GarbageShoot

Lenin knew Stalin couldn't take the union to sustainability

Are you referring to something more substantial than the supposed Will?

I often use Stalin's purges as evidence that things were terrible. He purged so many people and was still surrounded by revisionists.

I mean, considering we know that Yagoda was part of an opposition bloc, how implausible is it that the guy who replaced him also was some kind of conspiracist? I've never heard of the Yezhochina doing anything good, and it was quite unlike what happened before and after it. Granted, I think Stalin acted with wild negligence, but the hard pivot in policy lining up precisely with there being a new dude overseeing it from an office that was just infiltrated, then pivoting back with his death? Especially since it didn't seem to really answer the revisionism problem?

Idk, the very same testimony implicitly denies that Yezhov was part of their intelligence network, but how many conspiracies were there under Stalin? This sort of thing is very difficult for me to parse. Did Stalin just decide to turn over a new leaf, but accomplish that by framing someone as being another enemy of the state? Was Yezhov really just a fall guy when the former supposed fall guy really was a compradore? Was Yezhov just a personally fucked up and incompetent guy with no (further) conspiracy involved that Stalin and co just let have power he seriously shouldn't have? (along with the aforementioned negligence)

idk, I guess maybe it was the last one

This is really off-topic, but it's an issue that really bugs me. In any case, I guess my original point is that I don't think the Yezhovshchina was really purging all that many revisionists except by incident of killing huge swaths of people. I doubt the veracity of the will, but this certainly makes the case Stalin wasn't really the best leader for "sustainability," at least.

Wait a second, doesn't Trotsky work as a great example of someone well-educated in Marxism who chose to be some bullshit compradore instead, even if he only had mixed success at it?

Anyway, I've seen people argue that the PRC was set down the wrong path by the conciliatory foreign policy of late Mao -- which mirrors Khrushchev's -- and persists in some form to this day. I don't know enough to talk about something like that, and maybe they were just ultras who even dislike Mao.

Mob Psycho 100 is cool

I have read the Manga quite far in and in that, this stuff is clearly framed as bad/unacceptable.

Bull fucking shit, this is the excuse that Goblin Slayer apologists use, but in both cases the (threat of) SV is eroticized. They could have even kept the alien's dumb pornbrain motivation but just not stripped her of her cloths and your line of reasoning, while not saved, would be more plausible.

They gotta have the bad thing in there in order to comment on it meaningfully. That's what media is supposed to do.

It's really hard to respond semi-civilly to this because it's somewhere on the range between hopelessly foolish and utterly contemptible. No, they don't need to depict the lead up to eroticized SV to comment on it, what the fuck are you talking about? Also, they aren't commenting on it! I've read almost all of the manga and they never "comment on it meaningfully". It's just hentai-esque bullshit used to grab the attention of teenage boys.

The first episode is easily the most lurid. The SA aliens retain that motivation, but there is never another "staging" of those intentions like the one that turns up early on. I'm maybe two chapters short of caught up to the manga and the generic anime problem of sexualizing teenagers obviously remains, but I don't think things ever get nearly as bad as the first episode or the water level.

Historically, I am referring to the Bolsheviks and then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Generally, a vanguard party is the forward segment of the population that is educated on and dedicated to the project of social revolution and agitates and organizes among the general population towards this end, and though it becomes something more administrative when it has control of the state, those two functions remain, as does the need to not (try to) compel the masses into something they don't want to do. There can be no benevolent tyrants, just educators who operate with the popular mandate.

I really think the SU was condemned before Stalin even died. There was a grand window for selling out and dying comfortably, and every head of state after Stalin took it and did just that, all the way up to Yeltsin. Of course, it's very likely that you know things I don't. Did Yeltsin butcher the political class to a degree exceeding even the Ezovshchina? That would make a good case for questioning the small fries knowing the terms of the game.

But honestly, I think your line of reasoning is Enlightenment-style idealism that assumes people are rational actors. Even if there was substantial risk and a strong likelihood of that risk being realized, would there not still be a good number of takers? Everything I know about humanity says that a meaningful segment of the population is easily enticed by great rewards at great risk, especially if it's not a very difficult risk to take (however dangerous it might be). Perhaps I don't know anything, in which case I would appreciate you returning me to Socratic ignorance by telling me so.

Yes but how long did it take to get to that point? It took an incredibly large amount of time for the party to become corrupted enough to require the corruption crackdowns, which were essentially purges of this.

Depending how you count it, it took about 30 years, but really longer because Dengist-types preceded Deng's turn at the reins (they brought him from being in informal exile to toppling the Gang of Four, after all). I wouldn't know where to count to get an accurate estimate, but perhaps it would be 50 years, since the Hundred Flowers campaign's subsequent crackdown probably got rid of a lot of the ones who were festering from even during the Civil War. How old are these measures, anyway? Does this even apply?

Anyway, I think that overwhelmingly the corruption crackdowns were against people who were actually corrupt rather than ideologically compromised, and you happen to mention someone who is the inverse next.

Post ww2 the party became a "party of the people" and Kruschev deemed it was of the people because the people were participants.

It's actually worse than that. He actually said the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was over and they were now running a "Whole People's Party" as in supposedly representing the interests of the entire population, and he used this as cover for beginning the restoration of the bourgeoisie.

All ideology became muddled. It was a mess. This was because no enforcement of party line, no prevention of those uneducated in marxism was undertaken.

I would argue, based on the above and on the history of destalinization, that it was not just muddled but in fact deliberately revisionist. I don't really know where Khrushchev thought he was going with doing that while continuing to fight the west (seems like the perfect opportunity to be a compradore), maybe he just bought into pro-market propaganda. Of course, by the end of his time in office it certainly was also muddled because that's why he got ousted: for being directionless.

But part of my point is that even this dingbat revisionist and what was ultimately his substantial backing were all in the Party prior to the death of Stalin. Others, like Bukharin, were Old Bolsheviks themselves! This was a problem that wasn't started by some freak accident letting Khrushchev through, it was already consuming the Party before Khrushchev did anything and perhaps even before Stalin did.

You have not proposed alternatives?

I'm actually fine with gatekeeping a vanguard party if policy decisions are made by the people, even if that means they wouldn't do something as wise as the vanguard could wish of them. Ironically, Xi writes about just that scenario in a document that I have been looking for for like 2 years called something like "We Must Follow the People into the Fire". This is ironic, in my opinion, but we don't need to get into that and really probably shouldn't. My view is basically that of the primacy of democracy: either you give the people the ability to decide policy or you give them the ability to choose policy deciders (or vote for the people who vote, as I don't have a problem with that part of China's system).

I mean, come on, China's already got compulsory education requirements. If it's so important to have your definition of a good Marxist education, give it to people! Not that this answers the issue, since in many rural places people don't get all that much schooling still, which means this would still put privileged people on top (or further on top) politically.

Is that true? Is that how you get people in there who propose that risk is a type of labor? I am pretty sure Xi was involved in things by 2006 as a comparatively petty official, which is not to say that this is his view, but that this shit was allowed in the Party in a relevant timeframe and exams didn't stop it.

I'm sure that politicians being uneducated was a problem in the Soviet Union, but there were people who would at least turn revisionist who were among the Soviet vanguard since before the October Revolution. The problem fundamentally isn't ignorance, or it is somehow that many years of schooling are needed not to trip and fall into being a reactionary. The former means that education won't solve it, the latter is basically an excuse for having a party of the elite who the plebians can't hope to understand the intellectual workings of, who they must sit passively by and approve or disapprove from the short procession of learned individuals who had the privilege to go through all this political grooming.

But that's a counterfactual, I think the main problem wasn't a lack of education a failure to guard against the ability to be a revisionist based on choice rather than mistake. Given that, I think imposing these educational barriers, most of all ones that weren't decided on a direct democratic basis, is just enabling the party to be insular without doing a thing to protect it from intentional revisionism, the much greater threat if we're worried about an autopsy of the Soviet Union.

I can't help but notice that you didn't list a whole lot of traits that would be considered vital to having a fairly human sillhouette. There's nothing here about obligate bipedalism, for example, or having just two legs in the lower part of the body at all. There's nothing here about how the forelimbs are articulated, and whether it would look meaningfully like hands or an array of dexterous tendrils or something. And all this gritty realist speculative biology seems out of place when most sci-fi is basically a particular sub-genre of fantasy anyway. Even being generous to the sci-fi writers, supposing the universe works in a fundamentally different way from how ours does (breaking laws of relativity and entropy, commonly), why can't some ecosystems work out to stretch your imagination of what could be an advanced species? It all seems very narrowly prescriptivist, even beyond the fact that this is fiction to the point of taking negative liberties with the bounds of what is truly realistic.

Edit: idk, it just seems obtuse. Like, "Advanced life can only be carbon-based because being that way affords these benefits" without considering that other models could provide other benefits (I'm sure you know better than I about the use of silicon-based life in speculative biology). And that's if the subject is addressed at all.

Literal bootstrapism. I could present you success stories about poor people getting into Ivy League schools, and you'd rightly say that such stories are masking systemic problems.

That "definition" doesn't elucidate anything about the question, it's just shuffling words around and leaving the reader to guess. I would also contest your elaboration, because the vassal of an empire can still participate in the execution of imperialism (would we really not call South Vietnam imperialist once it fell firmly into US orbit?). Not only that, but by reasonable definitions, Japan has been known to perform imperialism even in the creation of anime itself, by outsourcing the labor to India, to say nothing of the historically much poorer per capita China and South Korea. That's just normal superprofits though, not "cultural imperialism". We'd need a good definition of that to answer the question.

That's better than the alternative, but they should still not be killing people. There just isn't a good reason for them to.