u/ZhugeLiangPL

The author is a Democratic Socialist/Eco Socialist and not a Leninist leftist (neither am I - I am an Independent Socialist[TM]) but his books do cover the topic of a revolution and building a better society. I am just finishing Red Mars (the first book in the trilogy) so comments with no or minimal spoilers would be welcomed.

I am currently funishing Section 2 Unit 5 of Chinese so I am still very much a beginner. How long until it becomes a downhill path?

Questions like: "What did Olof Palme mean in passage X?" are largely absenf from Socdem subs, unlike Leninist ones.

Like, Socdems do read theory sometimes, usually Bernstein, Keynes, Rawls, Crosland, Polanyi, Piketty etc. but nobody agrees which ones a Socdem should read or even if reading anything is required at all. And there are no hot exegetical debates about these individuals among Socdems.

An ML might say: "Revisionism isn't just any change, it's deviation from the fundamental principles of Marxism Leninism"

And there is the problem - why are those fundamental principles not up to revision? In science, fundamental premises are revised all the time - and it's actually required to revise/reject them once enough evidence that they are wrong accummulates.

The correct solution to this would be to either stop pretending that Marxism-Leninism is a science and start treating it as a regular political philosophy - or to adopt the actual scientific method and start testing the claims of ML (including foundational premises) as testable, falsifable claims. I don't see any of these being done.

Marx spend decades saying one thing - don't look at what a state says about itself, look at the material consequences of its policies. And from the outside, both the USSR under Khrushchev and Maoist China were doing regular great power geopolitics, they just dressed it in a different rhetoric for domestic legitimacy:

- Both competed for influence in decolonized countries with aid, arms and advisors

- Both avoided direct war with the US while testing limits. Khrushchev backed down in Cuba, Mao backed down after shelling Quemoy and Matsu and never directly fought US troops again after 1953.

- Both built nuclear arsenals despite criticizing each other's nuclear policy

- Both cooperated with capitalist states - Khrushchev supported bourgeois nationalists like Nasser and Nehru when they offered ports and neutrality, and crushed a workers' uprising in Hungary in 1956. Mao supported monarchs and military dictators like the Shah of Iran, Yahya Khan in Pakistan, and Pinochet's Chile when they were useful against India or the USSR, and told the US in 1972 that China would not support armed communist revolts in Southeast Asia.

I just don't see any profound dialectical difference between these two.

Hello there. Polish person here, b. 1994 and I started watching both in late 2005 when we got satellite tv for the first time but I essentially stopped watching tv around 2011-12, with minor exceptions.

At that time, both Discovery Channel and Discovery Science (the name of the Science Channel outside of the US) ran a ton of pop-sci programming, Mythbusters and space docus being my favorites, alongside Man vs Wild and Survivorman

Both of them have declined massively in quality - Discovery Channel has been running nothing but reality shows for close to 15 years by now, Discovery Science is a zombie channel that only shows automated reruns of How the Universe Works, How It's Made, NASA's Unexplained Files and perhapos 5 or 6 other programs, most of them only lightly connected to science and with no new content - and the channel was actually shut down outside of the US in 2023-24, Poland is one of approx. 5 countries that still have it.

So, anyone here who remembers Discovery in its best period, before the reality tv turn started in 2000-2002?

Just like with the Catholic ones, the list is dizzying - you get a whole taxonomy of heresies, their genealogies, and their refutations, and every heresy has a mirror but opposite heresy (like ultra leftism vs right deviationism) so that having the "correct" line feels like walking a razor thin line between two errors, where nothing is ever certain and damnation may come any moment from either side. On top of that, the ideology can evolve but the rate at which it is allowed to do so is itself a middle line between two deviations (revisionism vs dogmatism) so even misjudging how much heresy is permissable is itself a heresy.

High scores on trait neuroticism correlate with a myriad of negative life outcomes - poor cardiovascular health, relationship dissatisfaction (high neuroticism is the single biggest predictor of divorce among all Big Five traits, more important than conscientousness and agreeableness) and virtualy all common psychiatric disorders (depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, substance use disorders) involve high neuroticism as one of the primary causes, if not the most important one (it has literally been named as THE general factor of psychopathology, the p-factor).

The thing is - low neuroticism isn't associated with an analogous set of dysfunctions. Scientists aren't looking for ways to make people with low neuroticism more neurotic and people don't go to a psychiatrist saying "I want to be more anxious, more prone to anger and yo worry more!". Why is that the case?

A bourgeois lawyer with Polish Catholic background who joined the RSDLP as a Menshevik in 1903 and only joined the Bolsheviks in 1920 when the Civil War was ending. He was also one of the signatories of the order to arrest Lenin in the summer of 1917 on the charges of being a German spy - people were getting executed for far less than that in 1936-38. Yet he not only avoided any charges but actually became the chief prosecutor under Stalin - how so?

The line "Social Democracy is the moderate wing of Fascism" comes from the Third Period doctrine and I see self declared communists (Marxists-Leninists to be more specific) cite it a lot online. Broadly, the doctrine stated that the time from 1928 onwards is the "third period" of capitalism - capitalism is in its last gasps and Fascism is a desperate, last ditch attempt to save it, Social Democrats by defending parliamentary democracy and capitalism with a welfare state instead of supporting communist revolution, were objectively aiding fascism (essentially "Fascism lite"). If the analysis was correct, why did the Comintern itself drop it and switch to alliance with those same Social Democrats? What was the internal self-criticism?