Maoo [none/use name]

Best thing I’ve ever seen irl is multiple cop cars set ablaze.

Dems voters openly accepting 99% Hitler rather than do literally anything but whine about the people fighting back:

It’s enough but you’ve gotta be ready to pay for a $1 million small bungalow, so $200k up front and a $4k/month mortgage.

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Fro a rhetorical outcome, yeah.

That’s how low the bar is…

Soviets would have something like BeOS

This is CORRECT and REVOLUTIONARY inframaterialism

When comparing, say, American democracy with Cuba, it’s valuable to critically examine what one means by democracy, as Americans all grow up learning that it’s fairly specific things that the US has and it glosses over other ways in which the US is not particularly democratic but other countries, including Cuba, are.

A simple example is: if something is popular and benefits the public, how likely is the state to create interventions and draw its policies from the public? When was the last time the US had a plebiscite for a major national policy change? Cuba had one to introduce its new family code just a year and a half ago and it’s more or less the best one in the world. Last year in the US, a series of unelected oligarchs allowed the banning of abortion by individual states, with those that have highly racist voting policies leading the pack. When looking at states run by communist parties, it’s actually fairly common to see substantial reforms and changes in response to popular demands and bottom-up organizing. This is almost never the case in the US, where every major protest movement fails and is often put down by the cops and very popular and practical policies go unimplemented because they aren’t favorable to capital.

Speaking of capital, a lot of freedom boils down to economic exploitation and the extent to which it is capital, not the public, that dictates policy. The reason so many people in the US suffer without healthcare is due solely to the profit-seeking system that controls the country. There is no practical benefit to the private health insurance system, it’s purely a drain on everyone except for the people that run and own the insurance companies themselves. It doesn’t matter that nearly everyone hates the system, though, because (1) capital invests in a large volume of propaganda to spread a false understanding of the issue and (2) capital buys the politicians that could otherwise introduce serious policy changes. Capital is not democratic, it’s oligarchical. Cuba has one of the most effective healthcare systems in the world and guarantees it up all of their people based on need and their ability to fund it (i.e. avoid blockade-induced crises). It’s extremely popular and healthcare inequity was one of the first issues recognized by the communist government as limiting modernization and core freedoms (along with literacy and the overall economic base). These are not just good things, they are how needs of the public elicit important changes in policy.

Living under a capitalist system like in the US, 1/3 of your waking hours are controlled by a petty dictatorship known as your boss and the overall hierarchy of privately owned enterprise. If any of those petty lords up the command chain feel like it, you can lose your job and therefore your ability to have housing, food, warmth, healthcare. The reason doesn’t even matter if they’re half-intelligent, various policy protections usually only apply if the employer is stupid enough to telegraph their reasons. In places like Cuba, there is frequently direct workers’ democracy in the workplace itself, with the same people who do the work also voting on how to run their enterprise and allocate resources. Want to have a cantina with a cook for all your meals so folks don’t all have to bring in their own individual meals? If you convince your fellow workers, that can and will and does happen. It happens fairly frequently, in fact, even in a country so impoverished by US imperialism.

And don’t forget about that imperialism! The capitalist system places these other countries under siege, actively limiting their capacity to develop and prompting defensive measures. Cuba developed its secret police in response to sabotage and terrorism funded and coordinated by the Americans that attempted to invade and then blockaded. If capitalist countries could let others be, you would see less of this “siege socialism” that requires various forms of monitoring and policing. Though to be clear, none of these communist-run states are anywhere near the level of policing and incarceration of the United States. It’s a pure propaganda coup that Americans think state oppression is somehow worse in these other countries with vastly smaller percentages of people imprisoned and cops employed.

Coming up with new sub-terminology for “marketing”.

If you pay close attention to the price per weight of different sizes of products, it’s pretty common that the bigger ones are actually more expensive per gram of crunch or goop despite costing less to manufacture. There are marketing geeks that think they can wow you with the packaging and size itself (or they overproduced the smaller one) and they point to all kinds of studies about how making products seem bigger makes them more desirable and likely to be purchased. The larger one might just plain be better because it’s a more appropriate size for the person buying it, but rather than reflecting production efficiency, they just crank up the price, just enough that you don’t notice, to rake in those sweet profits.

Chuang reads like ineffectual Western academics write. An appropriation of leftist language but zero material analysis or placement of concrete action or class analysis. And then the use of words that have little meaning and operate only as dog whistles like “authoritarianism”.

It’s also written in a deeply weasely way. For example, their only source for the claim of widespread forced birth control for Uyghurs is the title of a Guardian article about how the Chinese embassy in the US deleted a tweet that linked to an article that touted access to birth control being a good thing. That article heavily cited Zenz. Presumably Chuang is aware that Zenz is a hack and people will notice if they cite him directly so instead we get the laundered versions.

Work they should’ve done if they wanted to make the claim! Imperialism actually means something to communists! It’s not just when you have a military or trade or even foreign ownership.

Imperialism can be quantified. Make them do so. What is the unequal exchange, how does it compare to their own exploitation, and are there any material differences in outcome when China comes to town vs. The IMF or Canada?

They will hate this question because their accusation of imperialism is based on vibes and nut an economic critique or class analysis.

There was no issue re: nuance in your statements, they were just nonsensical and revealed a lack of understand the basic ideas of the topic. This trend has continued with this reply.

The DDR was socialist. However, it was state socialism, which in my opinion is not ideal and not something we should strive to replicate.

The framing of socialism as ownership of the means of production goes hand-in-hand with control over the state. It’s how it was originally formulated by Marx, Engels, etc. The term “dictatorship of the proletariat” is stated in the same breaths and texts and concepts. There is no such thing as non-state socialism in this conception, the only conception that is relevant to this discussion.

This is something a person would know if they had ever read even a basic summary of this topic.

Yes, the means of production were “owned by the people,” but the state tasks itself with protecting the people. And therein lies the problem with state socialism - the state is easily commandeered by a corrupt minority who then uses the governmental apparatus to run an authoritarian regime.

You’re even using the liberal NGO lexicon for this description! Vague generalizations about authoritarianism and cute little stories with no grounding in reality.

We should be able to recognize the imperfections in prior socialist attempts, without immediately calling it “capitalist NGO propaganda.”

It’s not hard to identify a poor understanding when you have, you know, actually learned about these things. And interacted with thousands of people just like you and know why they parrot such nonsense. If you had an informed or valid criticism that would be something to talk about, but we are not in that situation. I think we are looking at a graduate of Reddit University, with all the intellectual humility that implies.

Have you considered that you seem to know almost nothing about this and therefore shouldn’t share your opinion like it’s some kind of fact?

The USSR was a communist country. A normal use of that term is that a country communist is one that’s run by a communist party.

If you mean it didn’t achieve communism, well duh communism is a hypothesized society achieved through socialism where the state ceases to exist. No socialists, including the people of the USSR, would think that their nation-state has achieved communism as that’s oxymoronic. They would think of it as a transitional socialist state.

That is indeed what your capitalist NGOs tell you with unlimited funds.

Consider that socialism is about control over the means of production, of deposing the capitalist system, and that your dismissal of the DDR as socialist didn’t address that at all. Do you think it’s possible you’ve been lied to?

Nazi Germany wasn’t left and the USSR, which included more than Russia, was a transitional socialist country lol.

Westerners are so propagandized that they don’t even recognize propaganda when they see it. They just internalize it as fact and fight when someone points it out.

The side walls are actually very important for the structural integrity of shipping containers. If you cut holes in it, it absolutely needs to be reinforced or your new roof line is going to sag over time. They’re built as cheaply as possible to accomplish their exact task, which is holding a bunch of crap and being stackable, and the side walls provide both tension to hold together the frame (basically a box) and to provide rigidity to both floor and the top. I reeeally hope y’all reinforced the areas around windows.

You can do a bunch of things to shipping containers to make them viable, but it’s far more expensive in materials and time than just building with more raw materials. You can remove the toxic coating but you have to have a whole human do the labor for that and do is safely, otherwise that human is paying for that decision with their health. The materials and labor for that aren’t nothing.

When you look at what is actually used from the container in order to create a house, it’s really not that much. Basically just framing of questionable stability and some corrugated metal siding, possibly the cheapest and easiest part of building a house. I can personally frame up something container-sized in less than a day, easy peasy. Siding and drywall are also easy. The harder parts are everything the container doesn’t provide: foundation, vapor barriers, plumbing, electrical, a good roof, any specialized need for insulation, efficient ventilation / heating / cooling, making sure safety elements are up to code.

In terms of mobility, I would not recommend moving a container home that has been substantially modified unless it’s been upgraded for exactly that. They can only be safely moved using the corners to distribute the weight, hence the special container arms at shipping yards that grab the corners. If you put a custom roof on there or otherwise make it so you can’t grab those corners, there’s a good chance the whole thing falls apart unless you’ve reinforced it to be mobile using yet more investment.

No, the problem with housing is that it is a financialized commodity that is engineered to go up in price faster than wages because it’s an investment. Not just for individuals, but for real estate companies and banks that gamble with the loans. Zoning laws are a symptom of this, but even if you basically get rid of them (as happens in various places in Texas), the same trend applies.

Those construction companies (really, real estate companies) all get big loans to build those apartments and they do so with an expectation of per-unit profits, often with unrealistic targets unless property values increase even more, and often targeting richer people. When they fail to rent enough at that price point, rather than decreasing rents (which would spook their lenders), they just leave units vacant until they can hit that price point. There are half-empty “luxury apartment” buildings dotting every major city due to this.

The most anyone can point to for the impact of zoning is that prices to rent tend to go up slightly slower.

Your local government is also likely funded by property taxes that are pegged to property values, which is why they never do anything sufficient to handle this issue.