Nothing gets done blaming others and taking no action yourself.

You’re literally complaining that she decided to take action too soon for your taste.

I’ve noticed a trend in some new American media coming out of more openly positive depictions of socialism/communism. The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene, and the new Fallout series has a more centrist/neoliberal take but at least calls out how the right uses communist as a “dirty word,” though she qualifies the statement by first saying “I’m not a communist.”

What you described is just welfare, not socialism. Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, meaning there would be no need to re-distribute wealth as it would be fairly distributed from the start.

What you’re thinking of is more along the lines of what Scandinavian countries have, which is just capitalism with social democracy and extensive welfare programs.

The hate largely comes from the side of anarchists who refuse to work with MLs and spend their time trying to discredit the accomplishments of existing socialist states.

You have been discrediting the accomplishments of anarchists while I have been acknowledging the accomplishments of marxists.

While the left bickers, the right is rapidly growing in power in vast majority of western countries.

I agree, but remember this conversation was started because you were insinuating that anarchists never accomplished anything.

This is getting repetitive and we’re just talking past each other so let’s just agree to disagree about the USSR. I just want to make the point - which I hope we can agree on - that the revolution wouldn’t have been successful without political pluralism within the ranks, and no future revolution will either. Dismissing the contributions of anarchists will only harm your cause.

What I’m pointing out is that all ideologies compete with others. That’s the reality of the world. If Anarchists are not able to defend the way they want to organize society then their ideology ends up being trampled by others. That’s the world we live in. Calling this victim blaming doesn’t change the material reality of the world.

The Bolsheviks’ had the ill-gotten might to push their agenda, but might does not make right. The Bolsheviks lied to and used the anarchists to achieve what they did, but anarchists have learned from their past mistakes and will prove you wrong.

USSR existed under siege from global capitalism throughout its whole existence, and that was the reason it was organized the way it was.

Capitalist aggression did not make necessary the regressive views on social issues and science the USSR had (which resulted in famine), nor the widespread corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency of state officials. You cannot simply excuse all flaws of the USSR by blaming global capitalism.

You’re using the same argument capitalists use to dismiss socialism, namely that socialism clearly doesn’t work because all socialist projects ended in collapse or continue in a state of poverty. This is, in essence, victim-blaming. Just as socialism struggles under the oppression of capitalist hegemony, anarchism struggles under the oppression of both capitalists and statists.

What Bolsheviks achieved was the betrayal of all who fought for the liberation of the proletariat. If power had gone to the Soviets as the Bolsheviks promised then the USSR would not have collapsed under the weight of its’ contradictions. You speak as if the USSR only repressed the forces of reaction, but it also repressed the very same workers it claimed to support when they tried to claim the worker control of the means of production they were promised.

Nah, I’m going by the actual tangible achievements, or lack of thereof as the case may be, of anarchists based on the teachings of their thinkers.

The Bolsheviks discount anarchist achievements by claiming them as their own. Anarchists fought alongside the Bolsheviks because they promised to realize the anarchists’ goal of all power to the Soviets. When it became clear the Bolsheviks lied in order to selfishly establish themselves as the intelligentsia, a privileged class, the anarchists resisted and were violently repressed by their former brothers and sisters in arms.

I would like to hear about your experiences growing up in the USSR as I know there were many positive aspects, but by betraying the values for which many of the revolutionaries fought they created a society with an unstable foundation, as evidenced by its’ eventual collapse. Anarchists did not reject real world solutions, they defended them with their lives and lost. The Bolsheviks have themselves to blame for the collapse.

You claim to know with great detail and certainty what anarchists believe without citing any anarchist thinkers. All you are doing is constructing a strawman of anarchists based on vibes hoping that none will be here to refute it. Anarchy is more than the absence of the state, and none who are knowledgeable posit that anarchy will materialize without effort. Anarchists are idealists not out of naivete, but necessity. It has been born out of history that when means and ends are not unified, the means become the ends. This was true of the Russian revolution when “all power to the Soviets” became hollow words and “war communism” became the new oppressor of the people.

This is an idea explored in The Egg by Andy Weir.

That’s what irks me the most, when people act like abstaining from an election is a grand act of protest that will change things for the better. I understand the reluctance to vote, but that should never be accompanied by a reluctance to act.

What’s your opinion of the Bolsheviks?

I would be wondering what I did to make his job more difficult.

That’s a fine perspective to have, the moral imperative to have children is a common enough feature of various religions and cultures. It is, however, just one perspective. One which you have no right to force onto others.

Here’s my perspective:

Every person has the inalienable right to self determination. One’s body is inviolable and subject to one’s own will alone. Having children is a personal choice that no one else can decide for you.

You are entitled to your opinion just as I am entitled to mine. By all means, be fruitful and multiply, but don’t demand that trans people hide themselves from children because you’re afraid of the ideas they might have. If you agree that people have the right to choose then you should have no problem with it being an informed choice.

And being “deeply confused” for a male child means not wanting to act out the traditional role of marrying a woman and bearing children?

From your original comment:

You can be a biologically-male woman all you want, that is your choice and your right

But then you say:

Boys need to understand that they are not women and will never be women, their role isn’t to bear children, it’s to meet a woman and be the father of a child.

So which is it? Is it the right of any person to identify as they choose, or must you act out the traditional (conservative) gender role predetermined by your biological sex?

I reject the premise that a child can be momentarily confused and end up getting full gender reassignment surgery. That’s just conservative fear-mongering that is willfully ignorant of all that’s involved in gender-affirming care.

I haven’t run into anyone who considers emulsifier a scary chemical word. Most people I know with any baking skill know what the word means and use egg yolks for that purpose all the time.

Yep that’s a big red flag, unfortunate it’s so common.

To explain further, the problem is money as an end and the product the means. The best companies with the best products and services are ones that view their product/service as the end and money as the means. Such a company is satisfied when their product or service is the best it can be. A company viewing money as the end is never satisfied and the quality of the product/service is only relevant insofar as it’s not a barrier to making more moolah.

At the moment Solarpunk is a somewhat small and not very well defined movement, but it’s slowly growing and coming into its own. It started as a call to writers to write more hopeful fiction about the future as a response to the disproportionate prevalence of dystopian fiction, chiefly cyberpunk.

Here is a more comprehensive write-up about it. Solarpunk imagines a future where humanity finds a way to live in balance with nature, technology, and each other, with a heavy focus on being realistic, grounded, and attainable. Politically it’s very socially progressive, environmentalist, anticapitalist, and anti-authoritarian.

Here’s a quote from Martin Luther King that says exactly what he thinks of people like you:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.