“Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon”
And they sometimes get called “tankies” too by people to the right of them. That’s why I both think it’s a useless term (if everybody is a tankie, then nobody is) and why I think I fall in the definition (as most leftists do, I’ve seen pretty mild social democrats being called “tankies” by liberals)
Plus ultimately these blanket descriptions are pretty useless IMO, you’ll find extremely heated debates between “tankies” themselves on many topics, there’s no consensus, and there are many different ideologies “tankies” subscribe to. It would be like saying that Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens are all the same thing. We could call them “dronies” maybe.
YES
Everybody to the left of biden is considered a tankie nowdays, and I’m proud of being to the left of (and opposed to) genocide enablers.
All those cars and solar panels that Chinese companies counted on selling in the US must go somewhere. Every other country in the world (excluding the EU, although to a lesser extent than the US) isn’t hell-bent on sanctioning China, their production will be just redirected elsewhere.
And since the US, biggest net importer in the world, just stopped… importing, there will be more goods sought after by less money, AKA more supply (old supply + goods that can’t profitably be sold in the US anymore) but less demand (since the US just passed these new tariffs) and as you know, this is gonna make prices fall, maybe not a drastic fall but still.
Collcata verba sunt accuratius modulatiusque.
“we have nothing to complain about, but we’ll still complain because fuck the poor, am I right?”
The fact that a worker who barely makes ends meet pays 10-20 times the taxes Amazon pays is… Fascinating in a dark way.
Similar to feudal peasants that used to pay up in the form of free labor and produce, while their noble overlords enjoyed massive privileges and zero taxes.
They weren’t colonized that’s for sure, they were (mostly) Muslim Arabs in a country where being a Muslim/Arab was normal and didn’t imply you had less rights or straight up didn’t deserve life.
Can’t even get a decent standard of living by selling your soul to Satan now huh
We should reject the dichotomy, between 99% Hitler and 100% Hitler we must choose to actually change things and not be passive in front of atrocities. No sympathy for either one of the two sadistic parties of war.
His plan A wasn’t even to escape to Russia, the EU and USA blocked the Ecuadorian plane who was trying to rescue him.
Around 2.000 no kidding
Half the comments be like:
China has fast internet
But at what cost?
There are cases in which the status quo kills way more in the long term than a revolution would in the short term, I agree with you that a war, expecially a civil war fought expecially on national soil brings misery and destruction to the nation, but it is sometimes a necessary evil in the short term in order to avoid a way bigger evil in the long run. To make another Italian example, the fascist regime killed hundreds of thousands of people, 120.000 innocents died only in Lybia during the deportation of the cyrenaican people, that’s less than all of the deaths in the Italian Civil War!
didn’t say that all revolutions are bad. It’s usually a mixed bag, some good, some bad
I think we agree on this one, I thought you meant revolution was inherently evil. Better to clarify and argument further nevertheless, For posterity. Peace.
By that logic all of America should still be partitioned between the Spanish, British, Portuguese and French.
I understand this is an hyperbole, but still, let’s take for example the French revolution: sure Napoleon crowned himself emperor and in the end left France in a worst state than before, but he gave the whole world some important advancements that in many (often subtle) ways still reverberate today:
for example, his monetary policies are the reason we have 1,2,5,10,20,50 of a given currency and the respective cents, and not an arbitrary system of fractions (old European coinage could get absurd, I suggest who’s interested to go on numista.com or a similar site and check for yourself) .
He helped introducing the concept of separation of church and state to the general public (not much considerated before).
He helped the nascent industrialist class to emerge and impose itself, gradually stamping out the remains of feudalism from Europe.
He advanced history in many ways I can’t even start to mention.
Let’s take another example, you can think what you want of the Soviet Union and I can agree to various criticisms, but living in the Russian empire in the 1900s (even before WW1) was like living 3 centuries in the past. People lived in misery and died young, servitude was abolished only 50 years before.
The Communists took a country that barely surpassed feudalism (in the cities) and gave basic dignities to its citizens, arriving to compete, militarily and economically, with the strongest superpower in history.
Can be argued it degenerated after Lenin’s death, but it’s undeniable that, even under stalin’s time, life was magnitudinally better than even 30 years prior (and to be fair that’s an enormously low bar)
Essù, anche noi abbiamo fatto ben 3 (tre) guerre per ľindipendenza contro ľaustria, evidentemente la gente lo voleva! Concordo che non sempre quando rovesci il governo vai a finire meglio (vedi Hitler, giovani turchi) ma gli Italiani lombardi/veneti/friulani sotto cecco Beppe non se la passano proprio bene… Non che i SaBoia fossero meglio, ma ľautodeterminazione dei popoli è una cosa importante per cui (a mio avviso) vale la pena combattere se si è oppressi.
Some kind of marketplace like eBay.
Having bought and sold there the rules are quite arbitrary, and their cryptic algorhitm is a nuisance to buyers (you clicked by accident on a stove? You’re gonna see a ton of stoves in the recommended for a while!) and periodically harms sellers (if you don’t post daily and basically make it your day job, good luck making money!)
a federated alternative, with different instances for various interests and categories, meta-categories even and so on. Maybe regional instances like we have on here, one for the EU (quite convenient to ship and receive packages from inside of it, no customs wasting time and money) one for North America, one for East Asia, etc. With one being able to purchase from all of them.
Federation would also ensure that rules are properly enforced without abuses or other malpractices like eBay does (did you know eBay shipped a pig head to somebody who publicly criticized them?) since those instances would naturally be avoided and new ones would be made. It would also prevent excessive fees, as the fediverse is generally not a for-profit endeavor, and still, there will always be the option to shop around from other instances.