That's what I get for going off to work for days at a time. So much stuff to read through.
Prak wrote:Oh, ffs. Russia was not fucked by the "extreme left." It was fucked by the usual selfish totalitarian fuckwads, who just happened to start by picking up a leftist ideology and selling it to the public as a means of control.
And extremist leftism is literally all about personal liberty. Or do you think anarchy is somewhere in the middle?
Omegonthesane wrote:There isn't a well known road map from true far-left social democracy to Soviet Union With All The Bad Stuff Reborn - the USSR is certainly not famous for having once been democratic under Lenin before it went state capitalist under Stalin, and my suspicion is that this is because that didn't actually happen.
ETA: And most places that try socialism got fucked by the US military during the Cold War, because the US thought that poor people having food was an existential threat to Democracy(tm) instead of an opportunity to co-opt the appealing parts of Soviet rhetoric and thereby defang the appeal of Communism(tm).
FrankTrollman wrote:Russia is a weird example. It had various governments that espoused leftist and rightist doctrines, but it's never been anything other than an authoritarian empire. You can set the timeline as far back as you like and even the horse nomads who used to ride across the northern steppes had an imperial and authoritarian clan structure.
There were a couple of major attempts to liberalize and democratize Russia in the 20th century, but those all met with failure. In every case some brutal strongman ended up winning the day and the secret police never stopped keeping dossiers on suspected subversives. Russia stopped having an explicit death penalty in 1996, but obviously the government continues to kill people just using extra-legal means. I don't think anyone thinks that government sponsored assassination is particularly better in practice than government sponsored judicial execution - but it is at least on paper more liberal to not have a death penalty.
I don't think you can find much evidence for Russian totalitarianism being a thing that happened "because of" left wing ideology. Russia had and has totalitarian governments of all nominal political affiliations left and right. You can't really put your finger on a point where people became less free by not being subjects of the Czar and becoming subjects of Stalinist dictatorship. It was a bad time all around, but the transition from monarchist dictatorship to nominally communist dictatorship isn't any more or less of a dictatorship.
-Username17
Kaelik wrote:Yeah, the "extreme left" didn't fuck over Russia.
Russia experienced both super fucked up mass murder and also the greatest improvement of standard of living during the USSR, MUCH better improvements than they have experienced since the USSR ended.
The USSR made literally zero changes to actual political self determination and freedom in any direction and vastly improved standards of living at the cost of lots of murders. It's certainly not a success story to brag about, but basically the only argument that increased political deaths came from the "left" is that the left aspects of the government made the country a stronger more advanced country, and therefore better at killing it's own people. Which when you think about it, almost makes it sound like actually the left aspects didn't kill more people, and it was the dictator parts, the same parts that were killing people during the Tsar, and the same parts that have killed people since.
Also, if you are literally my age right now and living in Russia, you have in fact, suffered WAY more from the right than the left, since by any possible metric the "Left" hasn't oppressed you in any meaningful way politically, and the historical economic boons of the USSR are at minimum even, if not improvements over what you could argue you should have expected. Meanwhile, the right has both done 100% of the political oppression in your entire life, and also made the life of the average person economically WORSE when accounting for technological progress, since they have siphoned wealth out of the people and lowered standards of living for the poor for their own benefit.
But yeah, nothing about "increased democratic control over the economy" the thing that is extreme left, is responsible for a single bad thing that happened in Russia, and yet, that is the thing it means to be extreme left.
All valid points, I guess. So basically I mistake correlation with causation and take issue with political strongmen, who try to disguise their shit with ideology, because they, in general, liked to use leftist terms and scraps of ideology for their masks.
Starmaker wrote:
The USSR was the first country to fully criminalize rape, in 1922. The first two countries unaffiliated with the Soviets to do so were Sweden (1955) and Norway (1971). The USSR was already collapsing by the time the oh so enlightened moderate West started catching up. If you are old enough to get appreciably screwed by the Soviet Union, almost everywhere else was a nightmarish hellhole when you were born.
In conclusion, kindly go fuck yourself.
Ayup. USSR also improved literacy and living standards incredibly...which wasn't hard to do, since Tsarist Russia was a clusterfuck of two diametrically opposed societies with an enormous lower-class uneducated peasantry, who mostly tried to survive and few of them prospered, an incredibly small middle class that basically sabotaged itself, and an upper class that sucked balls as they almost always do.
I don't deny that USSR made some significant progress in the social sphere. However, all of this was done by the 70s at most. Two or three last decades of USSR were basically it slowly imploding upon itself, and what arrived at 1991 was already a wreck in many regards, except it took a rough plunge afterwards.
infected slut princess wrote:Scandinavia isn't "socialist" or "communist" though. It's "democratic socialism" or "social democracy" like Canada or Germany or even the US. Despite the hype, in many ways Scandinavian countries are more, shall we say, "market oriented" than the US. Also important is the fact that America has a stupidly big expensive empire to run and a massive crony defense industry that devours resources, while Sweden does not. The US could have a more generous welfare system if it did not spend so much on its empire and and the associated crony defense industry, and it wouldn't even have to raise taxes.
And the US wants to influence world politics, while Sweden doesn't care much, I think, apart from taking some part in blocs. If the US just said "y'know, fuck our ambitions and exerting influence, let's genuinely try to make our country the best in the world by working on our faults, not pushing everyone else down", they could do that. Funnily, Russia could do that too.
And then China would fuck us all over, I guess? Maybe not, but they could certainly try. So I don't think that anything could be as simple as that, because the world is full of assholes who want to be the top dog.
Whipstitch wrote:That's pretty much the Ventrue and La Sombra gimmick, albeit the former leans towards capitalist robber barons and the latter is old money eurotrash. Which, you know, rather handily explains why they resent the shit out of each other.
Ventrue follow political power in all of its' forms. That's why they have constant beef with Brujah — Ventrue are The Man as a clan, in all of those forms, from benevolent to self-serving to actively malevolent.
Meanwhile Lasombra are usually associated with religion in some form, which is why they always snipe at Ventrue - the traditional Catholic Christian church always had issues with worldly power of kings and not having as much themselves. Ventrue stopped being the military aristocracy of knights and warchiefs and shifted towards merchants and businessmen at about the same time as those institutions started to lose power in favour of wealth and owning as much shit as you can. Lasombra have a subset of nautically inclined Elders who engaged in piracy, perhaps as an extension of that conflict.
It's interesting to note that this doesn't happen for most other religions (even Orthodox Christianity), which usually twine themselves about their rulers if not enforce theocracy altogether.