balderdash, balderdash9@lemmy.zip

Nah, it’s not too late, delete this shit OP

It’s bad for the economy in the long term. Fewer and fewer young people supporting more and more elderly people. We’re about to see the effects of this “inverted pyramid” in several Asian countries.

Patient gamer chiming in. I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time and loving it. No bugs, a great expansion, and paid $20. For single player games the backlog keeps me a few years behind and the cycle continues.

Actually inspiring.

Which begs the question: how long have they been knowingly sitting on these emails?

That’s helpful, thanks Cowbee. I know socialism is a transitional state but I thought that the bar was much much higher and/or the weeding out of private property/profit would happen faster by necessity. Which isn’t to downplay China’s achievements but it is confusing for someone just reading this stuff.

I genuinely do not understand how the mode of production in China differs from the U.S. In both countries we see commodities with use-vaule/exchange-vaule/value that are produced by privatized labor processes and that are made for profit rather than for direct consumption. Hence the exact same exploitation of the working class must be in place as the workers are paid a fraction of the value that they produce. Surplus-value is being appropriated in both countries.

Call China socialist if you like, the exploitation that Marx describes at the beginning of Capital is still there. On the other hand, here are the 12 points she mentions in the video:

(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.
(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.
(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.
(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.
(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.
(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.

Unexpectedly, this roadmap only mentions commodity production vaguely. Someone who has read more please feel free to correct me as I find this discrepancy very confusing.

Micheal Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds” covers way too many examples to list here. A must-read for those attempting to reject Cold War-era propaganda. Here’s an excerpt:

The Costs of Counterrevolution

From grade school through grad school, few of us are taught anything about these events, except to be told that U.S. forces must intervene in this or that country in order to protect U.S. interests,
thwart aggression, and defend our national security. U.S. leaders fashioned other convenient rationales for their interventions abroad. The public was told that the peoples of various countries were in
need of our civilizing guidance and desired the blessings of democracy, peace, and prosperity. To accomplish this, of course, it might be necessary to kill off considerable numbers of the more recalcitrant
among them. Such were the measures our policymakers were willing to pursue in order to “uplift lesser peoples “
…

In the name of democracy, U.S. leaders waged a merciless war against revolutionaries in Indochina for the better part of twenty years. They dropped many times more tons of explosives on Vietnam than were used throughout World War II by all combatants combined. Testifying before a Congressional committee, former CIA director William Colby admitted that under his direction U.S. forces and their South Vietnam collaborators carried out the selective assassination of 24,000 Vietnamese dissidents, in what was known as the Phoenix Program. His associate, the South Vietnamese minister of information, maintained that 40,000 was a more accurate estimate. U.S. policymakers and their media mouthpieces judged the war a “mistake” because the Vietnamese proved incapable of being properly instructed by B-52 bomber raids and death squads. By prevailing against this onslaught, the Vietnamese supposedly demonstrated that they were “unprepared for our democratic institutions.”

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 million in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;¹ over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust. Official sources either deny these U.S.-sponsored mass murders or justify them as necessary measures that had to be taken against an implacable communist foe.

Ftn 1:The 1991 war waged by the Bush administration against Iraq, which claimed an
estimated 200,000 victims, was followed by U.S.-led United Nations economic
sanctions. A study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, The
Children Are Dying (1996), reports that since the end of the war 576,000 Iraqi
children have died of starvation and disease and tens of thousands more suffer
defects and illnesses due to the five years of sanctions.

Gotta make sure we protect the Vietnamese from the evils of communism by killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. Another hundred thousand civilian casualties due to dropping Napalm, for their own good

Who’s got a good story?