DPUGT

The trouble is that I'm not a "majority" I am a person. More to the point, I am a person who is more used to not being in the majority than I am in it. "Good for the majority" in many cases has often left me out.

It isn't in my interest to pursue strategies that are good for the majority. There are others like me.

Such states can have many problems, but they’re an undeniable improvement over capitalism.

That's not clear at all. Let's go with the "at least communism fed everyone". In the United States, literally no one starves who isn't anorexic or similarly mentally ill. Homeless people are fat.

We can talk about other metrics too (spaces races and whatnot), but capitalism seems to at least keep up with communism in those regards without some really absurd double standards.

The default state of things in the west is that monopoly on violence is in the hands of capitalists, and it’s currently being used to subjugate the rest of the population to the will of capitalists.

Which of course never happened in the Soviet Union or Cuba, or any of the the other places?

Look, I'm not even you're opponent here. There is a profound philosophical question here, one that if anyone actually bothers to attempt to solve it, the sort of violence you think is a solution might actually become possible.

More to the point, not just possible, but justifiable. Like, provably so. Even to people like myself who don't conform to your ideology.

Wouldn't it be great if, for instance, we could look at some event somewhere in the world, apply the rules, and say "in situations like this where x and y are occurring, and where z does not occur, that violence was justified"? We have those rules mostly worked out for individual scenarios. We know what self-defense looks like.

We don't have those rules worked out for group/collective scenarios. And until we do, it will always be anxiety-inducing to contemplate the violence, and politically dangerous to even talk about it (for fear of terrorism conspiracy charges). Better still, with the rules worked out and agreed upon (mostly or wholly), we'd likely see quite alot of behavior changing in a hurry when the government realizes it is inviting justified rebellion if it doesn't... without having to resort to the violence.

The part you have to get over first is accepting that it may truly be the case that if we figure those rules out honestly, some of your heroes may turn out to have been "not so heroic" and some of your examples of good governments may turn out to have been the tyrants their detractors have claimed all along.

and max pay was capped at 9x lowest pay.

Even in the US, there are limits on the difference in monetary compensation. Because of that, for the most prestigious/lucrative positions, non-monetary compensation is offered. At the lowest rungs, it was health insurance. When you start talking higher, then there are company cars and so forth. And for CEOs, you get equity in the form of stock options, personal assistants, etc.

The Soviets had all of these for the highest positions, just like everywhere else. The only thing different is that they made the pay difference limitation explicit and lower.

They rose to their positions through their work.

No. I think higher in the thread you mentioned how Brezhnev came from a family of metalworkers. When he became General Secretary, it wasn't because he was the best metalworker at the foundry. It wasn't because he was the best manager of metalworkers at the foundry. That wasn't how anyone rose to high positions in the Soviet Union.

Like elsewhere, there is a social game. And people who play it well rise high, those who play it perfectly rise higher still. Those who can't or won't play it, those who are bad at it, or who are visibly bitter about it, don't rise at all.

None of it has to do with anything resembling actual work.

but it’s certainly not because the party was some sort of an oligarchy that you seem to be insinuating here.

What is an oligarchy? Sure, we all know the dictionary definition, but those aren't very nuanced.

The "rule by the rich". Even in places that are clearly oligarchies, occasionally one rich person loses it all, no longer rules, or another becomes rich and starts ruling. And "rich" is relative too, no one would claim that a millionaire can't ever be an oligarch simply because elsewhere in the world there exist billionaires.

The Party was a group of oligarchs. They did not measure their wealth the way that wealth was measured in other countries, socially it was sort of taboo to even think in those terms. But they had more luxuries, nicer homes, more real estate than anyone else in the Soviet Union. To a level that, were they in any other countries, they would have been (single digit) millionaires.

And that's without even considering the industries that they owned. Sure, they wouldn't use that word, because again it was taboo. But "ownership" is something that can't ever be collective. To own something isn't to be able to use that word to refer to it, but to control it and to be able to decide who control passes to and in what circumstances. Are you claiming that Brezhnev had no power to go to some iron mill and say "you aren't allowed to work here anymore" to some flunky he didn't like? Just as a western capitalist could fire someone he didn't like? That he couldn't put someone else in charge of that factory? That he couldn't decide to change the floorplan and expand it? Or shut it down?

Sure, he couldn't do it by decree like some feudal king. But the western capitalist rarely does that either (and rarer still does it without it causing him headaches). He builds consensus, gets others on the board of directors on his side. Let's the right managers know that good things will happen if they help, and bad things will happen if they don't. Etc.

The only real substantive differences are that some words (ownership, rich) weren't allowed to be used. But the same qualities and circumstances permeated that nation.

It's not so much that the state has a monopoly on violence. It's that for it to not have a monopoly on violence, it would mean that non-state actors would have to choose to do violence.

That's not an easy choice to make, is it? History is filled with accounts of crazies who chose violence but who chose it because they like the idea of violence more than for any other reason... and they ended up monsters. It's admirable that people would not want to become that.

When is violence justified? Against whom? How can you safeguard things so that the even initially justifiable violence doesn't go too far, spin out of control? More importantly, possibly, is what you do after your violence succeeds... you've built up this paramilitary force to perform the violence, they've won, and now they're de facto in charge. You end up with goons running the show, because you needed goons to beat the other guy. You might be a goon yourself. That's nearly always bad. You almost need some separate organization afterward, of civilians, to take over. How do you keep it separate during the struggle?

It might be more accurate to say that the state doesn't so much have a monopoly on violence as that it's just the only group out there sociopathic enough to want to use it.

I am no socialist, but I am surprised to agree that the Soviet Union actually did something positive. Literacy did rise to 99% from some low number. That is to their credit.

I can't tell if this is posted ironically or not. Shouldn't it be irrelevant, considering that his ideology was "Juche" and not anything much resembling socialism?

Why wouldn't you guys find this old copypasta hilarious? It tells the truth... heroin should remain illegal, and we need a corps of 3 million cops on the beat beating down anyone who even thinks about drugs. Any libertarian who suggests otherwise is trying to corrupt your children.

It really is the libertarians who are your true enemy. Not Republicans, not Democrats. Not authoritarians and busybodies and the apathetic. It's the people who want to leave you alone and for you to leave them alone.

Desktop usage is only kept afloat by their use in business. When you sit down in front of a desk at work, there's a computer on it.

That also doesn't bode well for linux, even if people could become familiar with it and comfortable with it, it's doubtful that anyone in charge of computers in the office would be comfortable having those be linux desktops.

The age of the desktop really is over. Linux didn't become mainstream, and now it's completely moot. Even if you want to disagree with me emotionally, surely you see the writing on the wall? Everything I've said only becomes more true 5 years from now, 20 years from now. Not less.

Linux needs a time machine to go mainstream. It would have had to have happened by about 2006 or so... after that point, personal computing pretty much died. Sure, you have a desktop or laptop system in front of you, and so do I, but I contend that we are the exceptions, that we're no longer typical.

There are people who do not use the internet with a personal computer as their primary means of using it. These people are many. These people are young, and will retain that habit their entire lives.

If it's any consolation, personal computing is dead for all the operating systems, and no one really won.

Thank god you leftists realize how dangerous the libertarians are and how the war on drugs must continue to be prosecuted no matter how unwinnable it seems. No one should be allowed to have heroin.

Apparently you are absolutely fact resistant.

Which fact am I resistant to? I'm resistant to your conclusions, which aren't worthy of being called facts.

But try to do the math at least once: 8 billion people and a fertility rate of 1.8

I'll wait 20 years until it's 1.3. Or 40 years until it's 0.3. The rate's not constant. You get that right? It's provably not constant. It's provably not going up, or fluctuating back or forth, but continues to go downward. That's not so hard to understand.

Maybe that's the fact I'm resistant to. Maybe the fact that it's currently 1.8, and that you imply there it will stay without anything to corroborate the idea. But also that you only imply it, because to assert such a thing sounds so absurd even you can't possibly say it with a straight face.

Sure you can claim it will go even lower then that, but there is literally zero evidence that people will stop having children all together. Z-E-R-O.

There's plenty of evidence that the downward trend continues to accelerate, as it has for a century. There's plenty of evidence that children internalize such things as social norms, and not alot to suggest that this isn't at least the cause, in part, for the downward trend.

They don't have to stop having children. It just has to fall below replacement. At that point you are, as a species, effectively dead. It never recovers.

And claiming to know what will happen with the fertility rate in the next thousands of years is just bullshit.

I used to say the same thing about climate. But the difference there is that we're supposed to believe such things about holy climate science, and disbelieve those things which contradict the dogma of our ideologies.

It might as well go up again in a few hundred years,

Magically? Like, your ideology already makes some assumptions about why it went down in the first place. And I'm not saying you are wrong... what makes you think those assumptions won't continue to hold, when all the statistics say that they are doing just that?

Dead.

Your arguments are how soon-to-be dead people think. I'm not unhealthy, so what if I've put on a few pounds. Sure, it was a heart attack, but just a mild one and with medicine now days. And I'm too old to do the fitness thing anyway, the medications are a better bet. Maybe they'll invent whizbang medical technology to make me immortal and I'll vacation on Neptune! Just dead.

Then why do you still live in such a country?

I have to live somewhere. I don't know of any that are better, just different kinds of "bad". You seem to believe "living better" is an objective thing, but it is subjective of course. And you and I don't want to live the same way. If you bothered to see things from my perspective, you'd understand how silly your question is.

You have the wrong idea of what having a public welfare service means. I don’t need welfare checks to live here

You have lived so long in the system that it's invisible to you. The welfare no longer looks like welfare. It's just an entitlement to you. You deserve it. You've earned it. Just by being there. They owe it to you. Once you've adopted that mindset, how can it ever be welfare again? But from the other end, how can your government even engage in charity? For them, you have become livestock they have a duty to keep fed.

And my children will be able to study in any university even if I don’t earn enough money to pay for it

It used to be the case in the US. But somewhere the politicians got the idea that sending 100% of the population to university was not just an ideal or even a goal, but an absolute requirement.

Opportunity costs being what they are, the price skyrocketed. It actually costs more than twice as much to send twice as many kids to college. And so the price rose. And colleges became more competitive for those dollars, but to stay competitive they have to be nicer colleges with nicer dorms and nicer campuses and nicer amenities. But those things cost more, so the costs were passed on to the students who were indoctrinated to believe that if they didn't go they'd be losers. And then bankruptcy for student loans was rescinded, and grants turned into loans that can't ever be defaulted.

Perverse incentives are a removed.

I can't tell which European country you're from, and you don't have to tell me, but all students don't go to university there either. We can be honest, can't we?