if they're so scared of the truth, the news must be really bad i guess.. and such varied topics as well: real estate, youth unemployment, stagflation, capital fleeing the dictatorship because of fears of asset seizure.. so many problems and nobody can talk about them.. but China is a big place, maybe they can just bury the problems somewhere in a big Chinese hole.. or lock them up in a camp in Xinjiang..
It’s so hilarious seeing them just plain state that people aren’t allowed to talk about normal-ass stuff if the government doesn’t like it, and then seeing people online who try to defend them.
Fuck Lenin for turning a philosophy of freedom and cooperation and consensus into just another tool of State/authoritarian power.
bUt It’S nOt PrAcTiCaL oThErWiSe
No, you’re just scared of what it would actually look like. Lots of supposed Communists who are scared of the whole “stateless” part meaning they can’t finagle their way into power, or who just want the revolution as a vehicle to change who is in power (i.e. them).
Lenin’s biggest mistake was thinking this whole “dictatorship of the proletariat” phase was going to be this magical normal period that no human would abuse ever, completely ignoring millennia of human history, human behavior, and the dynamics of power that would make that sort of thing literally impossible. Not only does absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even if a leader was immune to such corruption, dictatorships are never propped up by one single leader. They are precariously installed by groups of people who have other units of power, like the military, to keep the system in place.
One of those powerful people can simply say: “Keep this dictatorship in place or I will torture you and your entire family while spreading propaganda about detestable crimes, until eventually I’ll feed you to the angry mob and prop up a new dictator.”
And that’s it. The real communism dream never happens. Corruption quickly floods the state, and wealth disparity continues unchallenged and unabated. It’s just more hidden, under the guise of a system of equalative poverty for one class of people and gradients of power for another class of people.
Hell, this even happens with failed democracies, like Russia. Everybody gets behind the new system, but without the right kinds of checks and balances, corruption invades and, eventually, it’s a democracy in name only. But, at least democracy never had any notion of a dictatorship built into the philosophy. Democracies are still really hard to keep in place, but communism is a doomed idea from the very start.
Communism is a very doable system, the problem is that people have false expectations of it and what it should look like (largely thanks to Leninism).
Collaborative, democratic consensus, is the normal way that groups of people work. Coercion is not, but that is how majoritarian systems work, and it is how states work. People have been living under Western nation-state and administrative-state systems for so long, within defined borders that denote both behavior and identity, that it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales. The common response is, “but someone will always try to take charge/ seize power”, and that is true, but before the time of the modern state, you could walk away.
Now the state itself has become a self-perpetuating threat to its own citizens (which you can’t leave without subsuming yourself to another state), and majoritarian democracy is just used to maintain the state through the illusion of choices that hold that threat at bay. “Don’t let ‘x’ get in power, because if they do they’ll hurt those of us that are ‘y’.” You can’t fuck off and make a community that doesn’t allow ‘x’, because a state will come along and destroy or seize it.
it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales.
Because it’s already very very hard to scale. It takes only a small group of people to fuck up trust models to such a degree that the whole system falls apart.
If you are not prepared for evil, evil will hold far more power that you and decimate the entire community. Indigenous peoples from every corner of the world have been punished by that hard lesson over and over again.
Scale is half the problem. There is a reason that climate destruction, world-spanning wars, nuclear weapons, etc. all took off the same time that population exploded. You can’t separate scale from technology from destruction. I’m not arguing for de-dev, but the complex, “scalable” systems we’ve built and now rely on are literally either designed to kill us or are inadvertently killing us (emission, plastics, deforestation, PFAS, etc.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m advocating being unprepared for evil? Even in Anarchist systems, which do not have systems of authority, the use of force to counter someone hurting you is well understood.
If your argument is that state systems will scale large enough to destroy non-state systems, I agree, but then you’re just agreeing with what I said about the state setting itself up as a threat that must be participated with in order to counter (i.e. in this case arguing, “if you don’t want the state to consume you, make your own state”). That doesn’t make those other systems bad, it makes states bad. “Might makes right” is not generally considered a very modern or positive way of interacting with each other.
The official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) likely was at 49.5 in December from last month’s 49.4, according to the median forecast of 24 economists in a poll conducted Dec 22-28. The 50-point mark separates growth from contraction.
“Nuclear powered” has no reference to their weapons capabilities, but instead how it generates electricity to run the ship.
Back in the old days, subs had diesel generators that required air to run the generators (like any fossil fuel powered engine) that recharged the batteries that powered the ship while submerged. That means that if the batteries were running low, the sub would need to surface to use the diesel engines to recharge the batteries so they could dive again. With the invention of nuclear powered subs, surfacing wasn’t needed except for replenishing breathing air. Which I think is like a few days or maybe a week or two. Or whatever, I’m not an expert on this.
Now, that’s not saying that a lot of nuclear powered subs don’t also carry nukes (like tridents, for example). But “nuclear powered sub” doesn’t have any bearing on that. It’s purely describing how the sub generates electricity.
I hope that any submariners that read this will correct me if I’m wrong. This is all based on info I read years ago.
I don’t know if this is done in practice, but if you have a nuclear powered sub, implementing a water electrolyzer that makes oxygen is fairly trivial. Then you have air as long as you have power, so they could in principle stay submerged for ≈ 20 years, or however long the nuclear reactors can go without refill.
Technically a Sub can stay underwater forever, it is the crew that is the problem there. If they had Star Trek replicators to make them food with that reactor then boredom becomes the limiting factor.
I just re-watched all the first 14 Bond movies, and there are apparently satellites that can track all the subs, so we’re good 😊👌 Also, you can just reprogram the missiles to blow up the other subs — just steal the launch codes, easy peasy 👍 Check mate, Kim! 💥🚀
Side note: many (or, indeed, most) of the films did not age well 😣 I’m not proud of how little of the misogyny, borderline rape-y, no-consent, belittling of women stuff I failed to notice as a kid (patents’ fault) and adolescent (my fault); it starts to get a bit better around the end of the Moore era, and I’m now getting ready for the Dalton era. It will be interesting to see the newer films with this fresh context of the old ones, and I’ve never seen the two newest ones, which I think were supposed to address all of these issues.
Secondary side note: so far, the best ones (IMHO, YMMV) have been For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View To A Kill.
I think it downplayed the importance of CO2 scrubbing, because we can tolerate low O2 a lot easier than high CO2. High CO2 is also what gives us that suffocating feeling.
It briefly touches on rebreathers near the end. The theory behind them is that the difference between the %O2 on the inhale and exhale of our breathing cycle is very little. So if you can get rid of the CO2, you can re-breathe that same air for a “long” time before it starts to get too low in O2 content and it starts to impact your survivability.
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