lmao, imagine bothering to ban someone from unrelated communities because you were mad at a comment they made.

[CRUNCH]

Three.

I swapped from calling for Biden to stay to calling for Biden to go once sitting Congresscritters spoke out in public asking him to step down, since the main advantage of incumbency is supposed to be the ability to preserve party unity, but I was still expecting a lot more “DEMS IN DISARRAY HOW CAN THEY EVER WIN” style narrative to take root. There’s still time for me to be disappointed, but as of right now I’m pleasantly surprised.

Yes

I’m not saying the USSR was responsible for the development of the Estonian economy,

Really? Because that rather sounds like what you’re saying with the comparison you make here

If the british had built comparable infrastructure in India as in the UK, if they had industrialized it,

But I don’t know why I expect consistency from red fash.

Please. Show me the data for that. Show me how exploited the Estonians were, how much lower their wages were than in the rest of the USSR. Spoiler alert: data contradicts your claims.

The second external strategy employed by the Soviet Union to rebuild its devastated economic infrastructure was the joint company. It became a ubiquitous institution in Eastern Europe. The joint company enabled the U.S.S.R. to extract resources and products from a region partially occupied militarily by the Soviet Army and completely reorganized by the Communist Party. So effective had the joint company and Soviet exploitation become that the economic world of Eastern Europe was turned upside down. Not only did the U.S.S.R. impose the goals of socialism and industrialism on essentially peasant societies, it altered the region’s traditional trade pattern that had focused on commerce with Central and Western Europe. By 1947, commerce flowed in the opposite direction as seventy-five percent of all Russian imports originated in Eastern Europe

But tell me more about how THIS form of market capture over vassalized states is TOTALLY different than the British Empire’s form of market capture over vassalized states /s

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24664533

During the past half-century, the Republic of Korea’s economy has shown impressive growth, with average annual GDP growth rate surpassing 7.1%, raising the level of real per capita GDP in international prices almost 26 times (Table 1). Average GDP growth rates accelerated to 7.5% in the 1960s, 8.6% in the 1970s, and 9.3% in the 1980s

https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/183353/adbi-wp571.pdf

Still no response for North Korea’s fantastic workers’ rights and democratic institutions, huh?

if they had industrialized it, if there had been no extraction of wealth, resources and of human labor

Fucking lol. Imagine claiming credit for developments of Estonia’s economy before you invaded, and then asserting that you caused that AND trying to sweep your own extraction of value under the rug.

Fascists never change, huh?

Colonialists use that excuse, I’m very aware, the difference is that they’re lying when they say it. Number of hospital beds per capita, salaries, number of teachers per capita, conservation of local language through language choice in education and written publications such as books or newspapers in the local language, industrialization of the area

Holy shit, literally “The British built schools hospitals in Africa” level colonization apologia. Jesus Christ. And tankies wonder why I don’t view them any differently than any other authoritarians.

The imaginary tankies you and PugJesus conjure up to whine about don’t count. Neither does anyone who disagrees with you, which your lot calls tankies but actually aren’t.

Oh, cool, so the people in this very comment section simping for North Korea and the Soviet Union and denying the Tiananmen Square massacre don’t count?

Fucking lol.

Oh, cool, so North Korea is behind because they didn’t implement a fascist government that pushed against workers’ rights and performed crackdowns against unions, applied protectionism to key industries, and welcomed foreign capital into those sectors?

Fucking lmao.

But sure, tell me how South Korea’s greatest periods of growth were definitely under the periods of dictatorship and military junta and not the democratic period that resulted in reaction to that.

lol

No response for the capitalist hellhole of South Korea, I see.

and 2000 years ago Roman soldiers were paid with cocaine.

Goddammit, reject modernity, return to tradition! What a golden age!

It was because we abandoned the Kurds. Mattis felt very strongly on the matter. He also went to bat for transgender service members.

Huh, it’s almost like “BUT MUH OIL” has been an easy refrain of people with a simplified view of world politics for decades now, even when it’s not actually relevant

mod Removed Comment Did you just use the tank man photo unironically? Are you not aware that that whole thing was fake? The tank is heading away from Tianenmen square, and literally not one student protestor died by

@Crow_Thief reason: misinformation

It would probably be better for the country if he went full Dark Brandon…

… but it would be funnier if he went Diamond Joe. Just no fucks, breaking the law for petty shit with total immunity because “That’s what I was born to do man, even Johnny Law thinks so”

Don’t think I have an answer off the top of my head, but I wish you luck! Examining language and its relation to reality and implication is always a worthy endeavor.

I lack the vocabulary to express why I don’t like the term and want better ways to describe this type of subject.

Might be because tankie is sometimes used as a ‘thought terminating cliche’ - you say someone’s a tankie, and then voila, you don’t have to deal with them. End of.

That’s not how it should be used, of course. If you accuse someone of being a tankie fuck, it should be to highlight what you are dealing with - “This is pattern recognition - don’t be fooled into thinking their motivations are to ‘just ask questions’ or whatever the excuse du jour is, they’re fascists painted red who consistently argue for fascism, and their arguments should be studied and refuted with that in mind, not viewed independent of context”

But people, even people on the same ‘side’ as oneself, often prefer the easy path of a thought-terminating cliche.

They’re interchangeable tankie fuckwads. It doesn’t matter what their names are, they all regurgitate the same lines. Besides, I’d rather not fuel their persecution complex.

The first is comical. The second I don’t get. That looks like sarcastic satire to me.

It’s not. They go on to justify East German guards gunning down escaping civilians as ‘preventing imperialism’ and a host of other questionable things.

Why ostracise people that see things differently unless those things are comically wrong?

You see the issue, or part of it. Some people overuse the word ‘tankie’ to mean ‘left person I don’t like’, but actual tankies - typically MLs or MLMs - hold incredibly vile and wrong views. I went onto lemmy.ml the other day to see, out of morbid curiousity, what they were saying about the war in Ukraine. A lot of “NATO PROXY WAR” and “UKRONAZIS” style discourse. Heinous shit. That’s not the kind of stuff you say “Agree to disagree” about, it’s not the kind of thing you give any sort of respect or legitimacy to; it’s the kind of thing you shine a light on and scatter whenever you see it.