The first hint was mentioning Stalin’s purges. It’s always the Stalin strawman.

I find it ironic that I’ve spent so much time and energy looking at US history as an adult when I thought it was the most boring subject at every level of schooling I received. Turns out it was only boring because they had to strip it to its bones to not radicalize every child and adult along the way.

One of the best US propaganda tools targeting USians is convincing them their own country’s history is mind-numbingly dull and not worth learning.

For real, such an important read, but very difficult purely due to how shitty the history of the US actually is.

Yeah…I was just making a stupid joke about his appearance changing.

Sorry, I was still talking about Wyll!

Yeah, he ended up hornier than I expected despite me denying all of his romantic advances. Getting his ending with Karlach made up for all of his annoyances in the first act.

I’d say the Sino-Vietnamese war or the reforms to the “one-child policy” (OCP) in the 1980s were worse mistakes.

I think the war can be boiled down to (dumbass) leftist in-fighting at the state level. While I sympathize with the Chinese position on the Sino-Soviet split, this ended up leading to many incredibly poor decisions across the board with the USSR and PRC often taking a side in conflicts seemingly only because it was opposite of the other state. While the invasion didn’t happen in a vacuum, the PRC felt relatively weak and in need of a strong ally after splitting with the USSR, so they leaned on the US who were motivated to drive a wedge between socialist states so they would weaken each other. That said, it does not absolve the PRC and Deng of the invasion of Vietnam or of supporting the Khmer Rogue long past when it was obvious they should not. This still causes some sour feelings within Vietnam to this day even if politically the damage was repaired.

The OCP is a bit of a touchier subject. While I think there were some benefits to the policies in the 1970s in terms of women’s emancipation and improving the cultural views surrounding women, this could have been achieved in better and more effective ways. This is of course with the benefit of hindsight and after some of the pseudoscientific beliefs that were popular throughout the world at the time have fallen out of vogue. While the intention of the OCP wasn’t harm, there was harm done in the name of this policy and I don’t know if we’ll ever know exactly how much between the West exaggerating it in their red scare propaganda and the CPC downplaying it in an effort to justify bad policy decisions to save face. Responsibility for this harm lies, in part, at Deng’s feet.

Compared to these, Zhao Ziyang’s liberal influence and support of the riots feels trifling. They had to have known the risk of letting reformists back into the party and how to effectively mitigate those risks by that point. It’s hard to know if the benefits of letting people like Zhao Ziyang into the party outweigh the harms in terms of the opening up and how relationships with the West developed that led to China’s rapid industrial and economic development since. Without some liberal voices in the party, would the West have seen China as a bigger threat and taken action to weaken and topple them rather than showing them the relative cooperation and investment that allowed them to become resilient to such actions today? I don’t know.

Ultimately, I view Deng’s leadership as he did Mao’s,

“We should not lay all past mistakes on Chairman Mao. So we must be very objective in assessing him. His contributions were primary, his mistakes secondary. In China, we will inherit the many good things in Chairman Mao’s thinking while at the same time explaining clearly the mistakes he made.”

Many of the characters have serious flaws that made me dislike them to some degree when we first met, but as you get to know them and progress through the story, they grow on you or they grow into better people (assuming a relatively good playthrough), so I ended up liking all of them to some degree by the end.

Some of the most controversial/off-putting ones have the best character arcs such as Laezel and Astarion (ok, I always loved him despite his evil quirks).

The one I liked least was probably Wyll and I have to say, despite really hating his holier than thou attitude in the beginning, by the end I only avoided bringing him along because I never learned to build warlocks in a way that felt engaging to play.

I didn’t hate anyone by the end, but I also tend to favor deeply flawed characters who grow into better people in all stories. They are just more interesting and realistic.

Second the Minsc comment. He comes in so late that I feel like I didn’t get enough time in camp to see everything.

Get a hexbear in here and their emojis could fix this right up.

Please just cut yourselves off from the fediverse already. Even replying to this drivel has lost it’s fun.

There are a few clarifications to be made and some fallacies in your understanding of communism and socialism here. I’m not the one to clear all of this up, because I’m not going to put the effort and time needed into these subjects, but I’ll try to guide you in the direction of some resources to help.

Some quick clarifications:

Socialism and communism are the same thing. Communism is the end goal, but you cannot just jump directly to communism from capitalism, so we fall the transition period socialism. Communists often use the terms interchangeably, but any actual differentiation is a distinction of progress, not the goals of the project.

Communism is no more extreme than socialism and politics are not a horseshoe or circle where the far ends are the worst. This is a thought-terminating notion meant to keep you boxed within the status quo so that those who are currently in power stay in power, meaning you will remain relatively powerless. The same thing goes for trying to stay in the middle of a conflict: you end up not taking a side, meaning you remain on the side of the status quo, meaning you stay on the side of the oppressor. Your oppressor. As much as people argue communism is extreme, communists can argue that “the middle” or “liberalism” or “other leftists” are extreme. These arguments are always made for the purpose of getting you to stop thinking about those topics, to stop considering their validity. They are not trying to convince you those are wrong, but that they are not worth even considering. I implore you to do the opposite: do some reading and interact with what “extremists” are saying in good faith, then decide what you believe. I’m sure you’ll agree with some parts and not with others. We are all humans and most of us are of the same class. The “extremism” of communists is that we say working class people should run the world and the rich leeches should be oppressed in a sense that they cannot oppress anyone else through the use of their extreme wealth. We want to flip the system on its head to use an overly-simplistic metaphor.

Capitalism cannot be mixed with socialist policies. What you are probably referring to as socialist policies are actually welfare programs and state regulation . This is what we call social democracy, which is still capitalism. Socialism is differentiated more by who owns the means of production, how the economy is organized, and what class is in control of the state. That aside, socialists think social democracy is insufficient to curb the problems of capitalism because you don’t remove the roots of the problem. Most of the successes of social democracy in addressing wealth disparity and living standards are the result of countries trying to stave of socialist revolutions at home due to their workers seeing the success of nearby socialist republics in improving the quality of life of their people. These are capitalist concessions and if you look at the social democracies that exist in Europe, you’ll see that all of these concessions started getting rolled back AFTER the fall of the USSR. They were temporary relief (at home, not in their colonies), but the profit motive always demands more. If capitalism can’t steal enough from the global south, it will turn inward and eat itself like the US and UK are currently doing.

On entrepreneurs…most of the time people want to show the benefit of entrepreneurs, it is in terms of innovation and small businesses, so I’m assuming this is your point? Innovation and entrepreneurs do not disappear under socialism, but the way they function does. Innovation does not always need to be driven by profit motive as demonstrated within the USSR, but there is arguably some room for profit motive driving innovation in a mixed economy like China’s. The main benefit of socialism is that innovation is not at the whims of the market, which tends to act as if it is allergic to innovation, ultimately stifling it rather than nurturing it. Small businesses (and thus entrepreneurs) still exist in many socialist countries and will not be nationalized unless they grow quite big or become central to controlling an important part of the economy. In some ways it can even be easier to start a thriving business because you are less at risk of being stamped out by the “health competition” of a mega-corporation with a monopoly on an entire industrial sector. Those get nationalized, fixing the money attracts more money problem. If you remove the profit motive, this power can no longer be abused for profit. Corruption can happen under any system and has to be handled case-by-case, but you’ll find socialist countries have much harsher penalties for corruption to prevent it, unlike a paltry fine that is the cost of doing business. Jail time or up to the death penalty can be applied based upon the severity and circumstances of the crime. Vietnam and China have applied this last one to large-scale corruption within the last year whereas in liberal democracies, multimillion or even billion dollar fraud cases are widespread and normal with little to no repercussions. In some cases, it is even legal!

On education…if you want more, there are many sources available in many formats. I suggest Dessalines’ crash course of socialism and his reading list but there are plenty of others on here who provide lists worthy of mention (but their links are harder for me to look up). Prolewiki is like Wikipedia for socialism by socialists. Search a topic there that you want to know more about. You can also ask for resources on specific topics in lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net and you will probably get more resources than you care to consume in a year, so long as you approach them in good faith. People in these communities will only troll you if they think you are trolling them. The efforts some of them will go to in order to educate others is ridiculous (in a good way).

I hope this helps.

Oh that’s gold.

I guess it just depends on what your metric is.

Unfortunately one of its leading metrics is its contributions to human suffering. It certainly is the best system in the world at spreading suffering.

You give too much credit. I think it’s pretty safe to assume no one but socialists and historians care (or know) enough about Deng and Zhao outside of China so they aren’t likely to weigh in. Now if the question included the tinyman trigger-word, you’d have people jumping all over this post saying China bad and quoting Wikipedia until their fingers bled.

The treatment the plant in the picture received is called “air layering” that is used for propagation. You wound the stem you want to propagate, then wrap it with something moist. This leads to roots developing on that stem while it is still attached to the larger plant.

I’m not familiar with using this method to induce fruit production and it didn’t look like they used air layering in the paper.

Here’s the paper in the meme.

Yeah, oops.

Either way, the labor movement stuff was very active and applicable during his time too. That stuff began in the 1800s.

Lots of credit being given to Teddy here without mention that many of the New Deal reforms were actually given as concessions to a well organized and highly active labor force. Unions won these reforms through their sweat and blood. A tale as old as time.

Is every good thing Teddy did the results of this? No, but a hell of a lot of it was the spoils of class war won by labor struggles. This was literally the golden age of the US labor movement, workers were striking constantly and in new and creative ways. They were usurping the power of capitalists and the bourgeoise US government to an extent never seen before or since (with the exception of the Black Panthers perhaps). Much of the organizing was led by socialists, which is why they leaned hard on the unions to get rid of socialists with McCarthyism and the red scare 1.0. WWII weakened the US labor movement a bit in terms of manpower and coercion via nationalism, but by no means did this slow their roll. If I remember correctly, there were even more strikes during the war than the years between WWI and WWII. If you think the fight for universal healthcare is relatively recent, it’s because you haven’t learned about US labor history. Workers were fighting for this from at least the early 1900s. I mention this because it was an eye-opening moment for me the first time I heard it mentioned casually when talking about strikes in the 1920s and 1930s.

USians idolize this war criminal due to successful historical revisionism, making it look like he was just a “great man”, a good ol’ boy with stereotypically hypermasculine behaviors that made some good reforms out of the kindness of his heart and the strength of his moral character. Every story you read about this man is dripping with this mythos. He was no exceptional, he was practical in the sense that he saw that concessions were needed to appear the labor movement, but would he have come to these reforms and made the changes without all of this pressure? I doubt it.

Idealism and massive propaganda efforts poisoning the US education system are largely to blame. Those in the US aren’t taught this shit in school and the books that cover this topic in detail aren’t known by most. Sorry, I’d like to drop the names of them, but I don’t own these books and would need to do some digging to find them again. Our local workers alliance covers this in their labor history presentations each year and has copies they lend out, which was my first exposure to them.

Pressurized cylinder?

No surprise coming from Current Affairs. Most of the time they seem more reactionary than Novara (usually good, but also falls into the same western chauvinism.)

CA always felt somewhere closer to social Democrat than democratic socialist when I read them regularly.