I don’t think this is much of an issue for anyone here but… expensive wrist watches. I am a reformed watch guy. My $11 Casio F-91W keeps better time than my FIL’s $6,000 Omega. Quartz and batteries were a real game changer when it comes to watches. I really like having a watch but there is no reason for anyone to spend real money on a watch that doesn’t use quartz.

If you want/need a watch, to me the sweet spot are those Casio G-Shock squares. Totally bullet proof, can last a lifetime, and you can spend as little as $35 or up to about $150 if you want solar and atomic time. But spending any more than that and you’re really just buying jewelry, not something to keep time.

50.8% to 49.2% feels like it’s a lot closer than it should be.

Ah, the “I know what you are but what am I?” defense. Used by emeritus professors the world over.

I’m still getting used to federation. I saw that comment, didn’t look at the poster’s name, and assumed it was just sarcasm.

I’m gonna send this article to some people I know, and I already know what they’re going to say: “well they said it wasn’t collecting any data but it was still a spy balloon”. China’s explanation that it was a weather balloon is obviously, objectively true but acknowledging that the US government lies all the time is too much for Americans to accept.

But by then, the damage to U.S.-China relations had been done. On May 21, President Biden remarked, “This silly balloon that was carrying two freight cars’ worth of spying equipment was flying over the United States, and it got shot down, and everything changed in terms of talking to one another.”

So the article still blames China for damaging relations with the US, not the other way around.

Haha sure thing, I’ve really just scratched the surface I feel like and am really just starting on the journey.

“USSR good. Made mistakes - both moral and in terms of being able to sustain socialism. Failure not because “socialism doesn’t work”. But light years ahead of the US in terms of being a “good” country.”

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it, but yes, the Soviets / Stalin were responsible for Katyn. It’s not good, but Stalin is obviously a complex figure.

So the issue myself and others here have isn’t that Uighurs may face discrimination, marginalization, etc. They might, I will admit I don’t know enough to comment one way or another.

The thing is, “marginalization” is most definitely NOT the narrative going on in western media. It is that China is specifically engaging in genocide and forced labor camps. Both of these claims are patently untrue with zero evidence; and even Michele Bachelet’s UN commission agreed on this.

That is the narrative we push back on here.

Good lord this is a familiar feeling to me - not just parents, but friends too. They may not say outright that I’m lying, but they do think I must be leaving out information or otherwise am trying to “trick” them into a position.

Would love that myself but that area seems kinda barren in terms of historical research. There’s some political economy book Lewin wrote that might cover it but I don’t know much about that one.

I really like The Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin. Anything by J Arch Getty. Trotsky’s history of the revolution is pretty great. Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote a good history of the revolution + years after too (she’s a good revisionist historian and was instrumental in pushing back against the Cold War idea that the Nazis and Soviets were the same… but she does kinda have some anti-communist brainworms sometimes). Carlos Martinez has a really nice multi-part mega essay on the collapse of the USSR on the Invent The Future website. I haven’t read Losurdo’s book on Stalin but I will soon.

And most of what I’ve cited above (Lewin, Getty, Fitzpatrick, at least) are from historians who have the respect of the academic history profession, not Soviet apologists or anything.

To you: your perspective has been invaluable here. I have learned from you and have enjoyed engaging with you (mostly on another account I have/had) It’s sucks so bad how this site can drive away comrades who aren’t white / cishet. I’ve been here since day 1 and that’s the thing that will probably drive me away if it doesn’t stop. Hope you come back though if you feel like it in the future.

To the people who said that stuff: stop posting for while. Like fully. Do some self crit and come back when your perspective has changed. Please. For yourself, for everyone else, and for what we’re trying to build here.

It wouldn’t surprise me if conservatives think “15 minute city” means places you can drive to in 15 minutes.

Reading her brief bio, she’s not even some natsec ghoul with like a PhD in “International Relations” and time in a think tank. Literally just a random person who has been given a platform so her opinions seem important.

see how much free shit they can get from the USA

As much as it would be emotionally satisfying to see Vietnam to tell the US to fuck off, kissing ass and getting more investment is objectively the best route. The secret sauce of Dengism wasn’t the introduction of markets, it was foreign capital investment. If the West never pumped so much capital into China in the last few decades, China would not be nearly as economically successful. The West built China’s industrial capacity for them. That’s why Stalin had to push agricultural productivity so hard, no other way to develop industry than reinvesting that agricultural surplus when the rest of the world locks you out of investment.

That said, the US empire isn’t completely oblivious and all that investment China got came with a pretty hefty price tag. Specifically, becoming the US empire’s partner whenever they came calling: siding against the USSR, invading Vietnam and supporting Pol Pot, all that. Dealing with the US is like dealing with Don Corleone. Here, take all this investment money, it’s yours. Then maybe in the future, you may be called upon for a favor. US is absolutely expecting to rope Vietnam into siding with them against China and if they don’t the US is gonna snap back hard at Vietnam. But hey, until that happens, get that bread Vietnam.

Oh boo hoo, the nation that was the aggressor in the war lost 58,000 soldiers. The actual victims - the nation that was attacked and their neighbors - lost like 5 million people. For this reason alone, I would say America is a bad country. We only care about the war criminals’ lives but the people who were slaughtered were innocent, and Americans do not give a single shit about their lives.

One thing that really got me thinking differently about all this is how Patrick Wyman would talk about the “collapse” of the Western Roman Empire. Especially how it was very “uneven”. Some regions (like Britain) experienced swift, severe decline. It was slower for others. And some regions even fared better when the central authority lost power over them (North Africa).

Through that lens, lots of parts of America are already in collapse. Certainly a lot of inner core parts of cities, and rural towns for sure.

I’m just a simple communist, but maybe if you don’t want critical infrastructure during wartime to go away on the whims of a billionaire, maybe you shouldn’t entrust said infrastructure to free market capitalism?