I’m really struggling to follow some of this. Are you saying the Soviets didn’t need to fight Germany and didn’t need to take as much time as they could manage to prepare to do so?

I’m happy I could be helpful!

I guess this is in some ways an admittal of defeat

There’s no need to claim defeat or victory, we’re just talking; Success in communication is determined by the extent to which we are able to understand each other, and I think we did alright.

I think i still need to educate myself more on this topic.

I can’t claim to represent any perspective but my own, but the text that really helped me to begin to see things differently was Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Feel free to DM me/necropost here if there’s anything I can help with.

I’m going to avoid touching the rest of that and say that a centralized production not making sushi or shawarma is not the same as censoring those things. You can still make them at home, it’s not like fish, rice, and seaweed were beyond the reach of the existing production. Again, it sounds like a production issue.

This could be a language barrier thing, but it sounds like you’re talking about a production issue, not a censorship issue.

How about celebrities and not shitty CEOs. I’m generalizing towards multimillionaires as well as there aren’t that many billionaires. Unless the hate is specifically towards billionaires which I don’t think is the case.

I just took what you put out there. Generally, I’m skeptical that celebrities will really withstand scrutiny, since they tend to be supported by production crew and lesser-paid artists (whether in music or movies) who get regularly screwed over. Perhaps you can make an okay argument with athletes despite them also being held up by the pipeline from the notoriously exploitative college sports industry, playing in stadiums that are mostly damaging to the city, doing merchandising produced from sweatshops, etc.

But I don’t really care about those arguments. The reason I don’t care is that the conversation is based on an obscurantist metric, that being income. Any decent anti-capitalist is not mainly concerned with how much money someone gets or has, but their relationship to the means of production. That is, they are concerned with whether this person subsists by owning or subsists by working. You displayed what I would consider a good intuition by shifting from CEOs (who generally subsist by owning) to celebrities (who at least kind of subsist by working). It seems somewhat plausible to me that there would be very wealthy athletes, say, in a socialist state, because their job requires a lot of work and, at the top levels, having the talent to accomplish what they can accomplish is rare!

However, i would put money on the off chance that there is at least one billionaire who wasn’t shady about their wealth accumulation

If a machine produces a thousand cubes but also produces at least one octahedron, what would you describe the function of the machine as being?

think Steve Jobs.

When I think of Steve Jobs, I think of someone who put a lot of money and dedication into PR.

As a starting point if you believe that, here’s an article that lightly goes over some of his controversies (ignore points 4 and 10). And here’s one that I think is somewhat more interesting that incidentally demonstrates how dependent he was on exploitation of the third world.

Unless you consider holding companies to be shady.

Owning a company is just a legal status, it’s what you do with it that matters. If what you do with it just happens to be amassing more wealth than many, many people could obtain in a lifetime of labor, you probably didn’t get there with clean hands.

Can you name a billionaire who doesn’t match that description?

Under censorship you’ll not create . . . good meals

Are you saying that the Soviets censored recipes?

Usually it’s my friend Cowbee here who tells people to read things, but here I will:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

“Brainwashing” is a reactionary myth (that originally comes from orientalist stories of Chinese hypnosis that were used to explain-away defectors in the Korean war) that is used to position the believer in a position superior to the masses (“sheeple”), and which only knows how to treat the latter condescendingly as blind followers of this or that, which is not how you do mass organizing if you want to succeed.

It’s not because they think they can be billionaires, it’s because they’ve been taught (and in a minority of cases this is true) that they are better off going after the crumbs that billionaires leave them than trying some other system.

The conditional is right there

I’m sure Vance was lying, but if these were anything like the Presidential debates, there would definitely be a strong Democrat bias. You can’t possibly think that Walz didn’t get fact checked because he was a perfect little angel with flawlessly honest rhetoric, right?

Disclaimer: I didn’t watch very much of the debate because, as others said, it was boring, but Harris sure as shit lied in her debate.

I was lazy picking Wikipedia when everyone knows it’s got an American brainrot problem. That’s entirely my fault.

It is true that “conservative opposition to liberalism” is a thing that has exist and currently exists, but the issue is that “conservative” is a relative term, it refers not to an absolute ideological tendency (like liberalism does) but to the necessarily relative value of seeking to conserve the current order of things. This is relative because the order of things can be different, and that changes the question of if you want to conserve it (conservative), go back to some past state, real or imagined (reactionary), or advance to some future state of greater development (progressive).

So when liberal revolutionaries set the west on fire, conservatives were in conflict with them because the conservatives were trying to preserve the feudal/aristocratic/monarchic order that the liberals opposed. Now that the liberals in the west are no longer revolutionaries but overwhelmingly the establishment and without any serious contest, the acting of promoting liberalism over other ideologies is conservative and the old position of promoting a feudal/aristocratic/monarchic order is reactionary. The rise of neoliberalism, in particular, represents the overwhelming historical victory of liberalism over both reactionary and progressive forces (“There is no alternative,” the perfect conservative slogan).

Of course, a political ideology can be a mix of conservative and reactionary or conservative and progressive (I’ll let you decide on reactionary/progressive), and I’d say that former pair is pretty important for understanding the ideology of the Republicans, but don’t let that exaggerate in your mind the piddling degree to which the latter pair applies to Democrats.

Is that a better explanation? Whether this is how you personally want to use the words or not, this will help you understand how socialists use them.

Generally, the people posting this sort of thing also support land back or some variant of it, and will be on the side of the indigenous population in any dispute with western colonizers.

It’s an understandable mistake regardless, but just for your reference, the “What is your story?” at the end informally indicates it only wants affirmative answers because that’s how you’d have a “story” to tell in this regard. There are often hints like that in a question like this.

Nearly everyone would like a roof, heat/cooling (climate dependent), beds of some kind, etc. I don’t give a shit about seasonal decorations for a portion of the population until everyone who wants those gets them.

The Hillsborough disaster?

idk what your reference point is, but ime people want homes

and they are tied to “state owned companies”

“State Owned Enterprises” is the term. Anyway, is this actually true? My impression was that the billionaires had private companies (Alibaba, etc.) and SOEs did not produce them.

First of all, no one except for straw-anarchists are saying not to vote. Everyone who objects to Harris says to vote third party. Of course, some people will respond to what’s going on by not voting, but we (leftists) encourage them to vote instead.

There is no viable risk, a plurality of people already either don’t vote or vote third party, the people like me are already accounted for since I wasn’t about to support neoliberals anyway and have already voted third party.

So the only ones left are people who are just starting to vote third party. Let me say simply there is no way for us to just speak into existence a new voting bloc of around 15% of the population of the entire state to spoil your favored cop’s chances of winning. If things were that easy, we could have a communist President within, like, 3 election cycles. No, things move much more slowly than that because you can’t just manifest “Well what if everyone laid down their arms voted for Elizabeth Warren?” on a population like you made a magic wish.

The voteblue philosophy is one of fear, of an overriding fear even at things that are impossible in material reality, and using that fear as an excuse to never fight for someone who is better than center-right while always promising that on some future day we will finally have something better. It’s a psychological hamster wheel, you’ll keep running on it forever and never make progress, so the only solution is to get off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism