Sure you can bribe people, but it's a harder when the wealth isn't concentrated in a few people, and the companies are owned by the people instead of private interests. USSR politicians weren't known for being rich, but compare that to modern Russian oligarchs, or even US Congressmen. A majority of the US Congressman are millionaires, not at all true for the common populace.
I'm going off statistics and surveys, not anecdotal evidence.
Don't I have the power over my happiness in capitalism because I can work towards higher wealth extraction to achieve my own goals?.
If you're lucky, but you can't work your way to being billionaire without exploiting people on the way. So, chances are, no. Statistically you're probably one of the people having wealth extracted than the other way around unless you have a supportive network, friendly investors or parents loaning you money. If not, chances are you're making it harder for other people, either who work for you, work with you, act as a reserve army of labor, or are victims of your country's imperialism. It requires some people to suffer as part of the system, but that's not sustainable. There's a reason the US has a shrinking middle class, and a growing fascism problem, and economic crises every 10 years. The UK and Canada aren't far behind, with some groups trying to privatize their health services and such. Europe will be next, with the democratic socialist Scandinavian countries probably last. So it may seem fine where you live now, but give it some years and you'll be right where we are, with someone trying to sell off your health services or other state assets. I'd be willing to bet.
Because once you reach a certain level, growth isn't required, you just divide the resources you have to give everyone a happy life. People don't need infinite money to be happy, but they do a need a minimum amount, studies have shown that. Capitalism denies that minimum amount to a lot of people because of its focus on accumulating and concentrating that wealth.
It had some of the same problems but not all of them. It had universal healthcare, better rights for women, faster increase of education and literacy, less homelessness, less problems with religion interfering with politics, or companies buying politicians, etc.
It also had some new problems we didn't have like lack of focus on small commodities or suppression of religion, but that's not fixable or required for communism, it's just a focus they had specifically. It also had of the same problems we have just from being human, like anti-LGBTQ attitudes, racism against certain groups, bureaucrats, and wars. But communism's implementation changes between countries, none of those problems are necessary, it's just stuff that has to be learned from. For example, Cuba is communist but has made great strides towards fixing LGBTQ and racist attitudes, and has eased up on religion. China is communist but has a bigger focus on small manufacturing and as a result has lots of small commodities.
Imagine if we abandoned democracy the first time it "failed" in Greece thousands of years ago or the republic in Rome. I don't doubt that you have some relatives that suffered, but by comparison, the US and it's capitalist allies destabilized basically all of South America and Africa. While most people who were alive in the former Soviet block would prefer to go back to when it existed because it caused a huge economic disaster when they sold the countries off for parts and privatized everything for the oligarchs.
The important part is that it's a system not focused on things like GDP, growth, or money made by corporations to determine success, but the happiness and well-being of all the humans as a collective. Just focusing on that would go a long way, no matter which implementation we used (but imo it probably has to be an implementation of socialism or communism, because capitalism can't imagine a society without those money and growth metrics).
Well, there's a difference between settler colonialism (which replaces the indigenous population) and the sort of imperialist and classic colonialism in a lot of parts of this map, where people move in and resources are extracted, but you're left with a traumatized population instead of a genocided one, like in North and South America as well as Australia, so we'd expect the results to probably be different.
Not that I think religion helps these matters, as the US which is slowly turning Christo-fascist and reversing LGBTQ rights, probably not coincidentally, shows. I just don't agree with the Islamophobia part. Christianity looks pretty draconian on these issues too in some parts of Africa.
Idk about the others, but for Afghanistan, it's probably because it was taken over by religious fundamentalists trained, supported, and armed by Pakistan, Iran, and the US in order to fight off Soviet Union influence, along with some other countries (China, UK, probably some others). They basically invaded because they were called in by the local government afraid of these terrorist groups, who also called problems in the Soviet Union (similar to the US invading after 9/11). (Interestingly enough, the Pakistan influence can also be said to be a result of colonialism since it's existence is basically a result of English colonialism in India and the Middle-East.) After this, Afghanistan was basically a civil war zone between religious fundamentalist warlords fighting each other, the most extreme being the Taliban, but the other US allied ones weren't great, either, and were all still fundamentalist Muslim.
The official anti-LGBT laws were vague when the Republic (the Soviet friendly government) was in charge, all of the terrible attitudes were probably still there but under religious rules and unofficial, and being invaded by the USSR for years never helps those kinds of things, either. It was more intense when the US friendly war lords were in charge and made Sharia more official, making LGBTQ laws worse as a sort of collateral. It then got even worse when the Taliban officially took over, now it's even more explicit and the punishment even worse (death). I haven't read the article yet so not sure if it talks about any of these things, or if I got anything super off, but I've just been listening and reading stuff about this lately and felt I could contribute lol.
Is torrent galaxy still down? That was my go to and sounds like I have to find another. I am a little worried if they keep bringing down the big ones like that, that we'll be left with less choices and it'll be more difficult.
Tbh, I had always thought Tank Man was run over until extremely recently (like this year) so I'm sure there are lots of people like me who had just assumed that. I remember seeing a picture with red circles over all the supposedly dead bodies that had been run over by tanks. It's still an impressive image, a single man bravely stopping a tank, but not quite what I thought I was looking at.
It seems like if you'd take it's net impact throughout world history and it added it all up, you'd end up in the negatives. Like it's been actively more bad for the human race than good.
But with that logic, my friends have the right to go to Italy and Ireland, kick out native Italians and Irish and take their houses, because they're Italian-American or Irish-American. That's not how it works or how it should work. Its the same reason I wouldn't have supported the Liberia project of having African-Americans go back to Africa and kick out and oppress the natives just because they were mistreated in the US, if I was alive at the time. It led to centuries of indigenous oppression and civil wars, like Israel and Palestine nowadays. We shouldn't be looking to imitate that level of colonial superiority anywhere else.
It sounds like the opposite. Do you even know what Zionism is? It's calling for a place Jews from all over the world can go via. They bring in people from all over the world, lots of them have dual citizenships. Because Jewish people can trace genealogic origins there from thousands of years ago doesn't make some lady from Europe or New York the same as some local Palestinian kid at all. They then kick out the natives and give their homes to these settlers. They've been doing it since the 40's. People can look over the wall and see where they, their parents, or their grandparents used to live.
I recommend looking up the history of Zionism, including the European Jews that forwarded it, like Theodore Herzl, and the different places they considered for it (Uganda,Argentina, Cyprus, etc) before settling on Palestine.
Damn you were right. Scrolled down a bit and they were all over. Did Hasbara finally find Lemmy, or had there been a new wave of propagandized redditors leaving to come here?
There's nowhere else for Hamas to set up. There's civilians in all of Gaza. It's an extremely densely populated region, even more so now that it's being cleared and destroyed. Second, Hamas was created in response to Israeli aggression that already existed. Surrendering would just bring them to the status quo that inspired the First Intifada, when Palestinians were still being attacked, killed, restricted, oppressed, and their land steadily taken for more than 20 years already. People don't respond well to that and to expect them to sit there and being slowly ethnically cleansed again is unrealistic. The correct take is to oppose Israel and it's settler colonialism.
Sure you can bribe people, but it's a harder when the wealth isn't concentrated in a few people, and the companies are owned by the people instead of private interests. USSR politicians weren't known for being rich, but compare that to modern Russian oligarchs, or even US Congressmen. A majority of the US Congressman are millionaires, not at all true for the common populace.
I'm going off statistics and surveys, not anecdotal evidence.
http://thetrumpet.com/6322-eastern-germans-feel-life-was-better-under-communism
http://pewresearch.org/short-reads/2010/04/28/hungary-better-off-under-communism/
http://reason.com/2009/11/16/the-rise-of-communist-nostalgi/
http://voxukraine.org/en/the-strong-hand-curse-why-ukrainians-do-not-like-capitalism
http://balkaninsight.com/2010/11/24/macedonians-deem-communist-past-better-than-present/
http://themoscowtimes.com/2017/12/25/majority-of-russians-regret-soviet-collapse-poll-says-a60039
http://rt.com/news/ussr-collapse-mistake-poll-585/
If you're lucky, but you can't work your way to being billionaire without exploiting people on the way. So, chances are, no. Statistically you're probably one of the people having wealth extracted than the other way around unless you have a supportive network, friendly investors or parents loaning you money. If not, chances are you're making it harder for other people, either who work for you, work with you, act as a reserve army of labor, or are victims of your country's imperialism. It requires some people to suffer as part of the system, but that's not sustainable. There's a reason the US has a shrinking middle class, and a growing fascism problem, and economic crises every 10 years. The UK and Canada aren't far behind, with some groups trying to privatize their health services and such. Europe will be next, with the democratic socialist Scandinavian countries probably last. So it may seem fine where you live now, but give it some years and you'll be right where we are, with someone trying to sell off your health services or other state assets. I'd be willing to bet.