420blazeit69 [he/him]

It’s laughable to cry “whataboutism” when discussing international politics. Comparing how countries act in similar situations is one of the foundations of international law.

Which politicians, and what is your source for popular opinions in Hong Kong?

The ur-gooner

Love how you counter concrete, material facts like “guaranteed housing, employment, and childcare” with fact-free scare mongering like “political pressure” and “control over the media.”

There’s never any analysis about what this shit really means. “The fucking stasi” gets thrown out there like “the boogeyman” without even a thought towards how the U.S. security state violently repressed a nationwide movement against police violence in 2020, or how right now that same security state is violently repressing people protesting the genocide we’re supplying. You’re supposed to belive the stasi is the worst thing possible without ever digging into how it functioned, and certainly without asking how it compared to other states.

See also:

A new book by Kristen Ghodsee, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that women have better sex under socialism.

If that sounds strange to you, consider this: A survey of East and West Germans after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women (the socialist side of Germany during the Cold War) had twice as many orgasms as Western women.

What in the world accounts for such a wide gap?

According to Ghodsee, it’s about social safety nets. If, she argues, you build a society that supports women and doesn’t punish them for having children or devalue their labor, it turns out they’ll be happier and have better sex.

But it doesn’t matter how many studies or surveys or policy differences you point to – some guy always has an old relative whose story outweighs everything.

Socialism took the USSR from a late-feudal backwater that just lost the most destructive war in history (to that point) to the first man in space, and it did so in one generation and in spite of two subsequent invasions.

Socialism took China from a bunch of squabbling warlords dominated by foreign empires, where famines were regular and severe enough that people regularly sold their own children to survive, to a modern economic powerhouse, lifting a billion people out of poverty along the way.

Socialism took Cuba from a plantation run by foreign gangsters to cutting-edge medicine and higher life expectancy than the U.S., all while fending off a low-intensity war the most powerful empire in the world has waged against it for the entirety of its existence.