Hey, you know who could actually help me know how to avoid getting my comments removed? The mod who removed my comment. You know, in that little space underneath the action in the modlog where they’re supposed to list the reason for removal? Well, the good news is they told me, and the reason that they told me is that they consider the information that I wrote to be false. So I have concluded that that’s the reason it was removed. Because the person who removed it told me so.

Then why was it removed for “misinformation” and not “being shouty?”

Ooh! Looks like we can add Havana Syndrome to the list of things you’re not allowed to question on .world. Is there anything the US government says that we’re allowed to doubt?

Yeah, full support for the Trump administration to have the power to say which social media is acceptable, that’ll fix everything! /s

I don’t understand why people think in these terms, “If you approve of violence being done by your side, you must also approve of violence done against your side.” I’m not taking a principled stand in favor of violence for violence’s sake. I support that which hurts the enemy and oppose that which hurts friendlies.

Stealing from the rich? Good. Stealing from the poor? Bad. Killing exploiters? Good. Killing the exploited? Bad. There’s no contradiction here because my stance is based on self-interest and the interest of my class, not on any sort of categorical moral claim about some particular form of action.

How many pieces of silver is that?

Removed by mod

I’m not sure how the size of Cuba has any connection to numbers of doctors per capita. In any case, they didn’t used to have nearly so many, it was just like any other poor, exploited, undeveloped nation, and people frequently died from lack of care. When the communists came to power, they immediately focused on things like education and healthcare, and now they have so many doctors they regularly send them out to other countries in humanitarian missions, where before they were the ones in need of humanitarian aid. So yes, just looking from past examples, there would definitely be doctors and hospitals with communists in charge, moreso than under capitalism even, and more accessible.

Help me figure this out. In the region I’ve lived my whole life, older hospitals that were initially established by churches have been left to crumble or have been bought out by other corporate run healthcare facilities. So, without these new hospitals, in your mind, what would the future of health care have been in this region?

Obviously, you’d just have the state build those hospitals. What reason is there that hospitals should be profit-seeking?

You actually believe insulin would exist in a communist society? And hospitals?

Quick question, which country has the most doctors per capita in the world?

It’s not their job to educate you.

The problem is that folks see these things implemented in the past and say “let’s just do that.” Why can’t we take the good parts and think beyond the rest?

Of course we should! Every instance of socialism should adapt to the specific material conditions. There’s not much reason to think that socialism in developed countries would look the same as socialism is pre-industrial societies.

It’s just that in order to know what worked and what didn’t, it’s necessary to treat those projects as serious, earnest attempts at socialism and to be willing to point out both the positive and negative aspects. And doing that will immediately get you branded as a tankie by .world. Because in practice, tankie doesn’t actually mean that you defend everything any socialist state ever did, it means that you defend anything a socialist state ever did. Thinking critically and trying to learn from the mistakes from the past makes you a tankie.

Dronies have a pathological need to distance themselves from every attempt at socialism (except the ones that failed, which can be upheld as perfect since they never had to implement their vision), which renders them unable to look at the past from an objective standpoint. They are more concerned with making sure everyone knows that they’re “one of the good ones” than they are about studying and learning from the past. Tankies, otoh, are willing to own up to the facts and acknowledge that past projects were genuine attempts, even when they ultimately failed as the USSR did. Of course it would not have failed if it didn’t have its flaws. But you will rarely see a dronie pushing this angle or interrogating the reasons for the failure, because learning from its mistakes is too close to treating it as as serious and legitimate project - far better (and easier!) to just write off the whole thing and push for shit that has only ever existed in your head and has never been tainted by contact with reality.

Every fucking time.

In the case of Russia and the places they influenced, it was a group of self-appointed elites that did the actual revolting, and then they imposed a new system on the populace.

What on earth are you talking about? How would “a group of self-appointed elites” even be enough to overthrow the government? That fundamentally doesn’t make any sense.

It’s also whitewashing the Tsar. As if the Russian people were happy and content while they were starving and subject to serfdom and being fed into the meat grinder of WWI.

Hell, Lenin is even on record saying that Russia wasn’t going to have a revolution, before it did, and by the time he arrived in Russia, the Tsar had already been forced to abdicate!

millions more people genocided

That’s quite a claim. If the US is set to genocide millions of people, then as people at risk of being victims of that, surely we should be treating the US government as the primary threat to our safety, correct?

How about China is, in fact, a dictatorship for starters

That could be true. But I wonder, in general, what is the process for determining whether a country is a dictatorship or not, from the outside? China claims to be a democracy and holds elections, like just about every other country under the sun. Of course, not every country with elections is actually a democracy, but if we’re talking “hard facts” I think we need to be able to point to specific, objective things.

The Communist in “Chinese Communist Party” is just there for show.

Isn’t the Chinese Communist Party the single largest self-identifying communist party in the world? Shouldn’t that factor in, like, at least a little bit into our standards for what defines a communist party? Regardless, this is kind of just your subjective opinion, isn’t it? Again, what specific, objective standards are you looking at to distinguish between “real” communism and “fake” communism?

Can you point me to any member of these “huge groups of well known users” spreading bigotry, racism, and transphobia?

First rule of using Lemmy: If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.

Ooh hard facts? I love hard facts! Which hard facts are you talking about?