Sorry, mixed up grandpa and boss, hence the “the fact that you’re here”. The fact that you could have that conversation with your boss is because the Soviets gave everything to save him.

My grandfathers fought the Nazis in Europe and Japanese in the Pacific. A great uncle fought in Spain and in Germany against fascists both times

So all your family fought on the side of socialism against fascism and now you spit on their tomb by saying “socialism is just as bad”?

The Soviet Union was the most advanced and humane state of its time. Western Europe was murdering tens of millions through imperialism in the global south, the US had literal Jim Crow era laws against black people and was killing tens of millions through imperialism in Central/South America. If it weren’t for the fucking Bolsheviks, the entirety of Eastern Europe would have been genocided by Nazis and the few remaining people colonised, never to industrialise. The Soviet Union was the first country to guarantee truly universal healthcare, education and pensions, and only then did Europe have to follow through for fear of revolution. Highest unionisation rates in the world, abolished houselessness and unemployment. It certainly had flaws, but it’s literally the best it had to offer. For every Stalinist repression victim you quickly go dig up, I’ll show you ten Africans murdered by French/Belgians, or a hundred Indians murdered by British.

I am not talking about WWII at all because it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand

I brought up WWII because the peak of the Gulag system was starting on 1936, and by Stalin’s death in the mid-1950s it had essentially disappeared, it was a system implemented during a time of extreme necessity due to dekulakization, maintained during WW2 and the Nazi hysteria of the late 1930s after the assassination of Kirov, and dismantled after Nazism had been eliminated from Europe.

really quite racist

The USSR was patently the least racist nation in Europe. While in my homeland of Spain education in Basque and Catalan was forbidden, the Soviet Union for the first time in history guaranteed the citizens of all the republics an education in the official language of their choice, leading for the first time to universal education in Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belarusian, or even minor languages such as Mari for those who spoke it and desired to be educated in such languages. In France, up to 1993, there were no public schools teaching children in Occitan language, and even now I don’t think there’s even one. Fuck, the “Union of Socialist Soviet Republics” doesn’t even have a toponym or an ethnicity in its name, how many countries can claim the same?!

evil and oppressive

Look. I’m a Spaniard. In 1936, we had a fascist coup which resulted in a civil war between fascists and anti-fascists. The policy of the western world was to do nothing and to leave the war to itself while the Nazis and the Italian Fascists bombed the fuck out of my country’s partisans (ever heard of Picasso’s Gernika?). The only nation in the planet to help the antifascist struggle was the Soviet Union, which is the only source of Spanish antifascists of weapons, planes, tanks and military training against the fascists. It’s crazy to tell me that the only nation that helped the fight against fascism in my homeland was “evil and oppressive”. Your grandpa, a Jewish man, would have been murdered if it weren’t for the Soviets. The very fact that you’re here is because of the 27 million lives that the Soviet Union sacrificed in order to save Europe from Nazism.

No, it’s for Actually Existing Socialism, no idea what a student loan provider is, probably something too USian for me to understand. My bachelor university studies in Spain costed less than 6000€ total including tuition and the few books I had to buy, and my master’s costed around 1500€. That’s without any disability/income price reduction, highest price a Spaniard will pay for public university (around the mid-2010s)

Everyone does it because every country works through the capitalist mode of production, not because it’s a necessity of production.

How about you answer to the rest of my comment?

The problem is not of stupidity, but of concerted efforts by fossil fuel lobbies to muddy the research, create anti-green propaganda, climate science denialism, hide determinant research about climate change, and lobby politicians who are against the fight on climate change.

IP law is a process that protects creatives and without it creative endeavours would be eroded. This is not a point of debate

How is it not a point of debate? I’m giving you arguments as to why it’s a very good point of debate and you don’t seem to be able to respond to them.

Virtually every country has an IP law

Virtually every country also has homeless people and I disagree with that, that’s just an argument from majority, kinda useless to me.

IP law doesn’t make it so people won’t share their ideas, it makes it so people who do are rewarded

I already explained how there are already existing mechanisms without IP pushing for the rewarding of intellectual production, such as the “publish-or-perish” system in public research. You may very well have arguments against it, but the fact of the matter is that you don’t need IP as a mechanism to reward people who engage innovation/creative/research processes. Public openings at institutions (whether a national orchestra, a research institute or a cinema academy with subsidised production), contests and grants… IP is not the only method for material rewarding of intellectual creation, which is what you’re trying to argue.

You haven’t read my comment because it’s too long for your peanut brain, or refuse to address 90% of it because it goes against your propagandised beliefs. Have a good day, ignorant.

It isn’t common for people to be sent to slave camps as a punishment for years without knowing why they were charged

Ever heard of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo?

That’sthe kind of evil unique to totalitarian shitholes like the USSR.

The Gulag episode lasted less than two decades, by the mid-50s it was a thing of the past and never resurfaced in the country. Almost as if it was a mass hysteria response to Nazi infiltration, and not born out of a desire to oppress people inherently. Again, at the peak of the Gulag system, the prison population was similar to that of modern USA. Much more authoritarian if you ask me

The same nation you are praising

Yes, I’m praising this nation because even if it did mistakes, by industrialising eastern Europe and by eliminating Nazis it saved hundreds of millions of lives.

You wouldn’t be supporting their evil actions in this case if you had any empathy

I’m not supporting the excesses of the Gulag repression, it’s something that we can and should criticise. I’m supporting the rest of things of the country, which led to the saving of hundreds of millions of people from hunger, disease and Nazi genocide. The Gulag repression seems horrible until you realize the Nazis murdered 27 million Soviets at that time. It was an extreme measure carried out in extreme times.

You are making a lot of apologies for overt racism

I’m not. If he was jailed for his race that’s wrong. You’re just making too much criticism of the country thst saved Europe from fascism and which saved hundreds of millions of lives in the process.

I’m sure all the scientists love it when you tell them they won’t be credited for their work and literally anyone will be able to take their idea and do whatever they want with it, that’ll do so much to help foster humanity’s innate desire to learn and be creative

Literally yes. Why do you think every fucking scientist loves sci-hub and is against Elsevier, and even submits their papers to arxiv for anyone to read for free? You clearly have no experience in the field and are talking out of your arse

What does it mean for corporations to not exist?

Through the existence of exclusively public institutions, whether cooperative or government-owned, which don’t work in direct competition but either in cooperation or in emulated competition (I.e. a contest instead of a struggle to drive each other off business).

And it’s about coercing people who won’t act in good faith with the system into doing so

This literally doesn’t happen in public research.

Most people would keep a secret to make money especially if their livelihood depended on it

In public research it works backwards. The more you publish (i.e. make available to the public), the more you earn. You really don’t seem to understand the concept of public research.

A corporation will steal your creation and outcompete you in profiting from it if given the opportunity.

Great, so make knowledge accessible to everyone and abolish private corporations.

Without corporations there isn’t a need for intellectual property. Public research, i.e. most research, is conducted without intellectual property, and most scientists dedicate their live to science not because they think they can get rich by selling one product, but because they get a decent wage and position for doing so, intellectual stimulus, and social recognition. Research and invention don’t necessitate intellectual property, only private companies do.

Surely people going to jail for the wrong reason is something exclusive to the Soviet Union and not to all countries with a legal system? Like, damn, I feel sorry for your boss, but in dire circumstances such as those of the late 30s / early 40s in the USSR, excesses and abuses were sadly made because of the overwhelming conditions.

Your boss may have spent his teens in a gulag, but the fact that he lived to tell you that is because the Soviets managed to miraculously defeat the Nazis and prevent them from genociding the Slavic peoples they categorised as “Untermenschen” according to the infamous “Generalplan Ost”, which implied genocide of almost all people between Germany and the Urals. If it wasn’t for the Soviets, your former boss would have been murdered in a concentration camp by the nazis.

If you can only understand monetary motivation that’s your fault. Most people who spend 10 years in med school + residency don’t do it because of monetary incentives, they do it because of social and personal incentives.

Most research actually comes from the public sector (universities, research institutes…), where people work not because they hope to get rich one day through patenting something, but because they get paid to do research. 99 scientists in the public sector will do 99% of the work towards a technology, then a private company will take the final 1% of progress, patent it, and prevent everyone else from accessing the mostly publicly-funded development. For fuck’s sake, we saw this literally 5 years ago with the development of the COVID vaccines, it was predominantly based on university and institutional research that hadn’t been commercialized, and then some companies took all this research for free, got a ton of public grants on the side, and then made the vaccines at an absurd profit. For a counter-example to that, tell me, if the profit motive from private companies is what drives research fastest, why was Cuba the first country to vaccinate all of its population from COVID using state-funded research and production?

You won’t dignify me with a response because you’re simply replicating propaganda that you’ve heard on Reddit, and you can’t argue from knowledge but from vibes.

In a form of a piece of lead

You could literally open up a book someday and check your info, gulag inmates were paid. Wages were lower than those of a free worker, but nothing like the modern slavery that the USA uses in its prison system for example.

Where did I say ALL gulags were in Siberia

By using the cliche of “forced labor to the cold Siberia”, you’re propagating misinformation about the system, willingly or not. The fact that the majority of Gulags were in fact not in Siberia is kind of a strong statement in that it shows that the intent of gulags was not that of mass-murder of dissidents (which is the claim anticommunists like you normally do). The vast majority of gulag inmates were actually not political dissidents, but normal criminals. The gulag system was the prison system of the USSR for all crimes. Why would you send your average criminal who stole from another person to a death camp instead of trying to reform them? Why did most of the deaths in gulags coincide with a famine that affected the entire Soviet Union during a war and not before or after that? Why did the Gulag system, at its peak during the mass hysteria against nazism, have a number of prisoners similar to that of the modern USA? Maybe if you weren’t a propagandized misinformation spreader you could answer any of those questions. But no, you can’t, because you haven’t lifted the cover of one book in your entire life.

Stalin was alive in 60s?

I brought up the 60s because the Soviet Union was essentially industrialised by then. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks get to power, the former Russian Empire was a predominantly agrarian country where 80+% of people worked the land and the life expectancy was <30 years, there was no industry to speak of. The civil war which the fascists started, and in which England, France and the USA invaded Soviet Russia for the sin of being communist and gave material aid and troops to the pro-tsarist fascists, and which came right after WW1, left the country in a state of utter destruction, and the economy didn’t recover to pre-WW1 levels until 1929, the year when the first 5-year-plan was adopted. Industrialization of the Soviet Union was FAST as lightning, with GDP growths above 10% per year, the fastest industrialization process in history up to that point (and only surpassed by China to this day). But in 1941, as you may know, the Nazis invaded the country, and murdered about 27 million Soviet Citizens and essentially leveled the entire country west of Stalingrad. After 1945, the industrialization progress continued to its previous speed together with the reconstruction of the country, but it isn’t until at least the 60s when you can say the country was properly industrialized. This is why I said the 60s, because comparing a predominantly feudal country in terms of food security to our modern standards is an exercise of either ignorance of bad faith. So tell me, are you arguing from ignorance or from bad faith?

If you had actually read anything on the “decriminalization” of homosexuality in Soviet Russia after 1917, you’d know that there was not really any social movement on the side of legalizing homosexuality. The fact that its criminalization was repealed is mostly due to Bolsheviks wanting to repeal essentially all Russian Imperial law.

Homosexuality wasn’t even well-understood at the time, they conflated gender and sexuality, which is why only male homosexuality was criminalized. The Soviet Union, due to it being heir to a very patriarchal society, wanted “stronger men and workers”, and lesbians were seen as a more masculine version of men (which was accepted) whereas gays were seen as “feminized men”, which was seen negatively.

Even then, my point is that after the 40s most of the theorists of socialism were fucking killed at the hands of Nazis, and that’s one of the biggest reasons why social policy didn’t develop sufficiently in the Soviet Union. But even so, the criminalization of homosexuality for the most part wasn’t particularly prosecuted compared to many countries, there’s a difference between something being illegal and something being prosecuted.

All in all: yes, they should have done better, but the material conditions of the moment didn’t really allow for much better.

But wait, I arranged atoms in this order before you did! Now you’re not allowed to arrange atoms in this order unless you pay me!!

Here we go again with the false claims of genocide against Ukrainians.

The Bolsheviks gave Ukrainians for the first time in history borders of their own, representation of their own in politics and the right to study for free and in their own language. There are literal letters between Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin in which Rosa argues against Ukraine getting its own representation as a nationality, and Lenin argues in favour of it (which ultimately was done).

The president of the Soviet Union after Stalin was Ukrainian. There is no precedent, no continuation, and no following episode of hunger spiking particularly in Ukraine as it more-or-less did in the early 30s. And millions died outside Ukraine too during that hunger episode, primarily in southern Russia and Central Asia.

Trying to make the 30s famine about Ukrainians is a propaganda exercise first invented by the Nazis to draw Ukrainian sympathy during the Nazi invasion, and it’s picking up strength again as it’s used in Europe to stoke Russophobia and anti-communist sentiment.

Let me get this straight. To you, a famine produced unintentionally through policy that spiked class war and originated primarily from rich farmers sabotaging the crops and livestock as a response to their lands being collectivized in the first successful collectivization of a country in the history of the Earth, is to you as morally depraved as the English colonists literally starving Irish to death because of colonial and racist beliefs?

This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of patent practice. Patents exist not for inventors, but for companies. Destin, from Smarter Every Day, has a recent video trying to make a grill scrubber in which he talks with many people about how Amazon for example constantly avoids patent claims from small inventors.

Humanity progressed from hunter-gatherers to the industrial revolution without the need for a judge to determine whether I can arrange atoms in a given way or not without giving a canon to someone else who decided to arrange atoms like that before me.

Holidays for “enemies of the people” were unpaid

Not true. The GULAG system, which is simply the prison system of the Soviet Union at the time, did pay inmates a wage while they worked there, this is common knowledge and you can check it up if you want to.

and in a quite cold climate of Siberia

Really? The Gulags were all in Siberia? How about you actually check what you’re talking about instead of spreading misinformation? From the Gulag museum:

www.gulag.online/articles/mapa-taborovych-sprav-gulagu-a-pribehu-ze-stredni-evropy?locale=en

Wow, a ton of Gulags were actually to the west of the Urals, not in Siberia, who would have thought. If only this information was widely available and public…

They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food

Huh? Life expectancy in the Soviet Union rose exponentially, it was below 30 years of age before the Russian Revolution and 60 by the time Stalin died. The diet of the Soviet citizen was by the 60s healthier than that of a US citizen. The CIA itself says this BTW, check out on google “CIA USSR nutrition”, you’ll find a 1983 document claiming, and I quote, “American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of rood each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious”. Almost as if centering food production around the needs of the population instead of around the profit of food producers, gives a better result…

Just admit it: you don’t have any fucking idea what you’re talking about. You’re repeating talking points you’ve heard on Reddit or TV without actually checking anything.