Yeah, I think that managed to put my feeling into more concise words. Russian socialism cost many many lives, but at its core the principles it was trying to champion seem correct: it proposes fairness and dignity through the active improvement of people’s education and lives. Whereas fascist movements (Hitler, Mussolini, Trump) are actively destructive. They thrive off of people’s hatred and fear of “the other”.

I guess my main question would be… If the Soviet Union was truly raising thinking, critical workers that would one day not become slaves, then how is it possible that immediately after its collapse, Russia became almost immediately a fascist state that indeed allowed only slaves and never masters to exist beyond its oligarchy?

Something seems amiss in the proposition there. It seems to me like fascism is almost an unavoidable illness that comes to all societies sooner or later, and the only thing we can do is find ways to weaken it before it leads to catastrophic results.

MAGA will be a good example of how fascism comes to its end within societies that cannot be militarily opposed.

What is the reasoning behind that conclusion? I can see how comparing the two simply because they’re totalitarian would be superficial (there are many structural differences between both). And to me, what the Nazis did, the rhetoric they used and their rise to power has always felt much more ominous and foreboding than even Stalin’s.

But I can’t put it into words and I see no real reason why Stalin’s crimes and death camps would in any way be less evil than the Nazis’. To me it feels like Nazis went beyond just political power straight into core beliefs and ideology, whereas Stalin’s crimes were just your typical tyrant authoritarian maneuvering, but I don’t know if that really makes an ethical difference.

I mean, surely the answer is yes? There are virtually no supreme leaders who haven’t committed some form of sexual assault or power harassment in history.

Some examples include: European monarchs, Japanese daimyo, Latin American dictators, the United States dictator, several United States presidents, probably a vast number of catholic archbishops and surely some popes, and several Islamic religious imams and ayatollahs.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Scammers aren’t even writing their own scams anymore. It’s ChatGPT all the way down.

The thing about “prince” is that it’s halfway to “nonce”

Fast Fourier Transforms literally put food on my table many times in the past. Final Fantasy has never done that for me. But it might someday.