You think Trump and the Republicans have an exclusive lock on trumped up charges? Do you know anything about how federal prosecution works? Wait till you read about what the courts have been doing to black people and indigenous people for generations!
It’s literally in the title of the post and your comment was defending the take by presenting an example of something Stalin did.
Like, how much more of a connection is needed?
Also, no. Stalinist and Leninist are not “flavors of authoritarianism”. Words have meaning derived from the historical process of meaning creation in a society that you live in. Stalinism has a meaning that is historically defined. Leninism has a meaning that is historically defined. It not just “whatever was done”.
If that’s the case then the all genocides are Bidenism because Biden presided over a genocide. Genocides would also be Harrisism. Drone strikes of American citizens would be Obamism. Saving Nazis would be Trumanism.
None of these words mean those things.
A, everything that Stalin did is not “Stalinist” any more than every single thing you have done is Eldritchian
B, Vavilov was found guilty of “sabotage of Soviet agriculture and spying for Britain”. You can argue all you want that it was because of his opinions, but that’s not what the historical record shows. Vavilov studied all over Europe, including Britain, so it’s not all that weird for such suspicions to be dealt with with prejudice during the worst war in history.
Accumulated wealth is managed by specialists in the field of wealth management. If you make your money by being born into it, your family already has a wealth manager. The wealth manager is paid a small percentage of a very large amount of money as a salary. This is literally what hedge funds and wealth management offices are for.
So no, the wealth does not manage itself but the wealthy do not manage their own money directly. Further, wealth management is not something that requires even 10 hours per week and certainly not 50 weeks a year. So again, those that work have very little money and those with money do very little work.
Also, you think it’s riskier to manage money than to do roofing? You have no idea what risk is. You personally would never risk your life by working a dangerous job but you can’t see your own ideology blinds you by making you believe real risk is losing numbers on a spreadsheet.
By the way, at the level of wealth management, risk is easily mitigated with what are called hedges (hedge funds, get it). A hedge is when you decide to put some of your money into one place that has some risk of loss and put some other of your money into another place that has a similar chance of growth based on similar factors. For example, if you invest in corn, and the price of corn goes down, you could lose some money. So, whenever you invest in corn, you also invest in something that benefits when the price of corn goes down, so for example you might invest in pigs, who eat corn. Price of corn goes down, lose money, but also, cost of feeding pigs goes down so margin goes up so gain money. There we go. Risk managed.
Come to terms with it. Your belief that money comes from hard work is entirely wrong and not backed up by the evidence. It’s a fairy tale. We have a few heroic rags to riches stories, we embellish them and tell them to each other and our kids, because when we’re poor that’s all we have to give to our kids, stories. The reality is that the rich don’t work and the working don’t get rich and it’s been that way for centuries.
So a) you admit the point of capitalism is not to work for money but rather to stop working for money and b) every parent that works hard to make sure their kid gets more financial security at the start of their life reduces the amount of work their kids need to do and c) at the upper end of that spectrum, where parents buy their children rental properties or set them up with trust funds, is filled with all of the wealthiest children who, in fact, do not work for their money.
You know exactly how the system works because you have been studying it in order to make yourself financially independent but you fail to reconcile reality with your ideology.
The hardest workers under capitalism make the least - the parents raising kids while working two jobs. Manual labor jobs almost always pay less than bank jobs, and they require longer hours. Think about all the people you have ever met who are on disability leave - they worked in office jobs making $150k/year? No. They worked manual labor jobs for significantly less pay, longer hours, and their bodies are now wrecked because of it. Meanwhile the real estate agents who work part time in the richest parts of the country are pulling in a couple million, have almost zero risk to their bodies, and are in a position to get the absolute best deals on rental properties.
Money is totally unrelated to work except for a very tiny sliver of the spectrum. The biggest factor in your money is your position in the economy - which you first inherit from birth, and then navigate based on the means your family had to support you, and then navigate based on the network you were able to cultivate during the time your family supported you, and finally based on the network your were able to cultivate in your early career.
If you’re born into wealth, you already have the money, you don’t have to work. You are in position. You can work, but it’s not required, and the work you are likely to do will be far far easier than manual labor jobs and will pay far far more because of your positioning.
If you are born into poverty, not only will you be working to support your family by the time your 16, your family will be struggling to support you and you will lack the opportunities to build the network required to land high paying low effort jobs, which the rich child has in spades.
You don’t want to work hard anyway. If you did, you would be out there digging ditches with a mattock or laying concrete or doing manual demolition. Not for you. You’re going to work smarter, not harder. And when you have some money, you’ll use it to make sure it starts working for you so that you don’t have to work.
That’s the whole goddamned point of the system. Everyone is incentived to find a way to stop working. Doesn’t that seem like a contradiction to you? That the only way (in your words) to make money is to work for it and yet the whole point of having enough money is to not work? Really makes you think. Maybe the people with money aren’t actually working for it. Maybe the money they have is working for them and they’re doing whatever the hell they want because they love it and it’s rewarding and it doesn’t require them to work 14-hour days 6-days a week to put food on the table and raise their kids. Maybe in fact the people with the most money actually work the least.
No, that’s just not true. You are trying to win through sheer force of linguistic bullshit. Landlords are LITERALLY not in the middle of any transaction between producer and consumer. They are BEHIND the producer.
Look at it from the flow of money. I get money from my wage. I go to a shop. I give the shop my money and receive a commodity. I do that every day, once per day. On the 30th day, the shop owner takes some of my money that I gave them, and some of the money other people gave them, and gives a specific amount to the landlord.
A middle man, on the other hand, is IN THE MIDDLE. The SHOP is a middle man for the PRODUCER. I go to the shop and buy a toy made by Hasbro, the shop owner takes my money and buys a replacement for that toy from Hasbro. The toy is made by Hasbro and used by me but the shop is in the middle of the transaction. The more toys I buy from Hasbro, the more the middle man makes. This is NOT the case with a landlord who IS NOT IN THE MIDDLE and therefore receives a fixed amount from the shop regardless of how much I spend because the landlord has no idea how much I spend at the shop because the landlord is NOT IN THE MIDDLE.
No. Absolutely not. Landlords are middle men between tenant and the earth. But they are not middle men between consumers and commercial tenants.
Amazon is ABSOLUTELY a middle man because you DO NOT buy directly from the seller you pay Amazon and Amazon pays the seller.
Homeownership rate in China are 150% of homeownership rate in the US.
LoL. 80% of literally all poverty alleviation in the entire world over the last 70 years was done by the CPC. The CPC 5-year planning process led to the establishment of Chinese university dominance in at least 36 of the tracked 48 high tech fields in the world and it’s not even close - in some high tech fields China holds all of the top 10 spots. The CPC presided over literally the largest and fastest industrialization process the world has ever seen.
No, that’s not what middle man means.
A middle man is an intermediary. I do not buy food from the farmers market. I buy it from farmers who have paid rent to be at the farmers market. The market is the landlord, not the middle man.
What about all of those people who earn without working? Like, it’s literally what ALL financial independence literature says to do: don’t work for money, make your money work for you.
Ah yes, the liberal solution that never works and is always temporary and doesn’t account for literally any systems of power.
The dangerous narrative is that Democrats are different. The number of people killed under the Democrats is staggering. Stop propagating this narrative that somehow voting for Democrats is better.
The US runs NATO. The US decided to put Nazi officers in charge of NATO. The US came up with Operation Gladio. The US decided to expand NATO to undermine MAD and try to win nuclear war like psychopaths. The US got NATO to attack a bunch of countries not in Europe despite claiming it’s a European defense force. The US had NATO dropping Depleted Uranium in civilian areas in Yugoslavia in a so-called war for humanitarian reasons.
NATO is literally just an American nuclear military staffed with fascists and deployed in Europe with zero legal accountability, zero democratic accountability, and zero reason to exist other than to project US power in the region.
Europeans have zero fucking control over what happens.
You can’t really be serious. You think a few local elections have anything to do with Venezuela?
I got news for you. The USA has been attacking Venezuela since GWB was in office. Literally every president has done something against Venezuela since then. Most of it has been coup attempts and collective punishment to starve the Venezuelan people. But no one gives a shit because even Mamdani says shit like Venezuela is a dictatorship.
No, Americans are JUST fine with bloodshed as long as the president follows a narrative that makes the US look like heros.
Jesus. Blame the fucking genocidaires and the billionaire kid fuckers instead
Ukrainian independence and freedom is secured through negotiations. When Ukraine negotiates an end to the war and cedes territory, they still have independence and freedom. You are making up goal posts by saying that ceding land is an end to independence and freedom. It’s not. The end of independence and freedom would be Russia occupying Kiev. That is not in the cards. Russia will never occupy Kiev, they don’t have the resources for it. Instead, in the absence of a negotiated end to the conflict, Russia will bombard Kiev and the rest of Western Ukraine to destroy all infrastructure, all manufacturing, and all energy production. So Ukraine will be independent but destroyed entirely. The negotiation is to prevent such bombardment at the cost of the Russian speaking territories on the border with Russia and a legal guarantee that Ukraine will not allow foreign military bases that are hostile to Russia to establish themselves in Ukraine.
Yes, exactly. Trump is trying. The Democrats instead say “oh no!! The Republicans are doing stuff! Voters, only you can save us!”
Meanwhile the Ds collaborate with the Rs to temporarily suspend the filibuster so they can pass a spending bill. Or they concede all leverage on empty promises that the Rs have been breaking for 30 years. Or they send their hopes and prayers and raise a fist on the steps of Congress but do abso-fucking-lutely nothing that materially changes the trajectory of the fascist wave.
But yes, blame the voters who can’t even afford health insurance in 2026 or who have been food insecure for years or who can’t buy homes or who have to pay 50% of their income in rent.
It’s the VOTERS who are to blame, of course.
Man, talk about apologia, y’all will excuse anything to justify fighting communism.