I think on a long enough timeline it could be said Gorbachev killed more people than WW2. Because what he really did was he dismantled the nation best equipped to handle climate change, and to help others handle climate change. :doomjak:
Gorbachev said in an interview in Turkey in 2000 “My ambition was to liquidate Communism.” and establish a “Union of Independent Sovereign Republics” and to basically help America fight China. So he wanted a return of bourgeois nationalism, and a fully capitalist mode of production, but without dissolving the USSR, and with the addition of social democracy, which would rely on imperialism. It was a very naive in my opinion.
um… lenin, that’s a little too low to be xi’s arm :hyperflush:
not only do we not guarantee staple foods for all, but supermarkets throw out millions of tons of (barely expired) foods every year and deliberately lock the dumpsters so the homeless can’t loot them. There are several foods, like plain yogurt, which have artificially low expiration dates and get thrown out long before they truly expire.
I’ll never forget when I worked for a supermarket when I was 20 and was made to throw out an entire garbage bag full of cookies that had been only slightly overcooked by the bakery. They tasted great and were NOT burned. I ate as many as I could on the way to the garbage disposal. Had I not been under the direct eye of management I would have found a way to sneak it to the homeless outside.
I liked the meditations on empathy, etc. I have no objections to the vast majority of the article… until it talks about current events, stripped of context. The article was perfectly good until it started talking about the present war in ukraine in a totally amaterial and unexamined way.
Quote:
The brutal British empire, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the current Russian invasion of Ukraine—in each case, the perpetrators think of themselves as acting rightly against an evil enemy.
This is how the soldiers might be taught to think of themselves, but this is not how the leadership thinks of themselves. The leadership does not trouble themselves with morality, only strategy. Putin does not believe he is acting “rightly” against an “evil” enemy. He believes he is defending the Russian border from NATO expansion. Anything beyond that is rhetoric.
we are just as reluctant to apply serious self-scrutiny as Vladimir Putin is to question his bizarre fantasies about the need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.
denazification of Ukraine might be a cynical rhetorical justification for Putin’s broader strategic goal of preventing NATO expansion… But the need to denazify Ukraine is not a “bizarre fantasy” for the people DPR/LPR when the USA has been in bed with Ukrainian nazis since WW2, and has been overtly using them as pawns in their geopolitical games since 2014. The need to denazify Ukraine is not a “bizarre fantasy” for the LGBTQ+, the Roma, the Jews, and the Proletarians of Ukraine, who are victims of far right violence just as much as the breakaway republics. Even Zelensky preferred peace to the present situation, but has had US-backed fascist guns to his head this whole time, preventing him from pursuing this the way he may have wanted to.
a time he and his wife went to see a movie in Boston in the early 1950s.
christ he’s soooooo old. my grandparents were born ~ 1950 and I’m ~ 30. sorry to be childish about this, but it’s astonishing that anyone can live that long. :chomsky-yes-honey:
i remember trying to tell my lib grandma some of this stuff, and she constantly just tone policed me. “You should breathe more.” “Calm down.” “You’re talking too fast.” “You know you sound really angry right now.” “I can’t pay attention to what you’re saying when you get like this.”
This bizarre part of this is I was being very calm, slow, patient, and was taking care to police my own tone. I wasn’t actually worked up. It felt like a deliberate strategy of avoidance.
i find it tragic that the propaganda is so powerful people were fooled into dying for NATO and neo nazis.
3rd world nations: Give us reparations for climate change
1st world nations: Actually it’s China’s fault because we leveraged our economic hegemony to make them manufacture all the stuff. :soypoint-1::some-controversy::soypoint-2: