The YPG are the largest armed faction of the SDF, they’ve been working with the US for a while to steal Syria’s oil but this is a new level of yikes

More anarchist concentration camps.

Has the fastfetch dev ever mentioned why they use the infinity symbol? Don’t want to find out later on that it’s a dogwhistle.

The positions are elected by a vote at the supreme soviet assembly, those positions are elected by the soviets (councils) below the assembly, and those are elected by the soviets below that, and so on down to the lowest level where the local constituents vote.

In the party it’s generally considered a “duty” though, especially among those that participated in the revolution like Stalin who treated loyalty to the organisation, self-sacrifice and subordination to it as a significant and necessary part of what made the revolution succeed. Thousands of people literally sacrificing their whole lives for the goal.

As such, Stalin wouldn’t break a decision of the assembly just as he wouldn’t want anyone else to. If they said they still needed him in his post he did his duty and stayed despite not wanting to.

He largely held equal powers to everyone else on the Council of Ministers, the position of Chairman didn’t have special powers. The General Secretary role of the party was invented by Lenin with the intention of it being used to break opposition in the party (perform purges). Once Stalin had successfully performed his purges and prevented split in the country/civil-war he saw the position as having completed its purpose and wanted rid of it, he didn’t like the cult of personality around himself and wanted people to view the government in a collective capacity rather than an individual leader kind of way. That’s obviously not what ended up being the perception though. Lots of hero worship got in the way.

Voices: Correct! Vote!

Rykov: There is a proposal to vote.

Voices: Yes, yes!

Rykov: We are voting. Who is for comrade Stalin’s proposal to abolish the post of General Secretary? Who is opposed? Who abstains? Noone.

October 16, 1952 (http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1954-2/succession-to-stalin/succession-to-stalin-texts/stalin-on-enlarging-the-central-committee/):

This article was taken from the Russian newspaper Glasnost devoted to the 120th Anniversary of Stalin’s birth, was the last speech at the CC [Central Committee] CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] before Stalin died. The text was being published for the very first time in the Soviet Union…

…MOLOTOV – [Glasnost -] coming to the speaker’s tribune completely admits his mistakes before the CC, but he stated that he is and will always be a faithful disciple of Stalin.

STALIN – (interrupting Molotov) This is nonsense. I have no students at all. We are all students of the great Lenin.

[Glasnost -] Stalin suggested that they continue the agenda point by point and elect comrades into different committees of state.

With no Politburo, there is now elected a Presidium of the CC CPSU in the enlarged CC and in the Secretariat of the CC CPSU altogether 36 members.

In the new list of those elected are all members of the old Politbiuro – except that of comrade A. A. Andreev who, as everyone knows now is unfortunately completely deaf and thus can not function.

VOICE FROM THE FLOOR – We need to elect comrade Stalin as the General Secretary of the CC CPSU and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

STALIN – No! I am asking that you relieve me of the two posts!

MALENKOV – coming to the tribune: Comrades! We should all unanimously ask comrade Stalin, our leader and our teacher, to be again the General Secretary of the CC CPSU.

Same attempt (A. I. Mgeladze, Stalin. Kakim ia ego znal. Strannitsy nedavnogo poshlogo. p. 118):

At the first Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] called after the XIX Congress of the Party (I had been elected member of the CC and took part in the work of this Plenum), Stalin really did present the question of General Secretary of the CC CPSU, or of the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. He referred to his age, overwork, said that other cadres had cropped up and there were people to replace him, for example, N.I. Bulganin could be appointed as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, but the CC members did not grant his request, all insisted that comrade Stalin remain at both positions.

His sentence isn’t wrong. Stalin did try to resign multiple times (four actually). When his fourth resignation was rejected by the party he then attempted to abolish his own position entirely.

Here are some of the documented ones:

May 1924, 23-31 (Marxist Internet Archive, “The Trotskyist Opposition Before and Now”) ( https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/10/23.htm#1)

It is said that in that “will” [Lenin’s Testament - ZB] Comrade Lenin suggested to the congress that in view of Stalin’s “rudeness” it should consider the question of putting another comrade in Stalin’s place as General Secretary. That is quite true. Yes, comrades, I am rude to those who grossly and perfidiously wreck and split the Party. I have never concealed this and do not conceal it now. Perhaps some mildness is needed in the treatment of splitters, but I am a bad hand at that. At the very first meeting of the plenum of the Central Committee after the Thirteenth Congress [Undefined date of this attempt, however, within the Thirteenth Congress and thus anywhere within the 23rd to the 31st - ZB] I asked the plenum of the Central Committee to release me from my duties as General Secretary. The congress itself discussed this question. It was discussed by each delegation separately, and all the delegations unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at his post.

What could I do? Desert my post? That is not in my nature; I have never deserted any post, and I have no right to do so, for that would be desertion. As I have already said before, I am not a free agent, and when the Party imposes an obligation upon me, I must obey.

A year later I again put in a request to the plenum to release me, but I was again obliged to remain at my post.

What else could I do?

August 19, 1924 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 244):

To the Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] RCP [Russian Communist Party]

One and a half years of working in the Politburo with comrades Zinoviev and Kamanev after the retirement and then the death of Lenin have made perfectly clear to me the impossibility of honest, sincere political work with these comrades within the framework of one small collective. In view of which, I request to be considered as having resigned from the Pol[itcal] Buro of the CC.

I request a medical leave for about two months.

At the expiration of this period I request to be sent to Turukhansk region or to the Iakutsk oblast’, or to somewhere abroad in any kind of work that will attract little attention.

I would ask the Plenum to decide all these questions in my absence and without explanations from my side, because I consider it harmful for our work to give explanations aside from those remarks that I have already made in the first paragraph of this letter.

I would ask comrade Kuibyshev to distribute copies of this letter to the members of the CC.

With com[munist] greet[ings], J. Stalin.

December 27, 1926 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 244):

To the Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] (to comrade Rykov). I ask that I be relieved of the post of GenSec [General Secretary] of the CC. I declare that I can work no longer in this position, I do not have the strength to work any more in this position. J. Stalin.

December 19, 1927 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 245) (https://livrozilla.com/doc/796199/pelo-socialismo):

Stalin: Comrades! For three years [Suggesting there could be more resignation attempts unbeknownst to me - ZB] I have been asking the CC [Central Committee] to free me from the obligations of General Secretary of the CC. Each time the Plenum has refused me. I admit that until recently conditions did not exist such that the Party had need of me in this post as a person more or less severe, one who acted as a certain kind of antidote to the dangers posed by the Opposition. I admit that this necessity existed, despite comrade Lenin’s well-known letter [Lenin’s Testament - ZB], to keep me at the post of General Secretary. But these conditions exist no longer. They have vanished, since the Opposition is now smashed. It seems that the Opposition has never before suffered such a defeat since they have not only been smashed, but have been expelled from the Party. It follows that now no bases exist any longer that could be considered correct when the Plenum refused to honor my request and free me of the duties of General Secretary. Meanwhile you have comrade Lenin’s directive which we are obliged to consider and which, in my opinion, it is necessary to put into effect. I admit that the Party was compelled to disregard this directive until recently, compelled by well-known conditions of inter-Party development. But I repeat that these conditions have now vanished and it is time, in my view, to take comrade Lenin’s directive to the leadership. Therefore I request the Plenum to free me of the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee. I assure you, comrades, that the Party can only gain from doing this.

Dogadov: Vote without discussion.

Vorshilov: I propose we reject the announcement we just heard.

Rykov: We will vote without discsussion…We vote now on Stalin’s proposal that he be freed from the General Secretaryship. Who is for this proposal? Who is against? Who abstains? One.

The proposal of comrade Stalin is rejected with one abstention.

Stalin: Then I introduce another proposal. Perhaps the CC [Central Committee] will consider it expedient to abolish the position of General Secretary. In our Party’s history there have been times when no such post existed.

Voroshilov: We had Lenin with us then.

Stalin: We had no post of General Secretary before the 10th Congress.

Voice: Until the 11th Congress.

Stalin: Yes, it seems that until the 11th Congress we did not have this position. That was before Lenin stopped working. If Lenin concluded that it was necessary to put forward the question of founding the position of General Secretary, then I assume he was prompted by the special circumstances that appeared with us before the 10th Congress, when a more or less strong, well-organized Opposition within the Party was founded. But now we proceed to the abolition of this position. Many people associate a conception of some kind of special rights of the General Secretary with this position. I must say from my experience, and comrades will confirm this, that there ought not to be any special rights distinguishing the General Secretary from the rights of other members of the Secretariat.

Voice: And the duties?

Stalin: And there are no more duties than other members of the Secretariat have. I see it this way; There’s the Politburo, the highest organ of the CC; there’s the Secretariat, the executive organ consisting of five persons, and all these five members of the Secretariat are equal. That’s the way the work has been carried out in practice, and the General Secretary has not had any special rights or obligations. The result, therefore, is that the position of General Secretary, in the sense of special rights, has never existed with us in practice, there has been only a collegium called the Secretariat of the CC. I do not know why we need to keep this dead position any longer. I don’t even mention the fact that this position, called General Secretary, has occasioned in some places a series of distortions. At the same time that at the top no special rights or duties are associated with the position of General Secretary, in some places there have been some distortions, and in all the oblasts there is now a struggle over that position among comrades who call themselves secretaries, for example, in the national CCs. Quite a few General Secretaries have developed, and with them in the localities special rights have been associated. Why is this necessary?

Shmidt: We can dismiss them in the localities.

Stalin: I think the Party would benefit if we did away with the post of General Secretary, and that would give me the chance to be free from this post. This would be all the easier to do since according to the Party’s constitution there is no post of General Secretary.

Rykov: I propose not to give comrade Stalin the possibility of being free from this position. As concerns the General Secretaries in the oblast and local organs, that should be changed, but without changing the situation in the CC. The position of General Secretary was created by the proposal of Vladimir Il’ich. In all the time since, during Vladimir Il’ich’s life and since, this position has justified itself politically and completely in both the organizational and political sense. In the creation of this organ and in naming comrade Stalin to the post of General Secretary the whole Opposition also took part, all those whom we have now expelled from the Party. That is how completely without doubt it was for everyone in the Party (whether the position of General Secretary was needed and who should be the General Secretary). By which has been exhausted, in my opinion, both the question of the “testament” (for that point has been decided) and exhausted by the Opposition at the same time just as it has been decided by us as well. The whole Party knows this. What has changed now after the 15th Congress and why is it necessary to set aside the position of General Secretary.

Stalin: The Opposition has been smashed.

(A long discussion followed, after which:)

[continued in reply]

The USSR was a dictatorship

No it wasn’t. This is propaganda. Even the CIA admits that it is propaganda in this document:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf

Democracy under socialism is simply structured differently. You need to study it properly.

Several countries that you support today still use a system very much like this. Cuba and Vietnam for example. A solid video on Cuban democracy is here: https://youtu.be/2aMsi-A56ds

All the socialist countries built on this system.

Have you actually read it yet?

I worked at the server company that previously hosted discord servers (no longer exists) and let me tell you right now that all your conversations were accessible on the server to anyone in the company and completely and totally insecure. Overall security was pretty meh and it wouldn’t be very difficult for anyone who really wanted the information to gain access to anything on your server.

It is not a valid place to store or discuss anything that requires operational security. It is also not a place where customer data should be stored or discussed, in fact you’re also probably breaking gdpr by accident if you ever do so.

Yeah you get what I mean about her being THE child killer here lol.

Even the average person would’ve fucking killed her given the chance. This is Breivik. He’s a monster and someone absolutely would try and have him given the chance.

Being a child killer among other people that have committed murders but still have some principles is usually not good. Not to mention being like THE child killer in Norway not just any child killer.

I’m British, THE child killer here would’ve been Myra Hindley, would I have killed her in prison? Yes. Yes I would. I’m pretty sure there’s some fairly rough guys in there that would not take kindly to a person that slaughtered 69 kids one by one by one at a fucking summer camp.

So many good future socialists died that day. I completely guarantee someone kills the fucker if he is mixed in with everyone.

Not really sure why you think Norwegians are ontologically predisposed to not want to kill child mass murderers tbh.

Chatgpt is just Cortana with better marketing. AI isn’t smart, it’s just algorithms producing a facsimile of language via pattern heatmaps. What was Cortana if not just an earlier version of the same thing?

““AI”” is all a techbro marketing bubble. Will burst and move on eventually.

Like holy shit we had the autofill feature in Photoshop ages and ages ago and that’s just doing what the “intelligent” image generators do. We didn’t call it AI back then. All marketing for what amounts to just some interesting algorithms.

Rebranded Cortana?

Destined to fail.

Stop with the “one of us europeans” bollocks.

I’m from europe and this post is 100% accurate.

There is literally no “ad hominem” in that entire fucking comment, telling you that you don’t know about something (ignorance) is not ad hominem, dickhead. If you’re going to do reddit-tier debate-pervert shit to deliberately keep yourself in ignorance of factual information and stop yourself from ever learning anything then at least get your fucking debate-pervert shit correct.

This comment is ad hominem. Loser.

Post was written at 4am. Genuinely not sure what I meant. No challenge can be made to resolution 1718 though because it includes the requirement for the DPRK to stop developing nuclear weapons and icbms, and that’s a non-option.

Lol I can see that working.

It’s fucking weird though thinking about France being on their Fifth republic over a period since the 1700s and these 6 occurring in… 60 years.

It is impossible for any normal unpropagandised person to look at this scenario and not see something is up that’s worth scrutinising.

Ahh yes 6th. Working from memory in most of my responses and without checking I’m pretty bad at dates and numbers tbh. It’s worse with african countries though I am one of the people that mixes up their histories all the time to my great shame. I don’t even know why it happens, I don’t do it with south american countries.

The general point stands, the stability of their government is directly tied to whether or not they’re doing what the americans want. And whenever things aren’t going precisely as desired the coups happen incredibly easily. By design.

they both suck, dude.

Why though? What makes you think that other than “in bad country it is bad” ?

What actual things do you know about this country that drives you to have such an emotional reaction? Do you have this reaction about any south american countries or african countries? Many of them are capitalist countries that are significantly worse off for their people. Why is your emotional reaction significantly different for this one in particular?

The answer is propaganda. Your assessment is not a levelheaded on based on any real educated understanding of the data in comparison with other countries. Your assessment is based on feels acquired through the popular beliefs. Guess where those popular beliefs come from? The same place yours have come from, with the same level of understanding that you have. It’s ignorant feels all the way down. Created by the strongest media propaganda machine ever devised in history.

Is any of this to say that it’s all fucking rosey over there? Fuck no. Most of us are not juche and believe in a mixed market approach like what is being undertaken in Cuba, Vietnam, or China. We mostly have large criticisms of the isolated approach. But does that mean we buy into all the bullshit spread in the west and perpetuate it uncritically? Also no. That’s what you’re seeing here. People countering the utterly ignorant western bullshit liberals spew isn’t an explicit endorsement of the country, but an attempt to get people to calm the fuck down about it and look at it in a more measured way.

A failed state that has a starving population

This is not correct. Food security in the country has drastically improved and continues to improve - FAO data - Unicef data - both support this position.

By choice.

No? The reason it’s ostracised is a UN vote that was successfully passed that has never been challenged since because the DPRK is not in or allowed to join the UN, any attempt to would be immediately veto’d by the west. This is called 1718.

Wild to me how many replies you’re getting that defend North Korea

You see, this here is a problem. You consider simply stating factually true things that people are generally unaware of to be “defending north korea”. You live in ignorance and seek to maintain that ignorance in other people rather than view the situation in a more balanced and academic way.

South Korea is on its FIFTH version of the country because the US continually coups it whenever the existing people aren’t doing exactly what they want. It’s called the Fifth Republic for a fucking reason. It is an occupied vassal state entirely subservient to the USA and has been ever since the US genocided one fifth of the population of Korea (all of Korea). Keep in mind that being on your FIFTH republic is remarkable when the southern dictatorship was only first formed in 1948.

The US military has also literally run korean children over with tanks, which is very funny given that this is fake propaganda levelled at another enemy of the US, but in the case of america it’s actually fucking true.