128: The Death of Eastern Forests. I’m listening to the hosts talk about CWD and other prion diseases right now, which is a really cool and not existentially horrifying
I know, I actually live in Nova Scotia 😌 Although I don’t think I’ve ever visited that river. Between Truro and Amherst I don’t think I ever leave the TransCanada lol
When riverwash pug, then that is a pugwash, and it becomes a pugwash river. Then if you wash another pug, pugwash riverwash pug. And if the river is full of pugs instead of water, that is what they call a … engages dr Seuss mode
I will go on record as saying I don’t give a shit if there’s pineapple on my pizza. I wouldn’t order it that way, but I’ll enjoy a pineapple, jalapeño, ham pizza if a slice is put in front of me.
Raisins in Mac and cheese… I can imagine it’s probably tasty enough, but the rubbery consistency of raisins in tandem with sticky pasta is what I find revolting
Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. archive.ph/9Z12u
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
From 1989-1998, Hungary was a failing democracy. Since 1998 it gradually became Viktor Orban’s private kingdom.
It doesn’t mean that communism is wrong (as you’ve provided multiple examples here that I haven’t checked), but in the case of Hungary I’d say it is complicated.
The trajectory Hungary took after transition to capitalism mirrors what happened in most post USSR states. This just further supports the point that the communist system was better.
What happened in countries like Hungary and Poland is a direct result of the transition to capitalism however. What’s more this transition happened under the best possible conditions. The transition happened largely democratically without any violent revolutions, and these countries got support from the west to soften economic impact of the transition. Yet, despite all that we see that majority of post Soviet countries end up going in a similar direction under capitalism. Again, Hungary isn’t an outlier here.
Ok, so it is not nostalgia, bad management, corruption, disillusionment “of how great capitalism is”… it is only that post Soviet nations had it better during the communist era and thus are better managed as Communist nations.
Whelp, I’ll just remain a skeptic.
I wish the post Soviet nations, completely unsarcastically, good luck in the next elections or revolution. I would be happy to see the communist ideology continue to thrive in the face of capitalist debt slavery, and the contemptuous bourgeoisie.
Thing is that bad management, corruption, and so on, have happened in every human society that has ever existed. A political system isn’t magically going to change that. What a political system can do however is create different selection pressures for behavior. Capitalist system selects for different kinds of behaviors than a communist one. As we see with the case of transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe, the selection pressures of capitalism result in far worse things happening than under communism.
Idealistically? Yes. I wholeheartedly agree. Capitalism will always encourage unfair competition, whereas socialism will strive to end it by its very definition.
I’m just still unconvinced that the post Soviet nations, as a whole, suffer the same “communism withdrawal symptom”. The systematic pressures might be so that switching to Communism now will simply fail again (and let’s not forget the dear old CIA… eh?).
Again, hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see the point you’re making as clearly as you do. I think it is a more complicated situation, but I sure do think that being more socialist wouldn’t hurt them.
And I can’t repeat this enough, remove Orban the dictator from power.
Unfortunately, I expect that things are going to get worse before they get better. I don’t think people who are in power now will simply let it go the way communists did.
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