You still didn’t answer the question.

He did, you just lack reading comprehension.

The ruling elite was the Communist party, mostly people near the top who were able to obtain key government positions that they would exploit for personal gain especially in later years of USSR.

The Latter years of the USSR are notorious for being fucked, but this does not address the middle or early years.

Mentioning that some guy was Ukrainian with in the regime while not mentioning Holodomor is OG 🤡

Ah yes, the famine which affected all of the Soviet Union (and Kazakhstan more in terms of deaths per capita) which even the inventors of the narrative of genocide (Robert conquest) no longer call genocide.

Must he nice being a communist while enjoying benefits of western society lol

I love the benefits western society! I get to enjoy half my income go to some landleech and fund war crimes in the middle east! I can’t wait to see which climate change fueled disaster kills me, or maybe the fascist death squads will be the ones to do me in!

I mean, if you get into any real depth with math, you are going to reach a point where you can’t use conveniently use words to describe the symbols being manipulated.

As an example for the math I am doing literally right now, I very much prefer using C⁺_R compared to “semi circular arc in the upper half of the complex plane with radius R”, or M⁺(f(z)) which means “Maximum of the magnitude of the function f(z) over C⁺_R”, which if I were to write out in full, would just become a clusterfuck.

Also you still wouldn’t be able to get rid of symbols because some symbols are placeholders and straight up don’t have any meaning in natural language. This occurs often in physics as well, not just pure maths. For example, the laplace transform of any function is written as a variable of “s”, but “s” doesn’t have a clear meaning (at least as far as I know).

I personally lost all interest in math because there are way too many opinionated or non-standard symbol definitions

That seems like a strange reason to quit math since most symbols are pretty well agreed upon, and maths has little to do with the actual notation either way.

I would have quit math if I had to do algebra with names instead of letters.

Going by the other comments, his sin appears to be having a Russian passport

What even do you mean “a way of removing a putin” if what I have said does not suffice?

As far as my understanding of the soviet style democratic centralist systems goes (I suppose DemCent could be implemented in many ways, just like liberal electoralism can), every country has a supreme soviet which convenes some times a year to appoint, remove and review the progress of the presidium. The members of the presidium themselves have a strong distribution of powers amongst each other, and so a dictator type like Putin shouldn’t really show up at all, and if he does, he should be removed by the supreme soviet. The supreme soviet itself was elected by lower level regional soviets, which were in turn elected by lower level soviets and so on until you had the fully local soviets, which were initially organizations the factory workers and soldiers during the revolution (so they predated even the USSR), and latter (after the 1936 constitution) became location based (so similar to the local councils in liberal systems).

I have heard compelling arguments that any new DemCent system should take ideas from ancient athenian democracy like sortition and direct democracy. I agree with them, but implementing such a system in reality would likely be challenging and require many preconditions to be met (such as having a highly educated population with good amounts of free time and no worries about war or imperialism).

Aren’t people on ML instances also doing the exact same thing when they shout down and decry the wretched “liberals” (which seems to refer to anyone left-of-centre who doesn’t support communist party rule)?

Liberal is a well defined category though. Liberalism as a self-described ideology opposed to both communism and monarchy has been around for centuries at this point. Most people being decried as liberals would themselves identify as liberals.

Got captured by anti-communists, who then proceeded to march tanks through moscow to bomb the supreme soviet (ironic, right?) and dissolved the union, strip all of its capital assets leading to one of the largest peacetime drop in living standards in human history.

Congratulations, your ideology cannot be implemented in the real world because the ruling class interests will do anything in their power to stop anything like it from ever being implemented and you reject the use of force to displace these said ruling class interests, who are currently boiling the plane alive killing millions of people through pollution, healthcare neglect, war and disease.

Capitalists societies have only ever implemented mixed economies with (relatively) low gini coefficients in the aftermath of WW2, when both the working class was armed (and willing to use force) and there existed an existential threat in the form of the soviet union. Outside of these conditions, capitalists societies have maintained extremely irrational forms of organization.

It is not sufficient to have some idea of what kind of society you want, you also need to think about the kinds of conditions under which said society could actually exist irl.

Our definition of what is and isn’t a democracy is significantly different than that of liberals. We wouldn’t consider Europe and America to be democracies meaning that we have no sympathies for those style of governments and societies.

To contextualize this, one thing you have to understand is that there are many formulations of democracy that have existed historically. Athenian democracy is very different from liberal democracy, which is in turn very different from democratic centralism (the formulation most used by Marxist states). And there were probably many forms of democracy that hunter-gatherers and indigenous peoples used (which I unfortunately don’t know much about).

The main problems with how democracy is talked about in liberal philosophy (the hegemonic philosophy) is that only the liberal formulation of democracy is considered valid, even if its performance has historically been extremely subpar. Furthermore, class is completely ignored, as all “democracies” have existed in service of a class (in athens, for the slave owners, in liberal republics, for the bourgeoise, in ML republics, for the proles).

Because we do not consider liberal democracies to be a valid form of democracy, liberals take this disingenuously as if Marxists hate all democracy.

It gets very tiring trying to have a conversation with contrarians who think everything Western is bad and anything Chinese/USSR is good.

Why do outsiders keep making shit up about lemmygrad and hexbear?

Or worse, that their highly suspicious news sources (some random blog usually) are telling you the real truth, while using any mainstream news media source makes you a deluded Lib

I use this instance regularly and more often than not, the articles posted on the news coms are from mainstream sites. And even the “random blogs” (not really, it’s a few relatively well known blogs) use mainstream news to get basic facts. As proof, !worldnews@lemmygrad.ml is a link to the world news com. Out of the 20 articles on the front page (as of writing this comment), 9 are from the typical mainstream sites (like reuters) and 5 are from sites that may be mainstream, but I don’t know them. Only 6 are from sources like FT or things like a youtube video (which again, may be from some mainstream author).

Yes

Love how all of the tankies on this thread are open about their views while all of the non-tankies are wondering what the term even means, or think that people won’t self identify as a tankie. Reminds of that quote from the manifesto

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

Spook is from the german “spuking” which means haunting. Its use in this context comes from the german philosopher Max Stirner who is infamous for the memes where X is declared to be a spook.

Understanding what exactly spooks are is somewhat challenging, and plenty of people get the wrong ubderstanding about what is meany by spooks. But at least in the meme way of using the word, a spook is anything you think is a fairy tale, or nonsense that you don’t care about.