Riverside

What? You don't use your genitalia to shift gears?

God, I wish I were called Soviet Robot too, that sounds pretty fucking epic

I just think that students [...] should shut up and be quiet

I never said this. All my power to the students combatting the repression in Iran. My issue is absolutely not with the protestors, my issue is the framing of this in western media as justification for military invasion of Iran.

You still haven't said what you think about Israel's genocide in Palestine though, why are you avoiding that?

Not a tough line to walk, really. I see no constant stream of news on Lemmy about Qatar being an apartheid state with 80% of migrants without rights, or Saudi Arabia's similar policy. No constant stream of posts about mass incarceration of black people in the US, of Nazis roaming the streets of Madrid and Paris...

Deciding what news to publish is itself extremely political, and focusing on atrocity propaganda in Iran, a heavily sanctioned country against which there's an ongoing US military buildup on the verge of invasion, is willing and a form of atrocity propaganda. It's designed specifically to make progressive people less critical of the upcoming strikes, and judging by the number of upvotes these posts get, it's working.

5 years ago there wasn't this constant stream of anti-Iranian propaganda, it was Venezuela, and we've seen the results. Learning to distinguish the workings of propaganda is critical to any progressive, and it allows us both to be more resistant to propaganda and to use it better (for example by relentlessly posting about Palestine or the ICE, we can similarly engage in what I consider good atrocity propaganda).

"Hard economic and historical data" with no sources

Can't provide you the exact pages right now, but my sources are:

-Robert C. Allen's "Farm to Factory: a reinterpretation of the Soviet industrial revolution"

-Alec Nove's "An economic history of the Soviet Union"

-Albert Szymanski's "Human Rights in the Soviet Union" and "Is the red flag flying"

-A. Zveriev's "Lo que recibe el trabajador soviético además de su salario"

I gave you hard economic and historical data, what part of what I said is bad faith?

And what elections are you talking about, provisional government?

I'm critical of many aspects of Soviet socialism, not sure what you're talking about

The vast majority of housing in the country is that type of housing, meaning that the vast majority of people end up living in it, willingly or not.

Soviet architecture is a byproduct of the material circumstances of the moment. The USSR industrialized at an unforeseen speed, took it less than 40 years to reach industrial maturity compared to 100-150 for Great Britain and Germany. They had to build housing for tens of millions of people in newly erected cities from scratch. They managed not only to do that, but to do it fairly, guaranteeing housing for everyone and eliminating homelessness, housing costing 3% of monthly income on average, and on top of that it was built in walkable neighborhoods with a wide variety of services nearby from stores to schools to medical care, and with top notch public transit and urban planning for the time, leaving space for green areas and playgrounds.

Nothing of that is authoritarian, you've been brainwashed by capitalism to hate socialism.