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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AA
alexei_1917 [any] @ alexei_1917 @hexbear.net
Posts
3
Comments
60
Joined
1 mo. ago

  • Feel free to invent a new tendency

    Like the Trots keep doing? (Party splits)

    Or... Trot pretending to be a proper ML... I've run into a few of those. Most Trots are proud of being Trots (they shouldn't be, but at least it makes 'em easy to spot and ignore), but there's a few weirdos out there...

  • Ok, but I absolutely love this bit and have come up with something similar - "Big Sister Katya" - her whole thing is that she's a 1950s/60s Soviet sympathiser, who thinks McCarthy's a complete idiot, but her personality is otherwise every bit a sheltered middle class teenage girl of the era, she's often in the kitchen with her mum or helping with some domestic task in her videos, the mum is always a voice offscreen, or partially on screen for short periods but her face isn't seen, she's seen taking care of children sometimes - her little siblings - her whole vibe is "It's the beginning of souring relations with the USSR post war, and your big sister explains why the Cold War is bullshit and neither the guys on the TV news nor Mum and Dad know what they're yapping about". It's never made clear to what extent the character she's playing genuinely believes it's the beginning of the Cold War and the peak of McCarthyism, and how much of it is "it needs to be that soon after the Great Patriotic War for some of her points about fascism and defense and good allies to land properly". Every video follows a formula of "Today we're doing [insert domestic task] with Mum/for Mum while she's out today, and discussing [insert Marxist-Leninist theory concept]".

  • Yeah... on the one hand, the dragons are a little more creative than drawing China as a panda bear. On the other hand, the panda bear always looks cuddly and detracts from the meaning of the propaganda and I think that's an incredibly funny juxtaposition.

  • They're trying to counteract previous mistakes of drawing China as a panda bear, which... the Soviet Bear thing worked because you can draw a grizzly bear that looks scary (although I find most Soviet Bear junk to look hug shaped anyway), the panda allowed for good Sino-Soviet jokes, but they eventually figured out that it's very difficult to draw a panda bear that doesn't look hug shaped and adorable, so they started drawing China as a dragon instead... which only serves to make China look badass. Though I do miss the cuddly panda bears.

  • That would be amazing and I'd love it.

    Except that it'd never exist, because it could only be real workplace nightmares and real union organising under capitalism, but it would never be filmed or aired in a capitalist country. The USSR absolutely would have been willing to make something like that back in the day, but the necessary class contradictions, and unionising as the only means of recourse, simply weren't present.

  • lmfao

    Jump
  • but try to propose naming something after Stalin.

    Not that we would, of course. He'd turn in his grave at modern communists doing that. He hated cult of personality nonsense directed at himself just as much as Lenin did. He didn't want the people to erect statues of him and name stuff after him.

    But yeah, the double standard is ridiculous.

  • I wish a "Stalinist" party would take power in the US. Maybe then the sins of that guilty land could finally begin to be purged. Maybe then the US would actually do some good for the world. Maybe they could actually spread Freedom and Democracy by supporting other communist revolutions. Instead of just saying they're Spreading Democracy as an excuse to bomb civilians in countries 90% of their population can't point to on a map.

  • I mean, I catch myself falling for Soviet nostalgia crap that ends up in the West a lot, despite having been born long after the dissolution, but like, the Western left as a whole has a Soviet obsession and Eastern Bloc nostalgia problem. Lot of Western communists who didn't live through the Cold War but miss it anyway, along with those who did live through it and miss when just being a communist was in and of itself revolutionary and dangerous and Doing Something. People who love Soviet aesthetics and still want Red Dawn to actually happen, instead of having to lead a local revolution and take local culture and material conditions into account.

    So, this might not work that well in the actual former Warsaw Pact... but it sure as hell works in countries that were on the other side of the Cold War.

  • The delightful Soviet aesthetics of the Cold War are gone, and every modern commie thing looks exactly the same as capitalist design styles, with hammers and sickles badly bolted on and maybe a coat of red paint... and the powerful united front that was the Warsaw Pact is gone, leaving scattered small AES states that are far from achieving anything close to communism and not really able to rebuild such an organisation. Yeah, being a socialist nowadays sucks. Everything looks and feels terrible, as the legacy of the Soviet Union slowly crumbles and dies.