After Stalin abandoned Lenin’s internationalism and started promoting the socialism in one country model, it was mostly downhill. Even though Stalin executed most of the Nazbol leadership, he appropriated the same sort of Russian nationalism to drive support for the Winter War in Finland, which was an absolute disaster.

The USSR’s ideological project of international socialism ended with Lenin. Stalin went full hog nationalist and the USSR’s socialist project never really recovered after Stalin’s purges. Stalin eliminated 75% of the Comintern.

Nikolay Bukharin who advocated for gradual changes in agricultural policies like collectivization would have been a much better leader imho. A trained economist who worked out models on decentralizing a command economy, he was one of the last purged by Stalin in the Great Purge.

Read it in a book long ago.

Found an article with some of the keywords, but it is just the abstract. There are 10 sources for the paper though.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-1331.1999.tb00004.x

Stalin near the end had gone through half-a-dozen strokes, and was taking medical advice from a veterinarian.

His suspicious nature went into full blown paranoia, and he pretty much lost it.

The Stalin personality cult era after WWII when he was slipping off into dementia while suffering delusions doesn’t really need to be defended. Even the USSR admonished Stalin for his mismanagement and cruelty.

Emigration slowed down during the Khrushchev era, and then picked up again after the Afghanistan war debacle began unfolding. So it is not like it was constant either.

If you are American this doesn’t apply to you.

Libel laws in the UK are absurd.

Life extension technology is when capitalism’s execesses will finally dawn on most people. Having 200 year old trillionaires is going to be a hoot.

Best dunking I’ve seen this season.

Merry Xmas.

I wish George Lucas had pushed the Empire only allowed humans angle, because a lot of people watching the original movies missed that.

Imagine if Kissinger dies today too.

Looks nervously around.

Looks like Linus’s Tech Tips is nuking this topic on their forums now, but the drama is spreading on Twitter.

[CW: Racism/Sexism in linked Twitter post replies]

I actually gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time- made excuses for him but now that his incel army wants to show up in my feed- nah, in retrospect Linus 100% thought I was going to suck his dick for access to Floatplane. Fortunately, he has you to suck it instead.

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1557309978251210752

Bloodsports should be allowed for TERFs and pedophiles.

No one is nostalgic for this era except half-in-the-grave boomers.

Show me a punk musical in the 1980’s. I’ll fucking spend 7 days straight in the theater masked up.

Cultures without art of their own will glom unto satire as if it were a compliment.

If you read the Handmaid’s Tale it is even worse when it comes to race.

All the horrible shit shown in the show only happens to white people in the books. Black people are in concentration camps in the book, but they are only mentioned for two sentences as the “Children of Ham”. Atwood loves writing about white women, but she has many tricks to make entire races of other women dissapear in her stories.