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Vacations in the Soviet Union

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Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#311

Post by seanmcdirmid »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #302
krzyk wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the right to protest?

Well people protested against 0-covid during a time that the media reported as "Xi wants to maintain 0-covid forever because he wants more control". Mere days later, 0-covid was lifted. Sounds like a prime example of "the expected dystopia never materializes" to me.

Uhm, people were protesting 0-covid in China for almost a year before Xi lifted it. It wasn't like there was a protest, and Xi lifted it right away. It took the CPC sometime to figure out they were doing the wrong strategy.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#312

Post by badpun »

gdy wrote: post #219
jtbayly wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haga has a flagged comment pointing out the purpose of this policy, and I can't figure out why it is flagged, so I'll just quote what the article says: "It encouraged workers to vacation with groups of relative strangers as opposed to their friends and families. They were all part of a collective and that umbrella united them. In the Soviet Union, after all, the collective—not the family—was the most important social…

That's just sovietophobic fiction. I remember the slogan "Family is the unit of society" and childless people had to pay a special tax. Also infidelity in marriage was frowned upon and could negatively affect the career.

> That's just sovietophobic fiction.

From what I've read, the dismantling of families was really implemented in the 1920s and perhaps 1930s. That's when a kid [1] who ratted on his own father (likely sent him to Gulags) was glorified as a huge Hero of Socialism. After that period though, Communism was gradually less about implementing its distopian ideology and more about naked power of people on top, so the destruction of families was abandoned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#313

Post by mannerheim »

iudqnolq wrote: post #290
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask Chinese people outside of China, they also really don't care. They know what happened, its like the Kent State shooting for them. The west severely exaggerates every bad thing that happens over there then pretends like every misstep is solved with execution. Sure there's censorship but its exaggerated to a level of fiction in the west, like a movie that's "based on real events". More than likely if you ask…

.

Most people know what happened, but nobody refers to Tiananmen Square because 1) that's a pretty notable place on its own and 2) the protests were a nationwide movement, of which international journalists only ever saw any of it in Beijing. Akin to calling the January 6 protests the Capitol Hill protests. You'd call the Tiananmen Square protests June 4, or if you're being rather cheeky, May 35.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#314

Post by int_19h »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #67
0xDEF wrote: post #38

It's fascinating how the ideology of Marxism–Leninism (Communism) today is more popular than ever among young people in former capitalist heartlands like the US, Canada and UK. A simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare is all you need to satisfy 90% of people but the elites in the US and the UK refuse to provide that.

Perhaps young people in the US, UK, and Canada understand that elites will only settle for “a simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare” with the explicit threat of Communism? Historically, that seems to have been the case.

Why would young people from UK and Canada think that, given that they already have a European-style welfare state with universal healthcare? Canada actually pushes it further than most of Europe with their single-payer healthcare system that effectively prohibits private coverage for things covered by the public system.

Canadians of all people also ought to remember how they got their system, which was by voting[1] for parties that supported it in elections. It had basically nothing to do with threat of communism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Saskatchewan_general_elec...

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#315

Post by janalsncm »

mannerheim wrote: post #270
janalsncm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North Korea is an exception, since it’s pretty hard to talk to actual locals. Having lived in one of those illiberal countries for a while (China) I could clearly see how the US media distorted everything, reduced Chinese people to a monolith, downplayed or simply ignored all of the genuinely good things happening, and took every opportunity to highlight the negatives. It is to the point where every positive, interes…

Maybe you should have gone to China last year or the year before to enjoy the authentic Chinese experience of living in a cage without food because grocery shopping was verboten.

With sufficient repetition, propaganda embeds itself into a person’s core belief system. This makes it self-replicating in ways that no state alone has the resources to accomplish.

Very quickly when people travel (even if within their own country), they realize that their worldview has been shaped by what others want them to see. Maybe it is a benign travel ad that crops out the favela in the background, maybe it is genuinely lovely people colored as backwards or belligerent. There’s a reason someone has chosen to post that video or show you that picture.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#316

Post by [deleted] »

mannerheim wrote: post #313
iudqnolq wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.

Most people know what happened, but nobody refers to Tiananmen Square because 1) that's a pretty notable place on its own and 2) the protests were a nationwide movement, of which international journalists only ever saw any of it in Beijing. Akin to calling the January 6 protests the Capitol Hill protests. You'd call the Tiananmen Square protests June 4, or if you're being rather cheeky, May 35.

[deleted]

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#318

Post by thriftwy »

lnsru wrote: post #262
thriftwy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This cannot be further from truth. High ranking party members had access to "special distribution" stores whose selection of goods available was inferior to what your local 7-11 offers (not to mention the modern Russian supermarket chains for that matter). They could get some of the things westerners had, but with extremely low bandwidth.

Lol. As a very high level party member you could murder anyone. And if the crowd wasn’t too big you could get fine with it. I am not talking about the poor souls who got party books just to get mid career promotion.

Any known examples?

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#319

Post by catiopatio »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #304
catiopatio wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you dismissively say “internet freedom”, what you really mean is “free expression”, “freedom of association”, “right to peaceably assembly”, and “right to petition your government for a redress of grievances”. Even this photo is still censored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

I'll give you something much simpler than all of those things: having enough food, having housing that doesn't leak, having running water, having electricity, having access to schooling, having toilets, not having nearly every street in the city be a dirty mud pool full of trash, having safe streets mostly devoid of violent crimes. None of those things were a given when I grew up. Those things ard still not a given i…

Why are you pretending these things are mutually exclusive?

You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.

Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism. We’re discussing basic human rights, not “VPN annoyance”.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#320

Post by mannerheim »

janalsncm wrote: post #315
mannerheim wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should have gone to China last year or the year before to enjoy the authentic Chinese experience of living in a cage without food because grocery shopping was verboten.

With sufficient repetition, propaganda embeds itself into a person’s core belief system. This makes it self-replicating in ways that no state alone has the resources to accomplish. Very quickly when people travel (even if within their own country), they realize that their worldview has been shaped by what others want them to see. Maybe it is a benign travel ad that crops out the favela in the background, maybe it is…

Oh, I've been to China many times. Enough times to appreciate not having been born there. Western media about China, while somewhat one-sided, isn't particularly unfair in my experience.
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