As we all know, getting more militantly progressive because you see the repeated failures of the liberal worldview is exactly the same as getting more conservative because you own more property 🤡

convert inches to miles

When will you ever convert inches to miles? One of these is for measuring things that you can pick up with one hand, the other is for measuring traveling distances.

The useful thing about standard measurements is that base-12 is much more useful in daily life than base-10, which is only easier to work with on paper. Make a footlong object and you can very easily make 1/2 1/3 1/4 1/6 and 1/12 versions of it, make a decimeter long object and you can only easily do 1/2 1/5 and 1/10.

all base 10.

You see, this is part of the problem. SI seems more logical on paper, but in practice if you want to divide by anything other than 2 or 5 you have to pile on the decimals or switch to an unwieldly small unit of measurement, which hampers the ability to use those measurements. The most commonly used “standard” measurements are the way they are because they were the most useful measurements for actual craftspeople to standardize to, while the SI system was dreamt up by a bunch of rich French people.

I’ve been fighting this battle on Lemmy for years, people who don’t make or repair things with any regularity just don’t accept the usefulness of standard units. The fact that they’re mostly in base-12 or -16 alone makes them far more useful than metric!

True. I didn’t become a commie until I was almost thirty, young me was so idealistic.

tHeSe MeN wErE vIoLeNt TyRaNtS

The kulaks and the monarchists and the nazi collaboraters deserved it. Communists have been vindicated by history every single time.

voting for liberals to keep the fascists out doesn’t work

our current system has already shown the tendency for liberals to let fascists into prominent positions of power

in the historical example, the Germans could have saved their country by voting for communists, therefore I advocate voting for communists in the present day

is that simple enough for you to understand?

Since Biden has done nothing to curb the radical conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, he doesn’t have to. The GOP has all the undemocratic institutional power they could ever ask for.

I read Stasi State or Socialist Paradise some years ago, I recommend it for anyone interested in a history of East Germany that isn’t written by West German propagandists.

AFAIK FF is implementing Manifest V3 so that those add on developers who are migrating to it don’t lose FF compatibility. As long as they don’t deprecate Manifest V2 for those that need it, ad blockers will continue to be usable.

edit: although I’ll add that there’s a major problem here that Mozilla simply can’t address. If ad block stops working on chromium browsers, and ad block users all migrate to Firefox, then that makes it a lot easier for Google or others to target users of those browsers and deny them access to their sites. Imagine if Google goes scorched earth on all browsers that support manifest v2.

Biden has been working overtime to provide student debt relief the entire time he’s been in office

Biden could sign an executive order right now forgiving all government-backed student loans. He doesn’t need to work overtime on this, he could literally hand-write it and sign it in like five minutes.

We do know however that the Red Army had the most investigations of and prosecutions of rapists, so it’s a bit of a “Swedish rape crisis” problem where they look worse on paper than other countries simply because their record keeping of the crime in question is better.

East Germany paid war reparations to the Soviets while rebuilding itself into an industrial powerhouse - the people who “stole most of East Germany’s infrastructure” were the West German capitalists after reunification, when the whole region was forcibly de-industrialized and left a shadow of its former self that still hasn’t fully recovered over thirty years later.

They did do 80% of the fighting, though. So lets not give America too much credit.

I, personally, have learned from history, which is why I’ll be voting PSL in the upcoming election.

Ah yes, another fantastic reason to vote for Claudia De la Cruz in this upcoming election.

The Germans in 1932 all voted for the “realistic” liberal candidate, Hindenberg, and he went ahead and appointed Hitler as chancellor anyway. The only option to prevent the Nazis from rising to power was the communists, which is of course why the Nazis killed all the communists the first chance they got (with the help of the social democrats - don’t trust the squad is what I’m saying).

you deem the great Terror to have been necessary

Repression of the previous ruling class was absolutely necessary, the fact that it went overboard and also targeted comrades is the mistake. If it were possible to have a revolution that made absolutely no mistakes I would sign onto it no question, but I believe that such a thing is idealistic nonsense - and that forswearing all repression of the previous ruling class in order to not accidentally target comrades is far worse, because it takes an essential tool out of the revolutionary’s belt and replaces it with nothing.

And yet the Soviet economy uplifted hundreds of millions from poverty and built the war machine that was critical in stopping the Nazis. People went from working on tenant farms to living in modern cities with all of the amenities of the time in a single generation, and the first man in space was the son of a farmer! The achievements of the Soviet Union - yes, even the Soviet Union under Stalin - far outstrip its failures and mistakes. I’m partial to Mao’s overall critique of Stalin, that he was 70% good and 30% bad (which also applies to Mao as it turns out), and I feel that Mark Twain’s quote about the French Revolution equally applies to the Russian one.

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

one last thing

I dont want to fucking replace the boot with another one. I want the boot gone.

Me too, brother. But the bourgeoisie aren’t going to lift the boot from anyone’s neck willingly, and we have to be willing to stomp on their neck when we have the chance, otherwise a world without class is and will remain completely impossible.

I never said mistakes weren’t made. Class war is war and war has collateral damage. The problem here is the total idealistic rejection of “authoritarianism”, where every single thing that has ever worked is classed as such and therefore made off-limits.

If by “not falling in line” you mean “actively sabotaging the working class for selfish reasons” then I suppose you have a point, but I would argue that in class war those organizations which do not support the working class are fair targets.

the will of the proletariat during the 1917 and 1918 elections

By the time the Bolsheviks were disregarding the results of elections, the People’s Soviets were the state power in the former Russian Empire, and they were a hundred times more democratic than the Duma ever was.

amassing personal power and wealth

I’m sorry comrade but the Soviets simply never did this. The benefits enjoyed by even top Party officials paled in comparison to the lavish lifestyles of the former Russian Empire’s aristocracy or those of the ruling class of any of their contemporary capitalist rivals - even fucking Stalin lived in a shared apartment!

Objectively speaking the Soviet Union was one of the most democratic and equal societies on this Earth during the time of its existence, and you can very clearly see in the data how their system equalized wealth (not “perfectly”, just “better than everyone else has ever done it”), and how the destruction of their system undid all of their progress.