You’re getting “doggied” because of your idiotic reflexive assumptions, not because you’ve “cast doubt” on anything. To cast doubt, you would need arguments with evidence. There’s no evidence that suicide stats are being fabricated, you just assume they are because NK bad because news said literally 1984 so anything not bad must be fake. Most people are not this easily persuaded.

https://xkcd.com/1252/

Sorry, maybe that was a little antagonistic. I think user bennieandthez answered your actual question pretty well, that to the extent these policies existed, they dried up during wartime. When the Nazis invade and have cells throughout eastern europe, narratives of ethnic harmony got flattened into a desperate struggle for the survival of all the Soviet people. I’m not sure what these practices looked like in the postwar period, but even after the victory, Soviet authorities likely focused on reconstruction of vital infrastructure over something seemingly superfluous like cultural centers and what not. There was likely less to go around in general. Stalin would go on to die in 1953, and his death caused paradigm shifts which may have caused these policies to fade from view.

I think they believe that presidential elections truly fundamentally transform centuries-old institutions every time someone of the other party gets in charge. That coupled with the belief that the news is absolute truth creates a perfect cocktail for chasing their own tails. The problems never went away, they didn’t even appear in our lifetimes, but the media started talking about them a decade ago after not talking about them for many, many decades, and they stopped talking about it once Biden was elected before starting again now that the old guy is back in charge. So, in the brains of these libs, racism and fascism suddenly appeared with Donald and lasted four years before disappearing for the length of one presidential term and spontaneously manifested again out of the ether in current year. Because these things never existed before Donald, right?? It’s hard to watch.

I won’t say that Trump isn’t “worse” than other presidents (though he is better than many on the grounds that they aren’t allowed to own slaves anymore), but the idea that he represents a strict and total deviation from normal american politics is just so silly. Liberalism must interfere with the neural pathways responsible for object permanence.

https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/terry-martin

“Terry Martin is the author of The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the USSR, 1923–1939 (Cornell UP, 2001) and co-editor (with Ronald Suny) of A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford UP, 2001). In addition to questions of nationality and empire, he has written on religion, political and administrative history, Soviet neo-traditionalism, and the political police, as well as the Nazi-Soviet comparison. He is currently completing a book on the politics and sociology of state information-gathering in the USSR from the revolution through the death of Stalin.”

This guy does not strike me as serious. Don’t waste brainspace on his drivel.

I know it seems unfair to categorically dismiss someone’s thoughts like this, but it saves you so much energy. Any time you spend reading his historical fiction novels is time you could spend studying theory, or at least Soviet history from Soviet scholars. Or reading a better historical fiction novel, for that matter. Private publishing like this is frowned upon in academia for a reason. It allows you to say anything with a veneer of authority. The only reason you’re reading him is because he’s a Harvard professor, and that means less than nothing. It’s a finishing school for rich white kids, always was and always will be.

Liberals really just want the mask back to go back on.

Bi-curious, but you may find your preferences changing over time. Gender also isn’t an immutable quality of a person. The “straight guy who likes femboys” thing is actually very common. Straight men are attracted to femininity, not necessarily “women.”

You’re fine, I at least got an explanation for the downvotes.

I think that must’ve been it. I was echoing the language of the parent comment, I wasn’t really trying to imply that.

Yes, that part. I’m sensing hostility. If I offended, I’m sure it was inadvertent.

The part of the country with these minerals has already been “carved up” by the Russians and their SMO. They do not have access to most of these resources Zelensky foolishly promised them. This extraction will likely never take place, and Trump and whoever’s next will not be understanding in this regard. Ukraine’s economy is about to take on a very Greek aspect.

About the cultural revolution, yes, horrific and absurd crimes transpired against more or less innocent people, and the angry mobs shouting about reactionary science were generally wrong. If you were to read Chinese sources from the last few decades, they would form a consensus that the cultural revolution was a series of misguided responses to the challenges of industrialization. Mao in particular believed that economic development was a trivial factor in building communism, the primary factor being a protracted class war against bourgeois elements in society. In its own way, it’s idealism manifested. People are liberated through the satisfaction of their material needs, not the absence of their foes. A very wide net was cast concerning what counted as “bourgeois,” and a lot of people needlessly suffered from the reflexive desire to fight perceived class enemies. If you were to move to China, I’m quite certain you would be able to get your prescriptions filled. It’s not the sixties anymore.

“Bourgeois science” is a real thing, however. All sciences reflect certain priorities and worldviews, whether they are effective or not. In fact, the “effectiveness” of a given science is judged through the lens of these priorities, and the question of what priorities are worth considering is ideological. I would stray away from thinking in terms of “is psychology reactionary?” and instead think “what elements of psychology are reactionary? Are there any that aren’t?”

More on antispych stuff: people who subscribe to this belief system understand psychiatry as a mechanism by which people’s rights are usurped on the basis that the mentally ill or disabled don’t know what’s good for them, that their judgement has been clouded by the delusions their sick brains induce, and therefore others should make decisions for them. Psychiatric “medicine,” in this sense, becomes a mechanism of dehumanization. A person suffering from cancer could refuse treatment, and physicians would respect this. A psychotic who does the same thing has a slim chance of receiving the same grace. Some leftists think this way, others don’t. Either way, psychiatric medicine exists in China.

It would be a mistake to consider dialectics itself a system with contradictions, in my view. If we think of dialectics as a scientific theory, it’s contradictions are similar to those of gravitational or evolutionary theory. These explanations exist in the context of the material world which tests and refines them, and it’s these challenges which transform the theories, making them more precise and useful over time. The system here is not merely the theory, but the practice of that theory as it runs up against the constraints of the real world. No, theories don’t go through their own processes, but they go through processes nonetheless.

“He deserves special gratitude from the Ukrainian and European establishments for telling the truth before things go way too far.”

Before??

“Exercise a high degree of caution in China due to the risk of arbitrary enforcement of local laws.”

I feel like we’re being made fun of.

Trump just needs/wants to look strong, manly, in control. It excites his base and he thrives on whatever attention he gets, good or bad. It has nothing to do with getting what he wants from the target of these demands. It’s also the foot-in-the-door technique scaled way up, with the added bonus that by the time he’s “settled” for less than what he asked for, the news cycle will have fixated on the next absurd thing he said or did.

Do Israelis use that silly conlang just to camouflage language like this? Extremely rich to invoke the holocaust and then unambiguously call for the most horrific genocide imaginable without even pausing for breath.

“‘The nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the President receives are tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment,’ McConnell said."

Pretty fast and loose definition of a “lapse of judgement,” there. Seems she was absolutely right about Ukraine and the other shit Mitch “criticizes” her over.

“I’m not sure what the dumbass is even trying to do in the end.”

This might be a pedestrian opinion, but I wonder if being the world’s nominally richest person isn’t enough for him, or that he at least understands how ephemeral that status actually is. His wealth is largely based on speculations of the runaway success of his “revolutionary/visionary” businesses and “innovations,” and he may be coming down from that high. Seeing as he’s not going to actually colonize mars, the hyperloop is old news, and no one wants to buy a cybertruck, Twitter didn’t pan out super well, etc, he might feel that the jig is up. Getting a foot in the door of more traditional power structures by being Donald’s sycophant and the latest MAGA darling could be his attempt to concretize his “wealth” into actual power.

Darren, if it weren’t for all the thuggish imbeciles of the world, there’d be no one to do your dirty work.