politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Ah, yes, USSR had plenty of "social payments", it was considered that the reason wages are not so big is that you've been given the rest in the form of education, healthcare, everything else. People who were allowed to leave USSR in the 70s had to pay a sum approximating like a year of wages, to "compensate" the state for their education.
It was worse, an employer could "lose" your labor book, then you were fucked a lot. These things are kinda the opposites of each other, in the USSR the power of that document was the problem I meant. It was like losing an ID. Modern problems where everyone has the information about you, augmented by interpretations and perspectives of various jerks, are different.
Such a characteristic would possibly make it very hard to find a new job. In USSR, yes. And not having a job was illegal.
If you mean staying at home all day and not having a job, no they didn't. Anyway, most Soviet citizens didn't make enough money for one of the two to not have a job.
If you mean that USSR had kinda backwards views of gender roles, so a woman would not just work all day, but also get back and then do laundry, cooking, cleaning and all that stuff, - then oh yes. That's what you see in Soviet movies, not housewives in the western sense.
Living off a farm where you alone work would be illegal, for example. Or selling things of some craft.
People on those pensions needed support from their friends and neighbors. They were bad even by Soviet measure.
The particular economic system in which they couldn't avoid being unemployed or barely employed due to that was.
I agree that the lowest of the low was higher in the USSR than in the USA, maybe notably. But the average and the median were much lower.
We are also not talking modern USA, we are talking, suppose, 80s' USA.
The signum is not surprising, I mean that the scalar is much bigger than you think.
A young family having their own place, even if that's one room, was not a thing. They'd live with the husband's parents. Sometimes with the wife's parents. Maybe with some aunts and uncles. Crammed like sardines. In those modular Khruschev-era houses (and that's almost the optimal kind, say, I live in a flat in a Stalin-era brick house with high ceilings, that wasn't common in any way, my grand-grandpa was a civilian railways analog of a general ; some people still lived in communal flats even in the 90s, that'd be one room per family, with common kitchen and bathroom), hearing and smelling all of your neighbors talking, sleeping, fucking, cooking and so on, with leaking walls, cockroaches etc.
There are things you don't even think about and take them for granted. In USSR you couldn't buy anything. There were a few basic kinds of goods that could be bought anytime. The rest would happen to be in stores occasionally. On those occasions there'd be enormous queues, people would stand in queues more than half of their time not at work, excluding sleep. People would take days off to stand in queues. To get things you can just buy if you have money. Like - some fruits. Or - some t-shirts. Mundane things.
That free healthcare was also not what you think healthcare to be, being a westerner. Dentists would work without anesthesia, a lot of surgeries would be done without it too or with very basic anesthesia. Doctors would have all kinds of medieval bullshit ideas, so people would be afraid to go to a doctor the normal way, they'd use acquaintances and connections and favors and barters to find a good doctor. Getting various nasty infections in medical institutions was normal.
How do I explain it to you - for a person 60-70 years old now, grown in USSR in a "normal" situation, foreigners, and especially westerners, are some kind of magical creatures from heaven. What you call bad and horrible is, for such a person, much less hopeless than their life when they were 20.
90% of your comment boils down to "there were better material conditions in a 200-year-old industrial power that leveraged its political, economic and military power to exploit billions of people from the global south and extract their wealth, than in a 50-years-ago-industrialised self-sufficient country without exploitation of the global south".
Yes, it is hard to buy certain things when your economy doesn't rely on exploiting 5 south american / African / southeast Asian workers for every person in your country. What do you prefer for the world as a whole? Do you not understand, or do you not care about the billions exploited outside the US in this equation?
Why are you arguing about USSR not knowing anything of it?
No, it doesn't, that's what I'm trying to explain you, these things were not because of some economic power disadvantage or even connected to it. It's not about economic power.
You really don't understand that the same goods would be available aplenty where they were produced or imported. It was because of Soviet logistics and planning not being functional, do you understand that? What private businesses do in your country, only the state could legally do in USSR, a private citizen trying to do that would be put into fucking jail if caught. And the state couldn't manage the complexity of planning. The state also didn't have good feedback for planning due to corruption, gaming metrics, all the things that happen when people providing feedback are the same whose performance is being measured. You don't have to trust me on that, there are lectures and interviews by people who worked in Gosplan, one can find them in the Internet.
An example - red caviar was rare luxury in most of USSR, but in the areas where it was produced nobody would be able to eat it anymore, so fucking full of it they were. Same with kinds of Soviet beer that nobody far from the brewery's location remembers actually seeing sold. That example can be repeated for almost any kind of goods.
And about exploitation of global south - LOL, yeah, USSR exploited itself. The thin layer of party official families and foreign communists (Soviet elite had that inferiority complex, so any foreigner in USSR enjoyed special conditions) and komsomol leaders was similar to European settlers in some African country, the rest were like aboriginal population.
Ok, the conversation is over then, you're just denying political and economical concepts such as colonialism or industrial development. Can't have a serious conversation with someone who denies reality.
The Soviet Union lifted 300 million people from feudal poverty and a life expectancy of 30 years, to the second most powerful industrial power on earth, without exploiting the global south in the process. It had GDP growth rates of 10% for decades, and even when growth slowed down the material conditions of people kept improving at a faster pace than the material growth of the country.
Please try to educate yourself on imperialism and colonialism if you give the slightest shit about the billions of exploited of the world.
Your reading comprehension skill means you can't have a serious conversation period.
I won't try a third time.