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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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In what sense is it a communist country? Do the workers own the means of production?

Did they in the USSR?

Only sort of (when it dissolved, the people did get coupons for their shares of a lot of state enterprises, which largely wound up accumulating in the hands of oligarchs), but as I answered in the parallel post, the USSR at least claimed that it was communist, and it stands to reason that whatever it achieved amounted to some sort of best effort at it.

This is ridiculous. You leaping to the defense and trying to paint the whole thing as some kind of weird coincidence was one thing, but this is just obtuse nitpicking.

It's the exact same line communists use to claim the USSR wasn't really communist, just State Capitalist because the workers didn't really own it. It comes across as disingenuous, and desperate to defend bad people with bad arguments rather than discuss anything.

I wish I could understand why some people get so weirdly evasive and dismissive to the point of making arguments like "woah, you can't prove there was anything sexual about the drag strip show at that kindergarten!" An enemy of your outgroup is being attacked for something they did. It's presumably not even an attack on your ingroup, so what's even the point of doing the whole "maybe those words randomly appeared on that paper" thing? It just comes across as covering for them for literally no reason except maybe who the criticism is coming from.

I personally would like there to be more nuance to the discourse here than "communism is when the slightest amount of redistribution" (I exaggerate for effect here, but still).

I was just trying to put a damper on what seemed to me like OP increasingly leaving the solid ground of rationally debatable statements and working himself into anger against his ideological opponents. My expectation was not that he would have a reasonable answer to how Canada is communist, but instead that he would realise that there is no reasonable answer he could give that passes the ostensible debate standards of this place, and then maybe return to making more constructive statements.

If you feel that the original statement is worthy of defense, perhaps you could present one instead? The case of the USSR is certainly not the same; one can debate to what extent it actually was communist, but unlike Canada it certainly claimed to be communist and there is a reasonable argument to chalk up best efforts to implement an ideology to that ideology. The remark about the drag strip shows seems to be trying to group me in with a set of people that I do in fact have little in common with apart from being ideologically foreign to OP and perhaps you, but for what it's worth, as far as I'm concerned, actually, people who enjoy weird and edgy art are in my ingroup, even if the particular subflavour being discussed here (like the thing with little kids and nodding at judaeo-christian demonology) is not my exact cup of tea.

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