"Surely THIS round of neoliberal shock therapy will propel us to greatness" I say as I remove the last of my tendons with a flensing knife. The shareholders weep with joy. I am so enviously streamlined.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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having had to personally live through that shit, fuck every single one of these people
Do you even know what happened to the Baltics under the USSR, or are you just spewing nonsense?
I’m not denying the 90s were brutal, but don’t twist that pain into “therefore the USSR was a good thing”. The collapse being a shock doesn’t erase what the occupation did to us, the Baltic states, or what people lived through under repression.
The USSR was objectively a good thing and you're free to return to 90% illiteracy and a 40-something life expectancy if you feel otherwise
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russia on both life expectancy (which was already on par with a rapid global and regional improvement trend)
An insanely, blatantly wrong thing to say about a feudal serf-state
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Political realities of the time
Those political realities wouldn't happen to involve a bunch of Baltic governments enthusiastically collaborating with the Nazis and participating in the Holocaust, now would they? Because that would be a truly wild thing to just yada-yada.
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Double genocide theory is bullshit, it’s a form of Holocaust trivialization, and it came from—guess where—the Baltics, presumably from Baltic fascists to deflect from their own crimes.
The theory first gained popularity in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, particularly in discussions about the Holocaust in Lithuania.
"Ah well you see the nazis were bad, but stopping them was equally bad"
WiseManBowedHead.dril
Anything's possible when you make shit up kiddo
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Try nonfiction
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This is your brain on neo-liberalism. Read books, kids.
Jblog didn't provide any sources, can I ask outside of the quips the counter critique to this line? You don't have to explain anything, just some links, articles, etc
Studies
- Kazatchkine, M. D., & Shishkin, S. (2017). Health in the Soviet Union and in the post-Soviet space: from utopia to collapse and arduous recovery//How history shaped the health system in Russia. The Lancet
- Privatization in the countries of Eastern and central Europe and of the former Soviet Union - by Pekka Sutela
- Poverty in Eastern Europe and the CIS - Chapter 7
- 6 year drop in life expectancy in Russia 1991-1994.
- THE DEMOGRAPHIC IMPACT OF SUDDEN IMPOVERISHMENT: EASTERN EUROPE DURING THE 1989-94 TRANSITION http://web.natur.cuni.cz/ksgrrsek/acta/1999/AUC_1999_34_Rychtarikova_Is_Eastern_Europe.pdf, https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/4383228.pdf, https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/eca/publication/youth-unemployment-in-south-east-europe-10-key-messages, http://ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/documents/publication/wcms_142377.pdf
- Shpotov, B. (2011). Stalin’s Industrialization, Great Depression, and Western business
- Soviet Union: Facts, descriptions, statistics. (1929). Soviet Information Bureau. (Original work published 1929).
- Markus, B. (1936). The abolition of unemployment in the U.S.S.R. International Labour Review
- Cereseto, S., & Waitzkin, H. (1986). Capitalism, socialism, and the physical quality of life. International Journal of Health Services ( A must read!)
- Hickel, J., & Sullivan, D. (2024). How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis
- Hill, M. H. (2024, March 14). Under the red banner: Socialism, physical quality of life, and development
Books
- Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
- Jeffery Sachs: The strange case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid by Japhy Wilson
- Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti
- Russia without Putin by Tony Wood
Videos
1.Socialism is just better, scientifically. 2.Socialism is still better, scientifically.
3.How capitalism destroyed Eastern Europe ft. @YUGOPNIK.
No, it showed how important fossil fuels, especially oil, were in the 20th century.
That's gone now.
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No. You need lots of energy/electricity to economically grow and the US has fossil fuels in abundance,
especially coal, but it's very high in the other two sectors as well.
Despite that, the Soviet Union managed to grow much faster with much less, same with China.
But the Soviet Union doesn't have much coal and natural gas didn't become big and cheap
until the turn of the millennium.
And coal has been very important in the 20th century as that provides cheap electricity, while oil mainly provides cheap transportation. The problem with oil is that it's also easy to transport itself, so as a country like Saudi Arabia which has no coal and only oil, there's a large chance that it will get stolen from any countries with massive coal deposits and even a larger chance for the oil to be sold by a tiny group of elites of that country to countries with massive coal deposits.
The US, despite its absolutely massive fossil fuel deposits compared to the rest of the world,
started to falter in the early 1970s as they had an internal oil peak, crashing their economy.
The Soviet Union was thriving, but still had a long way to catch up as it had been a monarchy up until the early 20th century,
plus setbacks from invasions by Germany who put all their weight on the Soviet Union and still lost.
The US then blackmailed Saudi Arabia just in time and was able to prop up their system and even thrive
by forcing Saudi Arabia to invest into the US or be invaded. It allowed the US to go into massive debts without worry.
The same happened to other oil producing nations.
It's the US whose underlying institutional failures are showing right now.
China has risen in the 20th century because it's expensive coal became cheap enough over time, as all the cheaper coal had been used up. Russia managed to regain some of its power with natural gas.
But since the early 2020s solar power has become the energy/electricity rising star and solar power is far more evenly distributed than fossil fuels.
There's no blackmail scheme stopping this and we're already seeing China haven taken a giant lead in solar power, wind power and battery storage, while the US is trying to instigate a civil war while trying to ban wind power and attempting to go from blackmail to direct oil theft.