After Stalin abandoned Lenin’s internationalism and started promoting the socialism in one country model, it was mostly downhill. Even though Stalin executed most of the Nazbol leadership, he appropriated the same sort of Russian nationalism to drive support for the Winter War in Finland, which was an absolute disaster.

The USSR’s ideological project of international socialism ended with Lenin. Stalin went full hog nationalist and the USSR’s socialist project never really recovered after Stalin’s purges. Stalin eliminated 75% of the Comintern.

Nikolay Bukharin who advocated for gradual changes in agricultural policies like collectivization would have been a much better leader imho. A trained economist who worked out models on decentralizing a command economy, he was one of the last purged by Stalin in the Great Purge.

Read it in a book long ago.

Found an article with some of the keywords, but it is just the abstract. There are 10 sources for the paper though.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-1331.1999.tb00004.x

Stalin near the end had gone through half-a-dozen strokes, and was taking medical advice from a veterinarian.

His suspicious nature went into full blown paranoia, and he pretty much lost it.

The Stalin personality cult era after WWII when he was slipping off into dementia while suffering delusions doesn’t really need to be defended. Even the USSR admonished Stalin for his mismanagement and cruelty.

Emigration slowed down during the Khrushchev era, and then picked up again after the Afghanistan war debacle began unfolding. So it is not like it was constant either.

If you are American this doesn’t apply to you.

Libel laws in the UK are absurd.

Humans are getting really, really good at computational chemistry and all life is about balancing a system of chemical equilibria. So maybe?

Computationally, we might be close. Practically, probably going to be awhile. There are aspects common to all life about the molecular machinery of DNA/RNA/protein synthesis that biology still does not have good models for yet . Without accurate models of the entire human proteome engineering to significantly reverse or delay aging is next to impossible - it would be shooting largely in the dark.

There were many novels, comic books, TV shows, radio programs, and movies before humans actually had the Apollo program to the Moon. 100’s of years of them. No idea where we are on that time scale now. We could be in the 1950’s during the Space Race or we could be in the 1850’s before even planes were invented, and gliders were the highest technology of the time.

Life extension technology is when capitalism’s execesses will finally dawn on most people. Having 200 year old trillionaires is going to be a hoot.

Best dunking I’ve seen this season.

Merry Xmas.

I wish George Lucas had pushed the Empire only allowed humans angle, because a lot of people watching the original movies missed that.

:im-doing-my-part:

Give mensheviks their own little republik.

Bloodsports should be allowed for TERFs and pedophiles.

South Korean work culture today is like Japan in the 1990’s bad.

Cultures without art of their own will glom unto satire as if it were a compliment.

If you read the Handmaid’s Tale it is even worse when it comes to race.

All the horrible shit shown in the show only happens to white people in the books. Black people are in concentration camps in the book, but they are only mentioned for two sentences as the “Children of Ham”. Atwood loves writing about white women, but she has many tricks to make entire races of other women dissapear in her stories.