I recommend reading what people who actually have a clue have to say on the subject https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-ahead-war-ukraine

It’s a war of attrition that Ukraine is losing because they have a much smaller population to draw on and rely on weapons from the west. Ukraine is already conscripting children, women, and the elderly now. It’s absurd to think that such conscripts are going to be able to hold off a seasoned professional army for long.

Indeed, liberalism is just a precursor of fascism https://orgrad.wordpress.com/articles/liberalism-the-two-faced-tyranny-of-wealth/

The principle of being racist scumbags?

NATO sent a bunch of weapons to Ukraine and now wants to see some PR return on that investment. Meanwhile, we’re now seeing admissions in western media that Ukraine was forced into offensive with insufficient weapons and training:

When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-lack-of-weaponry-and-training-risks-stalemate-in-fight-with-russia-f51ecf9

I think if the west ever becomes socialist then the type of socialism we’ll see will necessarily be rooted in western culture and it’s going to be its own unique flavor. Even China says that their system is a product of their own conditions and history, it’s not a model that can be franchised to other countries directly. And Chinese model is far from perfect, so it’s worth looking at both the good and the bad to learn and improve upon what works there while avoiding the negative aspects.

As I pointed out, we can look at the tangible outcomes in China such as poverty reduction programs that simply aren’t happening in countries where capitalists are in charge. So, we don’t have to take their word for it, we can just look at the outcomes.

It’s also worth noting that 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. People in China learn about communism in school, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that a country where vast majority of young people identify as Marxist, would have a genuine communist government in charge.

Another indicator we can look at is that China doesn’t suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. An inherent contradiction within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.

Working conditions and wages in China are improving rapidly. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. Social mobility in China is actually higher than it is in US.

Another example of the difference in China is that it massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade. This is another thing we don’t see happening under capitalism because capitalists don’t see significant profit from infrastructure investments. This is the main reason US infrastructure is currently crumbling.

Finally, 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. This sort of home ownership is not seen in capitalist countries where housing has become a commodity.

The reason capitalists run the countries even under Nodric model is because they are able to use their wealth to create disproportionate influence on the society. Capitalists own the media, provide funding for political campaigns, and so on. This allows capitalists to run a propaganda campaign against the population of the country. A couple of excellent books on the subject are Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent.

And in fact, we do see this system erode over time. Here’s a discussion of what happened in Sweden since the 70s and how capitalists have been eroding social programs there https://jacobin.com/2019/08/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-olof-palme-lo

The difference with China is that capitalists don’t run the government and all the core economy is publicly owned. I can highly recommend this book discussing why China is fundamentally socialist

https://redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red

This was an excellent discussion on the subject as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT7Th2aV0wM

I find that comparing how China and India developed after WW2 is illustrative as well. India took the capitalist route while China remained socialist, and the difference today is stark. India has incredible amount of poverty and the situation continues to get worse, meanwhile China is responsible for the biggest poverty elimination programs in the world. The fact that China is developing differently from capitalist nations is a good indicator that something different is happening there.

Not really, Nordic model is capitalist because the capital owning class owns the means of production and holds power in society. Nordic model has generous social services and a social safety net, but that of itself does not make it socialist. A socialist model implies that it is the working class that holds power and that means of production are under a mix of public and cooperative ownership. This is the model that all western countries fight against.

why would you expose yourself like that

China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos are all examples of socialist countries today. China alone lifted over 800 million people out of poverty in recent decades. Compare that to the capitalist paradise in India.

They do when they work in a cooperative and have a stake in the business being successful.

I lived in USSR, but go ahead tell me how terrible life there was because I’m sure you’re far more educated on the subject.

https://gist.github.com/yogthos/1bafb776c5cd820faceb14595958947f

The thing to remember is that cryptography is very tricky business, and even when an algorithm is sound on paper that does not guarantee that it’s implemented in a secure way. A famous example is when NSA “helped” develop the Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key exchange standard and introduced a vulnerability that nobody noticed for a very long time.

Any standard that’s been developed in conjunction with US agencies should be considered compromised in my opinion.

I’ve been using Mastodon for a couple of years now and it’s become significantly more active in that time from what I see anecdotally. That said, I’d say the key question for health is whether the community is big enough to support ongoing development and hosting. I think at this point the answer to both questions is a definite yes. There are millions of users in the Fediverse now, plenty of users are technical and are actively contributing.

I think we’ll see active users fluctuate over time, but I don’t see the core base of users abandoning Fediverse at this point because they’ve already established their social networks here.