FunkyStuff

It's weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with "that's not true socialism." Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn't would say that, but anyone who's reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.

Which brings me to my next point: Socialism's biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It's the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants' daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.

protest for the sake of conducting the genocide more effectively is definitely enough reason to cut settlers some slack!

Can someone find a recording of him actually saying it? Telesur doesn't have any info on it. I can't tell if he was just joking and this is another Why China banned the letter N ridiculous premise you can only believe if you forgot that the enemies of the US still have functioning brains and aren't mindless drones.

At least in Star Wars they explain the context with the scroll at the start of the movie, libs think that Ukraine literally popped into existence in 2022.

No Republican had to give anything up to achieve this, this is literally just the Democrats doing exactly what they want to do because they want to do it.

They have a journalistic responsibility to include relevant information and seek comment from relevant groups. The article doesn't include any comment from healthcare professionals or advocacy groups, nor does it contain any information about potential consequences of the surgeries being banned. It fails to actually inform the public on the issue at hand, and the auxiliary information that is brought up just puts the medical procedure into question by positing it as controversial (yeah, controversial because of transphobes) and questionable. Presenting only a limited section of the issue, but making it seem like it encompasses its entirety, makes this article functionally the same as transphobic propaganda.

~~Stalin~~ Putin shouldn't have stopped at ~~Berlin~~ Bakhmut.

There is absolutely reason to capitulate: the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have an average age above 40 and are absolutely scraping the barrel by conscripting any poor man they find. There is no universe where Ukraine pushes back the front to recover any substantial amount of territory. They have already attempted to launch counteroffensives in better conditions, and all they've achieved is to slow down Russia, never actually regaining any territory. The only reason they're even in the war still is because NATO wants to sacrifice Ukrainian lives to weaken Russia, and corrupt Ukrainian politicians are making a quick buck by privatizing they country in the meantime. This is obviously not sustainable long term; in another year or two they won't be able to recruit more people, or they'll run out of artillery shlels.

The nature of the dialectic is for it to continually and fluidly evolve, every now and then contradictions mount to a point of qualitative change and give rise to a new system that resolves the contradictions of the last, but gains new ones. It never ends. Marx only said, capitalism will bring about socialism, which will in turn bring about communism. Everything after that is too far away to really make any concrete statement that isn't grossly biased by the conditions of our time.

The proof is the article, the burden of proof to provide a comparable case of someone who happened to be doing the most suspicious thing possible and was crucified by the media, yet turned out to be innocent, is on you.

If I had to pick which person is exhibiting behavior in a discussion where one side is playing devil's advocate for a dude who had 2 small children in his hotel room in an area known for kidnapping and child sex abuse, and another is saying the obvious despite not technically having strong evidence beyond the previously stated, my finger's on the guy that doesn't understand burden of proof.

Can you elaborate on how modern sanctions have materially changed from how they were pre-Iraq?