FrogFractions [he/him, comrade/them]

I’m a 20 year programming veteran and let me assure you that NOT ONCE has my work experience been verified.

Just lie. Fuck it.

how USSR despite its flaws did and exponentially better job at elevating the lives of the common person even while defeating a Nazi horde

I’m a western cracker but this is such a major thing for me.

All the accusations of corruption and self-interest etc are so obviously false. It’s so clear that the communists, or at least the revolutionary generation of Lenin and Stalin, and Che and Fidel, they truly believed in what they were doing.

Yes they cracked some skulls. They were ruthless and as philosophers they explained why they needed to be ruthless.

But they were not corrupt. They absolutely weren’t. They believed in communism and they were seeking to build it. They believed in equality, evidenced by the more equal society they created. They believed in anti-imperialism, evidenced by the personal sacrifices they made to fight it.

They were not corrupt.

Compare to someone like Churchill or Roosevelt or Truman. What were they fighting for? They were wealthy patricians fighting to maintain and build empires.

I want to stand with the communists. They’re more noble than the patricians.

I am a history nerd tragic and as a teen I couldn’t stop reading pop-history which was mostly chauvinist and ideologically pro-western / anti-communist.

Then I gradually progressed into more academic works which is when I discovered - to my genuine shock - how dramatically incorrect the popular account of history is and how much ideology shapes it.

Discovering that the popular western account of the eastern front was written by Nazi generals was an actual shock to me, and then reading David Glantz made me realize how skewed our account of history is in the west.

That opened my eyes wide open and I started reassessing everything from a perspective of “ok, what really happened?”

Don’t be smug about it though. Cooking might seem like an innate ability if you were raised with it but intergenerational poverty is associated with a lack of education about things like this and also a lack of access to quality food.

If you’re time poor from working shifts or multiple jobs

If due to social class or race or intergenerational poverty you lacked an education about food

If contemporary race and social class segregation means you live in a “food desert” that simply doesn’t sell fresh produce

Have empathy. Obviously this person is suffering and needs help.