Huh, why does that sound so familiar? Could have sworn I've heard that sentiment about the US several times over the last 4 years.
Suspending the Election
- Thread starter Trunkage
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Well sure, but Putin is a lateral step from Yeltsin, and a whole staircase down from Gorbachev.
Marx and Engels intended for the workers' revolution to take place in a wealthy, already-largely-industrialised society, and almost certainly not one under external threat (as Russia was in 1917). The infrastructure Marx identified as necessary for successful egalitarian revolution did not exist in under-developed Tsarist Russia.
I imagine Marx's ideal situation would have been an uprising in somewhere like, say, peacetime Germany.
Which puts the Kaiser Reich's decision to try and destabilize Russia in WWI by sending Lenin back from exile into a new, even less flattering light if that's conceivable.
Trump claims right to issue executive order on vote-by-mail
The president, who is trailing Joe Biden in the polls, did not elaborate on what any such order would entail.
www.politico.com
So, apparently Trump is gonna use this EO power to do....something. FIrst the "Postpone the election" talk, and now this.
Someone is getting desperate. Better have the trebuchet ready on Jan 20th to forcibly evict his ass out of there.
So he's once again threatening to use executive powers he doesn't actually possess.Trump claims right to issue executive order on vote-by-mail
The president, who is trailing Joe Biden in the polls, did not elaborate on what any such order would entail.
So, apparently Trump is gonna use this EO power to do....something. FIrst the "Postpone the election" talk, and now this.
Someone is getting desperate. Better have the trebuchet ready on Jan 20th to forcibly evict his ass out of there.
They literally took over one of the largest leftist groups in Russia. I think calling them comparatively tiny only makes sense when looking solely at the numbers of them because they weren’t the only police, but their power and influence was absurdly significant. Also, they literally employed a lot of the same guys and carried out the exact same methods, just with the resources of a functioning, industrialized state rather than the floundering Russian Empire. You’re basically saying the Russian Empire was better on human rights because it was garbage at doing things.
He doesn’t have to actually have the authority, he just has to convince enough people he does to throw the election into question.
Yes, but Trump says he can do lots of things, irrespective of whether he actually can or will.
It's his boastful, megalomaniac narcissism. More than anything else he wants to feed his ego by having people believe that he's super-important and super-powerful. Anything that happens does so because either he made it happen, or he was gracious enough to let someone else do it. Even when he plainly has no ability to control something, he says he does, because in his mind it's the worst thing possible for people to imagine that he can't: a humiliating diminution of his greatness.
What we really need to worry about is his habit of occasionally attempting to do things that he can't, or undermining / breaking systems designed to contrain him (such as Congressional oversight), because his personality disorder will very happily drive him to authoritarianism. He's finally found a cabinet (particularly the attorney general) very happy to indulge him, and Congressional Republicans have made it plain that they have no will to restrain him.
Trump has a terrifying psychology for a national leader. In a country with far weaker democratic controls, he would be the worst of tyrants.
Oh, he'll try everything. I guarantee you at some point on election night he'll try to declare himself the winner with only like 2% of the vote counted. And most of his cultists will go along with it. There's probably going to be violence. But will he actually succeed in foiling a transition of power? Given how willing the Republicans have become to cut him loose, it's still a possibility but a narrowing one.
The thing is that Trump still believes he is "CEO of America Inc.", not the President of the United States, and as such "what the boss says, goes". Stuff like "checks and balances" and "Constitutional safeguards" just get in his way.
Considering he seems to be running the US like a pump and dump operation(like so many of his business ventures)...yep.
They employed some of the same people, though relatively few. The Okhrana headquarters were sacked and burned, Okhrana agents were subject to automatic arrest, and its leadership executed. As for tactics, that's inevitable with any secret police organisation: but there's less in common between the Okhrana and the Cheka than there was between the Okhrana and, say, most other European secret polices.
As for takeover of one of the "largest leftist groups" in Russia-- are you referring to the SR Combat Organisation?
No, I'm not, that's a ludicrous simplification. As I said, most political repression in late Imperial Russia was handled by the military and regular police. It was still huge in scale.
Right? That's what I always want to know. I think socialists just get an invite into a group hivemind to download a bunch of theory and political history, all the better to let them bicker endlessly over the minutia of their ideologies.
Not sure which is worse, them having never read up on history being the reason they think socialism is a good idea or that they have read up on history and yet still think the ideology can work.
Edit: Also, aren't you a socialist, Ewok? Or have I misinterpreted our arguments in other threads?
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Hobby, though given the Russian Revolution is one of the most significant events in recent history it’s kinda odd to criticize knowing more about it than “Lenin was there.”
Eh, this is getting too hair-splitty for my tastes. I think we can at least agree both were absurdly repressive in their own ways with similar draconian restrictions on political expression and significant efforts from the state going into the enforcement of that.
Hobby as well. And seconded on how odd it is that so few people know much about it.
Yeah, it really is. Nobody thinks it’s “weird” to talk about the late Roman Republic or to know the names of dozens of WWII battles but be able to talk about the various factions involved in the Russian Revolution and suddenly you must be some kind of dangerous ideologue.
I don't know. Why not ask the same of their knowledge of American history? European history? Political theory? Economics? Microbiology? Constitutional law? Philosophy - ethics and epistemology?
I find socialists are frequently better informed than capitalists because capitalists, by merely living in capitalism, therefore assume that they know it. Socialists, however, need to actively go and find out. Doesn't necessarily mean they're right, but at least they bothered to read some stuff up.