MyMindIsLikeAnOcean

I assume you’re talking about physical gold.

Yes, it’s generally a scam. Some middle man is going to take a cut of what it’s worth before you enter the market - and they’re almost always going to misrepresent it’s value, especially if it’s not in the form of a stamped bar. Then you basically have to store it and shlep it and secure it and keep it secret, which will further diminish profit. Then you have to sell it, presumably as part of your retirement plan…or leave it to somebody who’s going to lose even more of its value when they want to unload it inefficiently.

If you’re not wealthy in the first place it’s only worth investing in as a hobby…because you have to factor in the value of your time and subtract that from its value, as well.

As far as it being a hedge against the collapse of currency? Bad idea. Skills and land you can defend are going to be the only hedges against that. Even if it had value post collapse…it would just put a target on your head.

No Of course the ideology of communism is utopian. All ideologies are utopian, don’t be silly.

No, they weren’t authoritarians. Insofar as they defined the transitional state as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”…there wasn’t a blueprint for the nature of that authoritarianism, how long the transitional state would last, and most importantly: the transitional state isn’t communism.

Marx and Engels were also drunks and capitalists…not being able to separate the men from the theory just tell me you want to shoot the messenger. You’re just choosing to define the communist state as the transitional state, and cherry picking the worst words you can find from the men and not the theories.

This “hellhole” you’re describing is your hyperbolic and incomplete take…it’s not true or universal.

Yes, I get it…leftists who strive for peace and class equality are both utopian ideologists and violent. The straw men critics build are just boring at this point.

Meanwhile, here in reality, socialism/communism/Marxism have seen different forms with different results, and you can’t just ignore that these regimes don’t operate in a vacuum…they’re polluted by capitalism and fascism whether or not they have failed, just like in The Soviet Union. They also don’t always fail…we have several ongoing projects that have resisted capitalism and fascism and are not particularly violent in their present state.

You’ve learned just enough about communism to say a bunch things you think are “sick burns”…but sound vapid and propagandistic to anyone who knows what they’re talking about. The theory, you’d know if you had any idea what you’re talking about, is a remedy for the collapse of capitalism…which we haven’t seen yet - and, by many indicators, we are progressing through late stage capitalism at the moment as monopolies coalesce, wealth is concentrated, and more and more people are driven into poverty/servitude.

Finally: the theory isn’t static. Marx and Engels are far from the only theorists. Sure…you can pretend nobody else has ever written on the subject or that the attempts at communism actually followed the “blueprint”…but that’s all bullshit. Every single country in the world had adopted varying degrees of socialism…because it works. Generally, the more a capitalist society is moderated by socialism…the healthier it is - because, at the end of the day, Marx was a capitalist who was a critic of capitalism and communism/socialism can’t exist without capitalism failing spectacularly…which is why we keep seeing it pop up in Latin America…nowhere has capitalism failed so badly as in those countries. The only reason capitalism got a stay of execution after its first collapse is because of the various New Deal type systems out in place around the world - but, as we’re seeing now, it was only temporary because it didn’t go nearly far enough.

They absolutely do not. As I said in my other comment, authoritarianism isn’t a leading feature of communism.

We can have a conversation about when and why it happens and what the nature of the authoritarianism is within communism…but it’s not a 1:1. Many Marxist scholars frequently argue that authoritarian communist states are not, in fact, communist because having an authoritarian class is antithetical to the concept. They argue what we saw in the USSR and what we see in China are hybrid systems where socialism is prioritized over capitalism, but they use fascist teqniques to maintain power. ie a country isn’t communist because they call their party communist. The Congo called itself a Democratic Republic…why didn’t anyone buy that label?

But authoritarianism is literally part of the definition of fascism.

Lol, no.

You can’t “both sides” communism and fascism.

The common factor is malignant authoritarianism…which is innate to fascism, but not communism…even if the USSR happened to be authoritarian in many cases.

This is key.

If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.

Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.

We can absolutely blame AI for everything. The reason AI took over Reddit is because Reddit fired their human moderators in favour of AI moderation. It’s basically a vicious circle of bots learning how to avoid being banned, and auto moderation learning how they’re avoiding being banned…repeat.

…the obvious problem being that bots are valuable to Reddit because they increase real engagement…if there weren’t bots, Reddit would make its own bots to do basically the same thing. Reddit only wants to restrict bots to a certain proportion of the population, rather than eliminate them.

Let’s be real…Reddit itself is moderated by AI.

People who moderate subs should be called “hall monitors” or something. It’s rare to find moderators who are actually moderating with impartiality, rather that being petty and taking sides. They also have tools to exploit the Reddit auto-mod system.

It was enshitified ages ago.

I don’t think he really ever had them. He was making what…250 grand a month from the Russians (some ridiculous number)? When he lost that cash he immediately changed his format from Russian propaganda to toxic centrism to try and steal viewers from people like Candace Owens…and it’s didn’t work.

Tim Pool is struggling for relevance after he got his spigot of Russian money cut off.

I don’t know if somebody fired a gun or made some sort of noise near his home…but I certainly know that Tim is disingenuous and a liar and I don’t doubt he would sensationalize, exaggerate or completely invent an event to improve his ratings now that he has to rely on listeners to make money.

ETA: never mind…he didn’t even call the cops. It’s made up.

Far-out.

By “neutral” they mean “don’t try to reflect your visitors in the gift shop, make sure everything is for white people”.

Can we tho?

You’re so far off reality I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.

Right? Never mind half of the corruption in Ukraine is likely perpetrated by people who would flourish in Putin’s Russia.

I don’t know man. This crap gives such ammunition to the “both sides are corrupt” argument.

Do we really believe things in Ukraine would be better or even the same under Putin? What are we even talking about here?

Seem like he’s a typical academic. I get it…you prefer to muddy the waters and shoot the messenger then engage with the content. Alternate view to…something you didn’t read? I assure you it doesn’t “demonize socialism”…it just chronicles events according to disclosure/a “data dump” of declassified files. It’s not ideological…it’s for eggheads who don’t want to read thousands of documents. When I read it it just helped me understand the playing field better.

The problems with the USSR weren’t with socialism, you’re missing my message. They were with capitalists corrupting it from within. There’s certainly an argument to be made that too much control was allocated to regional bureaucrats - when targeted positive/idealistic authoritarianism was more appropriate while socialism was in its infancy. But this in the context of just Russia, because I don’t agree with the expansion that created the USSR: my opinion is it created an unmanageably large state with too many “distracting” regional issues that were ripe for capitalists to exploit. Those faithful to the cause were simply stretched too thin and they couldn’t deliver a meaningful improvement to enough people, largely because the guilty regional bureaucrats weren’t loyal to the cause and they created systematic exploitation of the people they were tasked to help. Obviously I’m being unrealistic…just trying to get closer to 20/20 hindsight.

That’s a ridiculous way to frame a public university employee…but I’m just going to declare an impasse and drop it if we can’t agree on facts.

Talk about virtue signalling and purity testing, yikes. Still, thank you for the conversation, I will admit I’m a little amused at you trying to “out socialist” me, but I don’t feel I need to list my credentials in return…I’m comfortable with how militantly virulent I am on the subject of socialism ;)

Like I said: put two leftists together, and they’ll find a way to argue. I’ve been guilty of it too…it is what it is.

I gave you evidence…and you ignored it. I can provide additional evidence beyond ‘54, if you acknowledge those archives.

You believe Marxism allows for the billionaire and political classes in China that control the means of production? Bold.

You don’t “own” Marxism, btw. Most Marxists I know at least acknowledge and criticize the very large problems in the USSR and China. I mean…I also could be considered a Marxist…but I consider myself a post-Marxist because he’s been improved on. I also think we can do better than Marx the man as a foundation - don’t get me started on Lenin, lol. The weird thing is I like Stalin (but Che all the way).

This isn’t zero sum: I’m not saying either is all bad because they have kleptocrats and billionaires. We haven’t even broached the topic of what I think about the USSR and China as a whole (because you’re so hung up on denying their systematic problems in favour of focusing on the positives?) in contrast to what we see in the western democracies (for example) you’re typing as if i condemn them and I prefer the USA, or something…not a thing.

The USSR absolutely had oligarchs, don’t be absurd. I’m not strictly talking about the Politburo…who stole plenty and took the fall, I’m talking about the oligarchs - who didn’t blink into existence out of the ashes of the USSR - but rather came to be because of what they amassed at the expense of the people during the USRR. The savvy middle managers, the smugglers, the entire KGB. The Art of the Bribe is an excellent book that methodically outlinines how these proto-oligarchs came to be and how they destroyed and corrupted socialism. Telling me about the idealistic version of the USSR isn’t interesting…I’m more interested in reality.

Meh…save the “Marx wasn’t an egalitarian” stuff for the people who aren’t socialists. There absolutely was a very large wealth and power class in the USSR as there is in China now…both would be abhorrent to Marx. There’s a difference between being somewhat better off because you work harder and/or are responsible for administering a novel concept…and literally never working because you have so much power and influence you don’t need to: those people were lousy in the USSR, and exist to a lesser extent in China.

It’s an apples and oranges conversation because it can be argued that the Chinese billionaires hurt their people less than the oligarchs/kleptocrats did in the USSR…but you first must acknowledge they exist - if you want to move past the mass intentions of their systems and have the conversation about how the classes in communism were/are bad and why.

The reason I prefer Cuba isn’t because their system is a superior application of socialism…but rather because Cuba is so small and their rich people tend to be more enmeshed in the population and steal less/have less to steal.

I’m not saying all this because I don’t like socialism and dismiss The USSR and China as failures out of hand - quite the contrary - I’m saying it because socialism is a project that we need to achieve and we have to learn from what’s been done/being tried to achieve it.

Yeah…I just don’t see either state like you do. Both states feature(d) too many wealthy/powerful people for me to consider them entirely socialist. They’re both hybrids…like every state. The USSR heavily featured oligarchs who stole from the people, and who worked against the peoples’ interest on a mass scale. China features a party system that does the same, to a lesser degree.

I think Cuba is a pretty good example of what I’d like to see in a socialist state, minus the ongoing American “meddling”. I wish they didn’t have to rely on tourism to survive, tho…don’t like the classes it creates. Would be much better if they could trade efficiently.

I think you’re an idealist :)

Contrary to Marxism? I think you misread what I’ve said. I think Marx was a visionary, and I’d like to live in his world…I think I’m just more practical than you are.

I think maybe we can agree that we’re talking about different thing re libertarianism. But I will say…show me one of these supposed small business owners, and I’ll show you an employee or a liar that’s speaking on behalf of shadowy wealth. I look at American libertarianism as a well funded and organized appendage of the fascist movement that functions to validate and control poor people who might turn against their coalition.

Yes, I predicted we’d have a different view of the world…like I said…two leftists can always be trusted to radically disagree about everything. I look at early reunification Germany as a “victory” for the moderation of capitalism…but I will agree that the fascists put what they needed to in place to destroy the socialists that the “liberals” accepted, at first.

I’ll never agree that Russia was socialist…nor will I agree that China is. They had/have very heavy socialist elements…but Russia was ultimately an oligarchical kleptocracy and China is a weird hybrid that celebrates capitlmalism at the party level…and uses socialism to control the masses. If I were to view a state as a socialist success…I’d need to see the party/power apparatus less entrenched, and the leaders of the day living like the people. I believe that Latin American socialism could have been great…had it not been perpetually obfuscated and corrupted by the US.