected it all along.

I grew up the same, mostly because allowing so much as not literal means and easier time for a pastor that also does car upholstery part time to sell any concept. Literalism is pretty demanding a a position.

The literalist interpretation was seen as extreme until maybe 20 years ago. I was shocked to learn about how many denominations are going in for it now. But maybe that’s just the internet showing me parts of the world I hadn’t seen before.

It’s very hit or miss. Not all landlords are good or bad.

I’ve been to several post-socialist (and attempted socialst) counties. No one seemed to like those days other than Yugoslavs who didn’t get fucked up in the war that loved Tito because he validated them. The corruption was the same, and most other things harder or worse. Like getting your family sent to the gulag farms because you owned a radio and committed the crime of hearing music from the next country over.

Quantum physics: everything literally is probabilities.

The waves of this comment collapsed into photons entering my eyes showing me a joke about superposition once I observed it.

Wow, this is the setup for some excellent dystopian scifi. Or, like, real fucking life.

Someone said this bird eats insects, so it’s not violent for the fish at least.

I was very upset to learn that the Artemis II crew didn’t turn on Wizard of Oz at the exact moment that Dorothy opens her door, synced to the second they lost contact with Earth.

Beyond what’s been said already, we 100% do not have any way to take a picture of a planet outside our solar system that shows any detail of the planet’s surface, and no plans to make a telescope that can do that. What we do right now to even tell if there are planets around other starts is look at the star’s light and see if it gets slightly darker on regular intervals, indicating that a planet is crossing between us and the star in a regular orbit. Right now we can barely take a decent picture of Pluto, which is in our solar system. And checking the light brightness is really only good for looking for large planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn.

It’s like seeing a car at night on a mountainside 4 miles away with its headlights on. It’s just sitting there and you are wondering if it’s a car or something else. It’s hard to even tell it’s 2 lights, it just looks like one light from that distance. But what would we see if someone walked in front of the car with the headlights on? The light get dim on one side and bright again, then dim and bright again on the other side. Sort of the same thing.

As for the uncanny valley part, it’s because whoever came up with the graphic just did a random splash of water and land. The planet could be orange and magenta-colored, we have no idea. They used colors familiar to us looking at images of Earth because the intent is to make you think “it’s like Earth, but different.”

So is this is the fish equivalent of Bigfoot? Or like space aliens?

I hate that this is totally the opposite of how real conspiracy people think.

Edit:clarity

They genuinely believe this is some Capricorn 1 style psyop with an empty rocket. Once the rocket leaves their view, “we’re just supposed to trust NASA to tell is what’s going on?” Which, sadly, isn’t bad logic in is face, but during the Apollo missions, it was possible to use third party radio telemetry to prove they were, at least, in orbit.

Reverse the roles. The standing one is the conspiracy one saying “You see how much money they’re willing to spend to fool us?!” That’s legit how they think.

I’m 85% sure this lion is Ginger in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park. Him and his brother Garlic are the main two of two Mfuwe pride. Ginger is balding like this, and it’s awkward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8L9--GPrO4

Would prefer “Login with a whistled jaunty lil’ tune.”