the sleepytime owl 🧙♀️ on Twitter - "my girlfriend regularly tells me “if free public libraries didn’t already exist and someone tried to invent them, they would be condemned as a socialist plot” and I think about that a lot."
Opinion | Finland Is a Capitalist Paradise - The New York Times - "Finland, of course, is one of those Nordic countries that we hear some Americans, including President Trump, describe as unsustainable and oppressive — “socialist nanny states.”... The Nordic region is not only “just as business-friendly as the U.S.” but also better on key free-market indexes, including greater protection of private property, less impact on competition from government controls and more openness to trade and capital flows. According to the World Bank, doing business in Denmark and Norway is actually easier overall than it is in the United States. Finland also has high levels of economic mobility across generations... in Finland, you don’t really see the kind of socialist movement that has been gaining popularity in some of the more radical fringes of the left in America, especially around goals such as curtailing free markets and even nationalizing the means of production. The irony is that if you championed socialism like this in Finland, you’d get few takers... actual socialism seems so much more popular in the capitalist United States than in supposedly socialist Finland... Finland’s capitalists cooperated with government to map out long-term strategies and discussed these plans with unions to get workers onboard. More astonishingly, Finnish capitalists also realized that it would be in their own long-term interests to accept steep progressive tax hikes. The taxes would help pay for new government programs to keep workers healthy and productive — and this would build a more beneficial labor market. These programs became the universal taxpayer-funded services of Finland today, including public health care, public day care and education, paid parental leaves, unemployment insurance and the like. If these moves by Finnish capitalists sound hard to imagine, it’s because people in the United States have been peddled a myth that universal government programs like these can’t coexist with profitable private-sector businesses and robust economic growth... throughout the 20th century Finland remained — and remains to this day — a country and an economy committed to markets, private businesses and capitalism. Even more intriguing, these scholars demonstrate that Finland’s capitalist growth and dynamism have been helped, not hurt, by the nation’s commitment to providing generous and universal public services that support basic human well-being. These services have buffered and absorbed the risks and dislocations caused by capitalist innovation... Some of the country’s most notable businesses have included the world’s largest mobile phone company, one of the world’s largest elevator manufacturers and two of the world’s most successful mobile gaming companies... The other Nordic countries have been practicing this form of capitalism even longer than Finland, with even more success... Capitalism works better if employees get paid decent wages and are supported by high-quality, democratically accountable public services that enable everyone to live healthy, dignified lives and to enjoy real equality of opportunity for themselves and their children. For us, that has meant an increase in our personal freedoms and our political rights — not the other way around. Yes, this requires capitalists and corporations to pay fairer wages and more taxes than their American counterparts currently do. Nordic citizens generally pay more taxes, too. And yes, this might sound scandalous in the United States, where business leaders and economists perpetually warn that tax increases would slow growth and reduce incentives to invest. Here’s the funny thing, though: Over the past 50 years, if you had invested in a basket of Nordic equities, you would have earned a higher annual real return than the American stock market during the same half-century... Paying taxes is a convenient way for capitalists to outsource to the government the work of keeping workers healthy and educated... This liberates businesses to focus on what they do best: business... There’s a big lesson here: When capitalists perceive government as a logistical ally rather than an ideological foe and when all citizens have a stake in high-quality public institutions, it’s amazing how well government can get things done... a majority of people in the United States actually want... the American government [to] spend more on health care and education, for example, to improve the quality of life for future generations."
One common American response is that what works in smaller countries won't in the US. Yet, it's not clear why country size automatically nullifies policy effectiveness. Plus the only developed country whose population comes close is Japan, and it's almost a third, so this seems like the special pleading of American exceptionalism (as usual)
The Myth of Democratic Socialism – Foreign Policy - "the Nordic countries’ social successes predate their high-tax, high-social spending policies. A 2016 paper by the economists Anthony Barnes Atkinson and Jakob Egholt Sogaard shows that most of the progress toward income inequality in Norway and Sweden happened before 1970, at a time when the two countries had low tax regimes and less redistributive policies. Similarly, the Nordic countries’ social successes were more pronounced in those years. Relative to the rest of the world, for example, they had a greater advantage in life span and child mortality in 1970 than they do today. In other words, the Nordic model arose after those countries were already prosperous and egalitarian.Today, Nordic countries are even moving away from socialism"
Opinion | The Happy, Healthy Capitalists of Switzerland - The New York Times - "This $700 billion European economy is among the world’s 20 largest, significantly bigger than any in Scandinavia. It delivers welfare benefits as comprehensive as Scandinavia’s but with lighter taxes, smaller government, and a more open and stable economy. Steady growth recently made it the second richest nation in the world, after Luxembourg, with an average income of $84,000, or $20,000 more than the Scandinavian average. Money is not the final measure of success, but surveys also rank this nation as one of the world’s 10 happiest... Switzerland did draw 15 minutes of media attention around 2010, when Obamacare was still new — but only for its health care system, which requires all residents to buy insurance from private providers and subsidizes those who can least afford it. Admirers said Swiss health care had something for everyone: universal coverage for liberals, private providers and consumer choice for conservatives... The Swiss excel in just about every major industry other than oil, often by targeting specialized niches, such as biotech and engineering... Die-hard admirers of Scandinavian socialism overlook the change of heart in countries such as Sweden, where heavy government spending led to the financial crises of the 1990s. Sweden responded by cutting the top income tax rate from nearly 90 percent to as low as 50 percent. Public spending fell from near 70 percent of G.D.P. to 50 percent. Growth revived, as the largest Scandinavian economy started to look more like Switzerland, streamlining government and leaving business more room to grow.The real lesson of Swiss success is that the stark choice offered by many politicians — between private enterprise and social welfare — is a false one. A pragmatic country can have a business-friendly environment alongside social equality, if it gets the balance right"
Liberal, Not Lefty on Twitter - "Far lefties: We want Scandinavia!!
Me: Oh, okay, so you want no minimum wage, extremely low corporate taxes, and school choice? Sounds great!
Far lefties: nO nOt tHaT pAr*incoherent screeching*"
Tom Nichols on Twitter - "Me: Socialism means "state ownership of production."
Angry Twitter: No, it means Denmark and Sweden and good things.
Me: That's not socialism
Angry Twitter: Well, the GOP misuses that word all the time
Me: But that doesn't mean you should
Angry Twitter: *is angry*"
Socialist Professor Refuses Salary, Frees Himself From Bonds Of Capitalism | The Babylon Bee
Occupy Democrats Logic - Posts | Facebook - "My Uber driver is from Venezuela. He said on average, most families make $1 a month and it costs $5 for a meal . He said it was an amazing country until socialism."
James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "For those who don't know, Orwell's 1984 was a thought experiment about what would happen if the Fabian Society gained the power of Stalin, which Orwell thought might happen by the year 2000. The Fabian Society was founded in 1884, hence the book's title. It is a very widespread myth and misrepresentation among alleged "anti-fascists" on the left to believe that 1984 is a type of critique of right-wing excesses. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. Orwell (himself a socialist but neither Fabian nor Stalinist) made this quite clear. Though Stalin was obviously ruling by might and the Fabians recommended incremental change and institutional capture, Orwell realized as a socialist that they shared the same problem: believing a very bourgeois revolution could achieve socialism instead of tyranny. The Marxists (Orwell would have shared this view) criticize Stalinism for having created its own bourgeois revolution as a stage toward the full proletarian revolution, but this is going to be corrupt by design because the bourgeois are, frankly, corrupt by definition. This is why Marxists say that "real communism/socialism hasn't been tried." People like Stalin and Mao end up creating a Party that seeks to co-opt bourgeois values for themselves, thus corrupting the whole thing. They then install tyranny to force the false revolution. I don't think that Marx was right about the possibility of a true proletarian revolution, but that's beside the point. The point is that the Woke movement is certainly socialistic in design and is certainly both in bed with Woke Capital and predicated on wholly bourgeois values. How can you tell the Woke movement is wholly bourgeois? Easy: try to keep up with their language and shifting demands. It's more than a full-time job. Only very bourgeois people have the opportunity, not workers, not real elites producing real value for society. I also think Marx defined the bourgeoisie incorrectly by lumping the actual elite producers in society in with the bourgeois class that mostly produces worthless luxury opinions and beliefs to set themselves up as a kind of "performative elite." We have a lot of those now. Again, I don't think that the Marxists are right about socialism and communism and tend to think that something like Stalinism or Maoism will happen every time, but their analysis of what causes Stalinism and Maoism to happen and be so awful is very insightful. The Woke movement therefore bears every hallmark of being yet another experiment like the ones performed by Stalin and Mao, which, since it apparently needs to be said, DID NOT GO WELL FOR ANYBODY. Circling back, Orwell recognized these problems from the socialist perspective, but he also was well aware of the idea of Fabian incrementalism (long-march-ism, you could call it) and was highly critical of the misinformed tin-pot dictators in the Fabian Society and their ways. When you realize that we are currently in precisely the preconditions for a Stalinist or Maoist mistake that will be led by people who have espoused an ideology suited to ill-informed tin-pot dictators of the Fabian sort, you can start to see how 1984 was an apt prediction. The various thought-control and administrative policy control mechanisms featured in 1984 are very much in the Fabian style. Orwell understood this well, and even as an ardent socialist, rejected it utterly for the guaranteed horror show that it is. Orwell's 1984 is a thought experiment about "what if the Fabian society, founded in 1884, gains power over a century until it gets to a position to enact Stalinist excesses." The reason it feels so alarmingly apt in so many ways is because Orwell understood what he was looking at. Most importantly, don't let anyone fool you into believing wrongly that 1984 was a critique of right-wing excesses running amok (those look like Nazis and the Klan). It's a critique of a particular type of left-wing excesses that we currently are staring in the face. 2+2=4."
Why Some People Think 2+2=5 - "...and why they're right." (Popular Mechanics)
Kristian Niemietz: Battle for capitalism must be won again - "Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs commissioned polling on the subject. My report, “Left turn ahead?,” sets out the findings, along with a summary of the evidence we have from previous surveys. It turns out that there is a lot of truth to the stereotype of the woke socialist millennial/zoomer. The overwhelming majority of young people really do express stridently anti-capitalist views across a broad range of issues. Seventy to 80 per cent believe that capitalism fuels climate change, racism, greed, materialism and runaway housing costs. Similar proportions support nationalizations and rent controls. Young people associate “capitalism” primarily with exploitation, unfairness, corporations and the rich, while associating “socialism” primarily with terms such as “workers,” “equal,” “public,” “fair,” “communal” and, yes, “Jeremy Corbyn” (no, this is not over). Virtually nobody associates socialism with the erstwhile showcase of “21st-century socialism,” Venezuela. On the contrary, 75 per cent agree with the statement that “socialism is a good idea, but it has failed in the past because it has been badly done (for example in Venezuela)” — the old cliche that “real” socialism has “never been tried.” None of this means that Britain is full of committed young Marxist-Leninists. We included several pro-capitalist statements on the same subjects as a control, and found that, while anti-capitalist statements always receive very high levels of approval, the pro-capitalist statements sometimes receive majority approval, too. Large numbers of people simultaneously agree with an anti-capitalist and a pro-capitalist statement on the same subject, apparently without noticing the contradiction. This suggests that while socialist ideas are widespread, they are also thinly spread. For most young people, these are not necessarily deeply held convictions. Approval of socialist positions may often reflect familiarity: people express agreement with those arguments, because they’re au fait with them. Anti-capitalism has become a “default opinion,” which comes naturally to young people... One of the main findings from my report is that it is no longer true that young people “grow out” of socialism as they get older, in the way some previous generations did. Socialist ideas are just as popular among people in their early 40s as among people in their late teens, or if anything, slightly more so. This is not a fleeting effect, and it will not go away on its own. The case for capitalism has to be made anew, and won anew."
Frank Stronach: Capitalists have a role to play in countering the rise of socialism - "The problem with socialism, however, is that it is based on the distribution of wealth, rather than the creation of wealth. What socialism fails to account for is that we must first create wealth before we can distribute it. This is why socialist systems, even though they may be noble in their intent, ultimately fail. After the Second World War, Germany provided a fascinating living laboratory for studying the effect that economic systems can have on living standards. The country was split into two, with West Germany operating under a capitalist system and East Germany operating under a communist system... Today, we’re seeing a growing appetite for socialistic policies, particularly among the young. And who can blame them? They often graduate from college or university saddled with large debts to pay for an education that in many cases does not lead to good-paying jobs. They end up disappointed, disillusioned and filled with a feeling that the current system is rigged for the benefit of the few... Bottom line: until businesses starts doing a better job of sharing the wealth they generate, we will have a problem. We will keep going down the road of socialism and wealth redistribution, and the day will come when there’s going to be no more wealth to spread around."
Sickness to Socialism: Leftists Are More Likely to Have Mental Problems, Survey Shows - "Conducted by science blog Slate Star Codex and involving 8,000 respondents, the “results show that people who occupy the farther left end of the political spectrum are more likely to have been ‘formally diagnosed with depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia... “In addition, the results show that the highest percentage of respondents (38%) who admit being diagnosed with forms of mental illness also identify politically as Marxists,” Summit continues. “In comparison, just 12.1% of conservatives say they have been diagnosed with a mental disorder”... This just accords with previous findings, WND.com reminds us. For example, in “an extensive series of surveys involving more than 4,000 interviews conducted over the course of four years, Gallup pollsters in 2007 reported that Republicans had ‘significantly’ better mental health than Democrats, with Independents ranking in-between the two parties”... “a 2013 SurveyMonkey study commissioned by left-leaning website BuzzFeed News found that Democrats suffered mental illness notably more than Republicans in almost every category”... Every kid I encountered who’d been “ADHD” diagnosed (back then it was just “ADD”) came from a liberal home. In contrast, the best-behaved children generally had three commonalities: politically conservative parents; a church life active to some degree; and a stay-at-home mother — or at least one usually home when the child is (these factors correlate, of course). Moreover, the “ADHD” kids didn’t exhibit any of their “symptoms” when in my charge because I enforced discipline; they knew misbehavior brought consequences. So unless someone believes the children could somehow decide to not be “sick” when in my proximity, it’s clear what was going on."
War, Socialism and the Rise of Fascism: An Empirical Exploration - "The recent ascent of right-wing populist movements in many countries has rekindled interest in understanding the causes of the rise of Fascism in inter-war years. In this paper, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of support for the Socialist Party after World War I (WWI) and the subsequent emergence of Fascism in Italy. We first develop a source of variation in Socialist support across Italian municipalities in the 1919 election based on war casualties from the area. We show that these casualties are unrelated to a battery of political, economic and social variables before the war and had a major impact on Socialist support (partly because the Socialists were the main anti-war political movement). Our main result is that this boost to Socialist support (that is “exogenous” to the prior political leaning of the municipality) led to greater local Fascist activity as measured by local party branches and Fascist political violence (squadrismo), and to significantly larger vote share of the Fascist Party in the 1924 election. We document that the increase in the vote share of the Fascist Party was not at the expense of the Socialist Party and instead came from right-wing parties, thus supporting our interpretation that center-right and right-wing voters coalesced around the Fascist Party because of the “red scare”. We also show that the veterans did not consistently support the Fascist Party and there is no evidence for greater nationalist sentiment in areas with more casualties. We provide evidence that landowner associations and greater presence of local elites played an important role in the rise of Fascism. Finally, we find greater likelihood of Jewish deportations in 1943-45 and lower vote share for Christian Democrats after World War II in areas with greater early Fascist activity."
In other words, it's not that the socialists rose up to oppose the fascists, but the reverse. This has important implications for modern leftist excesses
Meme - Bernie, BLM, Antifa, Democrats etc: "VICTORY IS OURS, THE REVOLUTION IS COMPLETE."
"FINALLY, I CAN FOCUS ON MY ART AND NOT WAITING TABLES!"
Communist: *stare*
"WE NEED ART, RIGHT?"
Communist: *stare*
*Labour camp*
Why the East Germans Lost (Jacobin) - "The specter of dictatorship and economic stagnation that is used to (one-sidedly) characterize life in the Eastern Bloc continues to be cited as incontrovertible “proof” that capitalism is the only workable — and indeed desirable — socioeconomic system. Moreover, socialism’s collapse in 1989 demonstrated that, when presented with the choice, most workers opt for the material abundance of capitalism and liberal democracy over whatever a socialist system has to offer. This claim is not without a few kernels of truth... The communists tasked with constructing a new order in the Soviet zone faced an impossible task: How to build socialism in a country devastated by six years of war and twelve years of fascist terror, divided in half by the occupying powers, and now subject to crippling reparations payments? How to trust the working class, the social force Marxists believed would naturally fight for socialism, after it failed so spectacularly to stop the Nazis? Even late in the war, only a tiny fraction of the German population ever engaged in organized resistance. Contrary to the communist vision of a revolutionary rupture carried out by the class-conscious masses, socialism actually came to East Germany by the bayonets of the Red Army... the experience of the 1930s and 1940s fed a pervasive suspicion of the masses among the Communist leadership. Historian Martin Sabrow describes them as a “generation of mistrusting patriarchs” who sought to exercise power on behalf of the workers and peasants, but could not rely on them to exercise that power on their own... For many who survived fascism and wanted a new, better Germany, the GDR appeared as the natural choice. A number of prominent leftist intellectuals and artists, like renowned playwright Bertolt Brecht, composer Hanns Eisler, philosopher Ernst Bloch, and legal theorist Wolfgang Abendroth, opted to move East and lend their services to the cause. Some left in disappointment, while others chose to stay, criticizing the state’s weaknesses and excesses but remaining loyal to what they saw as an earnest attempt to build a better society. Beyond these famous examples, it should not be forgotten that over five hundred thousand Germans chose to migrate not West but East in the first decade of the GDR’s existence. The hopes of these political pioneers were encapsulated in the country’s new national anthem, penned by Eisler himself: “From the ruins risen newly, to the future turned we stand.” The discrepancy between those lofty hopes and reality was powerfully symbolized by the presence of the Berlin Wall, which cut the German capital in two, dividing friends and sometimes even families. The “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall,” as it was known in official parlance, was not constructed until August 1961, twelve years after the GDR was founded and sixteen years after the Red Army defeated the Nazis... While West Germany enjoyed generous loans and subsidies granted by the US-funded Marshall Plan and soon entered the long economic boom known as the “Miracle on the Rhine,” the East was forced to pay extensive war reparations to the Soviet Union, dismantling and shipping over two thousand factories eastward — 30 percent of its remaining industrial capacity... many citizens viewed the Wall as a temporary but necessary evil in order to protect the fledgling socialist state from subversion and collapse. That harsh repression and pervasive censorship characterized life in the East is a given. But reducing the GDR to the Wall and the secret police does little to help us understand how and why it came about, and obscures everything else that happened within its borders. Millions of people in East Germany and other socialist countries actively supported and identified with the system, albeit to varying extents, for decades. Angela Davis even completed her doctorate at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Are we really to believe that they were all brainwashed? Or were there perhaps redeeming elements about the society and their lives in it that led to such support? The Wall was ugly, menacing, and, for many citizens, no doubt heartbreaking. But the economic and geopolitical stability it ensured also gave the GDR the chance to build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders... Despite popular notions about a corrupt caste of party bureaucrats living off of the fruits of socialism’s labor, class distinctions in the GDR were in fact dramatically reduced, both in material as well as cultural terms. Industrial workers earned significantly more than white-collar employees, and the pay gap between manual and educated workers, on the whole, was only 15 percent. Even the party elite, cloistered off in a gated suburb north of Berlin known as Wandlitz, enjoyed a standard of living that was shockingly modest compared to today’s ruling class."
Will communists ever change?
The fact that people stopped migrating East once the truth became apparent is, of course, ignored
The fact that the Berlin Wall was officially "anti-fascist" tells you all you need to know about modern "anti-facists"
Of course, the fact that Angela Davis was a communist has nothing to do with why she went to study in East Berlin
Yet another example of how the fetish for "equality" is about everyone being equally miserabble
The Socialist Party on Twitter - "Socialism and communism were exactly same thing for Marx and Engels, and seeing how we want the same class-free state-free money-free society that they wanted and wrote about, we have always called ourselves both "socialists" and "communists"."
So much for all the leftists who call people who say the two are similar ignorant
Meme - ""My grandfather died in a gulag."
"Yeah, well, I'm expected to get a job, so I have it worse."
Sophie @RadioFreeS...: "My family suffered under communism"
Ok? My family suffers under capitalism"
Meme - "you can tell that this is a communist rendition of the last supper because there's plenty of theory and nothing to eat."
Meme - [On the Canadian truckers in Toronto] "Working class? Each one of those tractors costs at least $250,000. These aren't workers. They own capital. They are small businesses owners." "communists when workers own the means of production and use that as leverage against the state"
Helder Camara quote - "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist"
Hélder Câmara - Wikipedia - "Hélder Pessoa Câmara[a] OFS (1909–1999) was a Brazilian Catholic archbishop. A self-identified socialist"
Meme - "In 1953 the Koreans signed an armistice and split their country in two, creating the world's best political case-study. Half the country would embrace capitalism and become one of the freest, healthiest, most prosperous nations in history. The other half would embrace socialism and become a stunted pariah state of misery and starvation and tyranny. The two show us indisputably, that the difference between socialism and capitalism, between freedom and misery, is like night and day..."
Damn CIA!
Meme - Jacobin @ @jacobinmag: "The Berlin Wall was no doubt ugly and heartbreaking. But the economic and geopolitical stability it ensured also gave the GDR the chance to build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders."
Samuel Gregg on Twitter - "Deep down, this is how the radical left views the world. The GDR was one of the WORST Communist regimes and terrorized its population, but for today’s Jacobins that is a price worth paying to establish what is impossible, dangerous, and immoral: i.e., absolute equality."
Meme - Sarah, as a bit. @_fohsarah: "John Oliver loves pointing out all the problems with capitalism without ever saying capitalism is the problem." - Twitter for iPhone
"Ok while you're here, if you can, you should buy something for my classroom." - Twitter for Android
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, Disillusion in Iraq - "Today Jewish groups refer to the Babi Yar massacre as part of the Holocaust by bullets. It marked a turning point in Hitler's campaign to exterminate them. For such was the scale of the slaughter here that even Nazi death squads found it hard going. Not long after. Hitler's henchmen devised the gas chambers of the death camps instead, a more efficient industrialized form of killing where the culprits could be spared the aftermath... After World War Two, Ukraine's Soviet rulers discouraged any discussion of it. The site went unmarked, was used for landfill, and then as a park. It was only in 1976, that a monument went up, and even that made no mention of the racial hatred, which drove the massacre. Instead, it merely spoke of Soviet citizens executed by German occupiers. This was partly to maintain the official Soviet doctrine, that all ethnic groups suffered equally under the Nazis. Nobody talked about this in Ukraine when I was growing up, says Mika. We never even knew about the Holocaust with the 6 million. Things changed after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991."
Weird. The tankies love to trumpet the USSR's anti-fascist credentials
Meme - "The fact that Gender Studies graduates cannot land a decent job after college is a testimony to how much of a failure of a system that capitalism is"
"Translation: No one wants to buy what I'm selling"
Ironically, under socialism they tolerate this even less
Existential Comics on Twitter - "The Soviet Union: goes from a backwards agrarian society to the Space Age in 50 years, while almost single-handedly defeating the Nazis.
The American educational system: "communism doesn't work because people will be lazy and not bother to accomplish anything.""
Tankies demonstrating their poor grasp of history once again: he has never heard of lend lease
The US is so powerful that its sanctions and the CIA managed to topple the USSR. I guess the USSR wasn't that great after all
There's a reason his comics are almost never shared - only his shit commie tweets
Eli5: why was the US the first to make it to the moon despite the USSR being first in nearly everything else in the Space Race? : explainlikeimfive - "Von Braun's personal mission was to colonize Mars; the official mission of the US space program was to land a manned mission on the Moon. The mission of the Soviet space program was to beat the US space program at everything... The US knew they'd need a large crew and some sort of orbital rendezvous to make a moon landing work. So they built the larger Gemini mission that could support two people. The Soviet Union wanted to beat the US to a multiple crewed mission, so they took their single person R-7, removed a bunch of stuff (including some essential life support systems) and put another person in it. The USSR did beat the US to that milestone. The US mission was a stepping stone but not a milestone; the Soviet mission was a milestone but not a stepping stone. The US had to learn how to rendezvous two spacecraft in order to make the moon mission work. So they set out to start doing that. The Soviet Union wanted to beat them, so they launched one R-7 to orbit, waited for the orbit to line up with the ground station, and launched another R-7 into an identical orbit. They were able to get within 3 miles of each other, at which points their orbits diverged; bada bing, bada boom, rendezvous! US beaten. But the US needed to actually connect them together. Remember the larger Gemini capsules? It also had substantially more fuel for maneuvering. So Gemini 6 and 7 were able to maneuver to within a few feet of each other and stay there for 20 minutes. Gemini 8 had the docking adapter and was able to actually connect to another spacecraft... Basically the US thought of space as a series of stepping stones; each thing has to be in service of the next thing. The Soviet Union thought of the space race as a series of milestones; each thing has to be the first. It's just a philosophy that doesn't engender itself to a decades long space exploration program."
"With the exception of Sputnik, all of the Soviet "firsts" were the result of the relatively low level of technical complexity involved and the fact that the US publicly announced launch dates months in advance of the actual launch, whereas the Soviet Union didn't. The Soviets would just wait for the US to announce a launch date for something, then make sure that their own launch date was earlier. Sometimes this involved doing risky and/or technically useless things. A good example of this is the Soviet Voshkod program, which beat Gemini to the first multicrew mission. To beat Gemini, the Soviets just stuck an extra two seats into leftover crew modules from their single person Vostok missions and, viola, they now had a multicrew spacecraft. But the Voshkod modules didn't represent any new development in anything - to free up space they removed the abort module and the crew couldn't wear space suits, so any problem - even a minor one - would have resulted in the entire crew dying. So the Voshkod modules were just objectively worse Vostok modules that let them stick 3 people in orbit and call it a win over the purpose built Gemini modules. Low Earth Orbit missions - particularly short duration ones being flown during the early space race - have a relatively low technical complexity because you're just sticking a person inside of small metal box and the putting that on top of an ICBM and that was very much what early spacecraft were. The Apollo missions were a big departure from that - they were real spaceships that had to be able to land on the moon, take off again, then land back on Earth - all using only stuff that they could bring with them on a single rocket (and to do that, the Saturn-V had to be a lot more complex than the repurposed ICBM's that both countries were using prior to that). Also they had to do all of that while keeping their crew alive in deep space for a week. Doing all of that stuff required a level of technical sophistication that the Soviet Union never came anywhere close to achieving, which is also why the moon landing is considered the most meaningful first. The early space programs of both the US and Soviet Union were just outgrowths of their ICBM program. Both countries realized that warheads weren't the only thing they could put on an ICBM - they could also put satellites and people. So they just went ahead and did that for the free PR, but any country with an ICBM program could have done that and, again, the Soviet "firsts" were largely the result of them deliberately not publicizing their launch dates so they could set them earlier than the US. The moon landing, on the other hand, was a monumental technological achievement that had relatively little overlap with any pre-existing military program. The only country that could have done it was the US - even if you had given the Soviets another 20 years to put a person on the moon, its unlikely that they would have been able to do so... The Soviet Space Program was trying to answer the question: how can we frame something that can already be done as a victory over the US? The US Space Program was trying to answer the question: how can we do something that no one thinks is possible to do?"
Nintil - The Soviet Union: GDP growth - "The USSR never did really compete in the same league as the US, and the gap between the two didn't became narrower after the USSR began, even when taking into account that poorer countries tend to grow faster when they industrialise. We can then compare the USSR with other countries that had similar incomes in 1930. The USSR doesn't do particularly well in this metric. Initially it did better than many countries, but by the 70s it was being outpaced by the rest. By 1990, the average income in the USSR matched that of Malaysia, below countries like Spain and Portugal... the Soviet Union was the mediocre economy economists say it was, not a healthy, growing, superpower. If the USSR had an impact in the world, it was due to its size, natural resources, population, and strong military, not because it was more productive than other countries... the Soviet Union spent a sizable share of its economy (15-17%) on military spending (vs 5% in the US in the 80s) and on investment (rather than consumption), so GDP growth does not translate into population welfare equally in every country. This could be read to mean that the USSR would have done even better had it spent less on the military. Or, conversely, that its GDP did that good because of it, if it's easier to grow an economy oriented to produce T-72s and MiG-29s than consumer goods. As you can see in my other posts, healthcare, food consumption, and working conditions were not as good as this GDP comparison might suggest."
Meme - Anti-Capitalist League: "Teachers are class collaborators with the ruling class. They are not members of the working class, along with police. Teachers betray class solidarity by indoctrinating the young into capitalist ideology. *Time magazine cover on teachers*"
Doesn't stop the Marxist teachers who are ignorant of history
Meme - "Modern day Communists when they see they're assigned to the coal mines instead of making shitty resin art to sell on etsy"
Meme - "The world globalist agenda wants to indoctrinate us in order to control us, reduce the population, and destroy the family"
"you're so traumatized by the mundane reality of capitalism that you have to invent an evil conspiracy theory that's guilty of everything bad in the world, since you can't deal with the idea that the very system you grew up accepting simply follows the boring logic of capital circulation and accumulation"
Ironic, given leftist conspiracy theories
Meme - "There's nothing left..."
"I just stocked these shelves! Rob, we gotta stock the shelves again!"
"All stocked!"
"Capitalism has failed!"
Ironic, given that under socialism there're empty shelves
The Cuban Experiment: Institutions and the Wealth of Nations - "This paper studies the role played by socialist institutions implemented in Cuba after the 1959 Revolution in its level of income per capita. We adopt the method of synthetic control developed by Abadie and Gardeazeabal (2003). Cuba is a natural candidate for such experiment, since it was the only country in Latin America that adopted a socialist regime in the 20th century. In the Cuban case, evidence shows that the particular institutions adopted by the Revolutionary Cuban Government in 1959 had a negative impact on the level of GDP per capita for the period between 1959 and 1974. Our estimates suggest that had Cuba not changed its institutions, its GDP per capita level would have been on yearly average 28.5% higher than the performance actually achievedd uring the aforementioned period. The results are robust to the tests performed."
Damn US embargo!
Meme - "If I CAN'T EVEN AFFORD RAMEN I'LL EAT THE RICH"
"Color: Black Polyurethane. $112.95-$259.98"