“Expand as an ideology” is a strange way to say, “they weren’t shot for disagreeing with the Party.”

The reforms didn’t weaken the economy. The economy was weak, therefore there were reforms. And it’s not cherrypicking, the Soviet system worked poorly, objectively.

Nostalgia doesn’t prove anything. What they feel now has nothing to do with what the people felt at the time.

Read Robert Conquest.

No, you denied that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship. The GDP does not effect that.

And books describing the Soviet Union as a totalitarian dictatorship are used as reference. Wikipedia is providing a variety of opinions of the Soviet government. It’s not declaring Pat Sloan the sole source of truth on the question of human rights in the Soviet Union.

You clearly don’t care about being righteous or correct.

This is a good example of one of things people hate about lemmy.

Communism fan boying, implicit denial of genocides committed by communist powers, out in the open on the front page.

So, you’re denying that glasnost allowed for political dissent?

Second, no they didn’t.

Finally, it does not matter because we were debating whether or not the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, which the literacy rate has nothing to do with.

Well-respected by Tankies, not by actual historians.

We weren’t debating the quality of the Soviet Union. We were debating whether or not it was a dictatorship.

That’s what dissent is.

Nothing you said disputes it being a dictatorship. The people could not choose their leaders, there were no limits on the power of their leaders, er go it was a dictatorship. None of your “pros” matter. And that’s before we get into the lack of freedom of speech and press and total absence of transparency, meaning that I have no reason to trust those supposed accomplishments.

What is complicated about it?

The reforms you refer to allowed for political dissent. If the Soviet Union was some worker’s paradise, then allowing people complain wouldn’t change anything.

The simple reality is that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship that only survived as long as it did because it was a dictatorship. Once people had the option of opposing Communist rule, they did. And that is what killed the Soviet Union. Not some conspiracy by the United States or the kulaks.

Yeah.

The CIA is why the Soviets fell. Not corruption or incompetence.

Okay.

It was fun while it lasted.

For someone.

I presume.

Firefox changed terms. Proton is just run by a twat.

Between this, Proton and Firefox’s change of terms, most of the advice I’ve seen on tech that protects your privacy seems like it’s going the way of the dino.

One of the things that has continuously confounded me about Musk’s veneration by the modern American fascist is that one of the main accomplishments they hail him as a genius for are “his” advancements in electric cars.

Which are necessitated by Global Warming.

Which they do not believe in.

Because it is.