Cass Eris (cognitive psychologist, succdem/liberal) has a playlist going through the book. She brushes part of outright accepts some anti-communist horseshit, but those should be obvious to you when she does. Other than that, she shows that holding JPB to any reasonable academic standard is a futile endeavour, from sharing information from his patients doing little to protect their identity to making absurd propositions and comparisons all with little to no citations. She also makes it a point to point out all the Freudian and Jungian poppycock Beterson has incorporated into his work.

It’s a lot of videos averaging 40 mins so you could limit yourself to 1-3 rules and probably still be far more in-depth than your friend. I don’t suggest trying to go through the whole thing quickly, Dr. B’s work is quite frequently a mindfuck to think about with any depth, far too much quackery to take at face value.

And the next one of course.

This is not a case of Trump having done bad things and Biden doing nothing. An analogue is if trump were firing a minigun on a bunch of people, he left office, Biden took over and resumed firing.

Also, sanctions by the richest country in history need to be proven to have adverse effects on the imposed in the same way the theory of gravity needs to be proven again: only flat earth type loonies need it so it’s merely an exercise, not an academic necessity.

Ebil sissypea making hardworking bosses pay their parasite employees after closing the shutters. (they didn’t even take the risk) This would never happen in free^TM countries, where you’re allowed to not pay the proles for a year, sell off all the company assets and pocket the difference. Obviously the individuals clever enough to defraud their employees, who have no recourse, should be rewarded.

It’s irritating that we won’t get to see Biden fail to string up sentences together on the debate in September, but I’m far more annoyed at how quickly all the morons trying to get people to vote for a corpse turned around to sing a different tune. Previously people who didn’t want to support a zionist zombie were against democracy or whatever the fuck, now Biden is laudable for realising his flesh will have fallen off by November.

You are absolutely correct, picking stats and indices in alignment with our views isn’t something communists are immune to. We’re nevertheless decent at it.

This post is an indication of that. OP’s proposition is that western media says Chinese markets aren’t attractive to investment, and that the FDI index shows otherwise. This holds up, and here’s the description of the index:

The FDI confidence index is calculated as a weighted average of the number of high, medium, and low responses to questions regarding the likelihood of making a direct investment in the market over the next three years. Values are calculated on a scale of 0 to 3, with 3 being the highest level of confidence in a market for Foreign Direct Investment, and 0 being the lowest level of confidence.

Biggest reason, I can still use Boost after the api shit. If I were forced to use a browser or shudder the official app, I wouldn’t even consider it.

Most of my scrolling I do here, my Reddit use had become more specific even before I became more active on the 'grad. I don’t use twitter or any other social media, so Reddit is my only source of news on the series and mangas I follow.

For my part I don’t use the wider Lemmy either. I’ve got 2 subscriptions from hexbear and that’s it. Other instances feel like knock-off Reddit so I don’t browse them for the same reasons I haven’t browsed r/all in years.

All this needs is to make the indigenous person a golden eagle, may not be such a direct relation to the supposed ancient ancestors but certainly more of a descendant than a lizard.

I hope the Tories don’t stop coming up with policies just because they’ve been relegated to the shadow cabinet, otherwise sir Keir might not know what to do and accidentally enact something half decent once a year.

Huh. Must be a day that ends with y.

No one can really make an argument that  the Iranians don’t know about the unit. Iran’s intelligence doesn’t need a public webpage to know about U.S. forces operating in Israel. So the only ones who are kept in the dark are  the American people, who don’t have the luxury of an intelligence service (or a functional and informative news media) to tell them what’s going on. Americans who, poll after poll demonstrates, care deeply about what’s happening in Israel and their government’s role in it.

Propaganda isn’t for the enemies, it’s domestic. You keep Rome stable so you can fight your imperialistic wars in peace. It’s hard to fill your coffers under scrutiny.

I don’t believe either candidate is doing a bad job gutting the US on the inside, though as an outsider my perspective is limited.

On the diplomatic front, absolutely. During Trump’s term, most usian “allies” took the dumb shit he did as the temporary acts of some man-child. The corpse of Joe Biden is disproving the myth of the adults in charge in real time. He started a losing war in the Ukraine and now he’s practically overseeing a genocide. What’s more, he could’ve let Trump have sinophobia, but he chose to reveal that democrats could be just as sabre-rattling.

At this point anyone who isn’t as dignified as Obama is fine though. It’s all a race to the bottom with the bourgeois dictatorships and only an articulate, pretty face can mask that, and even that not for long.

I looked at only one comment, the highest actual comment on the first link. The cited books don’t lead me to believe this guy’s well-read at all, not only because of the weird format, but also they’re not the useful kind of citation that backs up central claims.

Parenti’s work speaks vaguely about “less inequality”, “public ownership of the means of production”, and “priority placed on human services”, but these statements say nothing about the real, systemic experiences of Soviet citizens, particularly industrial workers who were explicitly supposed formed the basis of Soviet society. Saying that there was “public ownership” of industry is a truism. It tells us nothing about what state ownership and management meant for ordinary Soviet industrial laborers in terms of wages, working hours, factory management, social mobility, and more broadly their participation in Soviet society. It’s a “socialist” history of the USSR with the working class’ real, material experiences written out.

I know this feels right to people who haven’t got a grasp on the fact that they live in a capitalist society. All manner of improvements can be made to the superstructure of a capitalist society, it won’t become equal. How do I know the USSR was socialist? For most of its existence it didn’t have a class of people with an overrepresented influence over its administration or the functioning of its society. Specific statistics and policies that indicate prosperity or democracy aren’t immaterial, but they are only ancillary.

Parenti spends no time engaging with the vast academic literature on Russian and Soviet workers and labor history. Most of these works are written by socialist scholars interested in examining the role of class and labor in Soviet society.

The poster has to know this ain’t true. Western historiography on the subject of the USSR and other worker states is notoriously devoid of first-hand accounts and documents. Grover Furr calls attention to this in many of his speeches and writings: a medieval historian who doesn’t have a good grasp of multiple languages used in the region they’re studying is rightly a laughingstock, yet how many historians of the USSR speak (or just read) russian? How many historians of seeseepee know mandarin?

… In none of these works is the Soviet state itself a producer or unfiltered transmitter of worker’s “class interests”, inasmuch as scholarship nowadays accepts the idea that such a diverse group - in terms of gender, background, geography, and profession - could have a coherent set of interests.

I’m not sure I’m reading this right, but I think the dimwit is proposing the proletariat doesn’t exist because intersectionality makes class interests too complicated, which would be as correct as the dodo population is numerous. We’re who we are here, we’ve at least skimmed Capital, we’re better than to believe added factors change the core of a system.

Parenti largely avoids engaging with the question of how “socialist” the USSR was in a substantive way. He skips description of what the USSR “was” for excuses about “why”. Certainly its leaders were convinced Marxists, and this set of beliefs pervaded every aspect of the USSR’s existence. …

And so on and so on. How someone could read Blackshirts and Reds and come away with the singular question “Why didn’t the author prove to my satisfaction that the USSR was communist?” is beyond me. I might be convinced they never read a word Parenti wrote considering their entire comment, it’s filled with stuff they may have gotten from reviews.

Why would anyone do that? It’s a useless level of abstraction. I’ve never seen scientists looking into the composition and structure of the sun say “Why don’t we apply the ideal gas law?” Because the answer is obvious, the myriad axioms the ideal gas law comes with aren’t applicable in a gigantic ball of plasma. The only reason one would even attempt such an oversimplification is if they don’t see the candidates serving the same interests structurally, and hilariously the exact same in some cases.

I will regardless offer you a simplified approach, so that you may use it to synthesise your own. It consists of 3 questions regarding policy differences: (1) how has the issue come to this [under Biden for stuff that happened in the last 4 years], (2) how do I really know the other guy will be that much worse, and (3) if there definitely is a difference, is it significant? Let’s use 3 issues to look how it turns out.

Palestinian genocide: (1) Although the zionist entity has been murdering Palestinians for decades with impunity, the massacre that’s been going on is unprecedented. 35k dead, 11k of which are children, and fuck knows how many more indirectly, as a result of conditions imposed by the zionist entity. (2) Amy argument that Trump supports the zionist entity and it’ll get worse is moot. Biden called himself zionist on multiple occasions, and the most he’s done is to not sell arms to be used in Rafah, not even s stop the sake of assume altogether.

Abortion: (1) Roe v Wade was undone under Biden. He didn’t have Dep. of Health policies changed to safeguard it, he didn’t withhold funds from states that criminalised abortion, he didn’t stack the courts. (2) What’s he going to do, double ban it?

Cannabis: (3) Biden regime sent out a note unofficially saying they’ll reclassify cannabis. Not only is that gesture miniscule when they could work to declassify it altogether, it’s done when he doesn’t have congressional support so likely won’t happen anyway.

Between the schools of thought “best lies have a hint of truth” and “the big lie” this one definitely subscribes to the latter. Literally every sentence is the opposite of reality.

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I’m going to make 2 different cases for you never making this comment and if neither have an effect I’m going to ask you to gently fuck off.

1. The FBI has a history of bullying people into all sorts of things, including suicide. We know from Snowden’s leaks that NSA agents use what’s at their disposal to look up people they know for petty reasons. Finally, OP only described minor changes in their PC, not books on shelves being switched around, which can be accomplished with a lot of software. Put all this together, and the scenarios where this is all quite possible are plain to see.

2. Even if you don’t believe it, as is your right, this is without doubt the worst way of making that known. This is just one step above hurling slurs and unhelpful to a distressing point. Mockery never got anyone better.

I thought this statistic could simply mean that a lot of people get illegal entity citizenship without intending to move there, but clearly there’s more.

“Seventy per cent of those polled reported that they have significantly changed their behaviour in public since 7 October,” said the survey report. “They are more reluctant to display Jewish symbols or speak in Hebrew, they remove the mezuzahs from their doorposts, they tend to go out less and meet less frequently in city centres.”

It added that 44 per cent of respondents considered enhancing their self-defence capabilities. “They cited the purchase of a firearm, carrying pepper spray or tear gas, installing security cameras in their homes or taking Krav Maga [martial art] lessons as the preferred means for achieving this goal.”

“I’m worried I’ll be attacked due to my religion/ethnicity. On an unrelated note, those 13000 Palestinian kids deserved what they got.” -Zionist fucks, as always

Pasty ass crackkkers can’t even handle being called by their self-proclaimed “colour” smh

This is a misconception. Cis people don’t choose their gender, nor do heteros their sexuality. All babies are born genderfluid bisexual. When they start teething, gender and sexuality fairies arrive and make the baby into something else. Babies too fabulous for heterosexuality are made homosexual. If the sexuality fairy doesn’t visit a baby, but they just love everyone so much, they can’t distingush someone[s] they particularly like to limit their love to, they end up identifying as asexual.

I know the gender fairy visited me, we have pictures and everything, but I not sure about the sexuality fairy. I’m told they arrived, but I’ve seen evidence they were elsewhere at the time.

Here’s a super fun exercise anyone can do with a bit of free time. If ever you read an article regurgitating some claim of an atrocity by any western enemy, follow the links to the claim. It won’t be much of a rabbit hole. In general, for a 4 yol claim (so the October 7 tales may not fit exactly) you’ll be linked to a 2 week old article, which will link a 6 month old one, which will link a 2 yo one, which send you to:

1. Wikipedia, which will have already been re-written citing a 1 yo article
2. A UN transcript, HRW article, or something equally worthless of someone repeating the claim
3. The best approximation of an original source

That last one is extremely rare, but it’s always magnificent. You find out stuff like how the 1-3 million interned Uyghurs claim comes from a pseudo-study that remotely talked to 8 people and nothing else.