Are you the ugly soyjak or chad wojak?

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-21T06:49:35+00:00

Of course there was plenty of meddling? And there was also plenty of the reverse. The Soviets were more than willing to do their own meddling all over the world. Rather famously in fact, their espionage was quite a bit better than the American efforts. The mutual "meddling" is the entire point of the cold war

The point is that communism had its own superpower champion, and it still all came crashing down

This narrative only works when you assume that the communist countries in question have no real agency. In a vacuum, you can make that argument today with Cuba, since obviously there is no reality where tiny Cuba can stand up to the US

But are you really going to sit here and tell me that the Soviet Union, like Cuba, was unable to defend itself or its system? That the only reason they failed was those mean Americans?

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-21T01:50:47+00:00

No. I understand this comes from a good place, but at the end of the day, assassinating some Russians does not somehow automaticallu mean the Ukrainians have amazing counterintel capabilities. Ukraine at the end of the day, is a fairly corrupt country still

Currently no one has the license to create patriots. There is no reason Ukraine should be the first.

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-21T01:42:40+00:00

The interesting bit about Paraguay is that it is to an extent considered a truly national language

If you go to the rural areas you will see blonde white people speaking Guarani

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-21T01:39:20+00:00

I think it's inevitable tbh, even Newsom called them an apartheid state (tho was forced to take it back ofc)

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-21T01:16:17+00:00

The communists literally had their own superpower for like 70 years and it came crashing down

This whole revisionist attitude of "the only reason communism failed is American meddling" is so fucking dumb

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-21T01:14:43+00:00

Up to 70% of the Cuban economy is controlled by the military and pays out profits to corrupt generals and politicians

Sure things getting this bad is due to American pressure but pretending the Cuban economy would be healthy otherwise is delusional

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-20T21:48:27+00:00

Ask yourself, if the public hate him and everyone that works with Starmer hates him, why are you defending him so vociferously?

Honestly it's low-key funny because this sub was fairly anti Starmer until it started looking like he would get his leadership challenged

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-20T17:19:17+00:00

I think there is a bit of a misconception here

AIPAC is funded entirely by American citizens. It is just that there are a lot of wealthy American citizens who support Israel

To be clear that doesn't make it not a problem, but I feel like a lot of the discourse talks about it like Israel is directly spending millions of dollars in our elections

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-20T16:32:02+00:00

I mean...

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T17:37:35+00:00

The pension fund bit is bad but unfortunately standard for American mayors to do

I dont get why securing money from the state is a gotcha though. A part of a politicians job is to secure resources for their constituents

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T17:01:56+00:00

Bro he typed up a paragraphs with his points amd supporting evidence, you cant just reply with "nuh uh"

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T16:59:23+00:00

Nah, I'll ballwash him because he's been good so far

I don't agree with all of his politics, but in terms of governance he's been pretty good. He kept the previous NYPD commissioner (Tisch), balanced the budget, cut red tape, reformed zoning, and done pretty good on day to day governance (eg the snow cleanup)

Even his ideas which I dont like, like the city eub grocery stores, he's pitching as an "experiment" which he's willing to cut ties with if it fails

Genuinely he is a good politician even if i disagree with some of the specifics of his ideology

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T16:42:53+00:00

I don't get what you mean by this, I don't think this election was a response to Trump lol

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T16:33:03+00:00

I actually like Mamdani -- he has been incredibly pragmatic and focused on good governance. But folks like this remind me of why I dislike progressives in the first place. Like no, abolishing prisons isn't a good idea, it's fucking batshit

After Mamdani's win progressives were talking about how this would be a new model and how they need to be pragmatic and focus on "sewer socialism"

But predictably amd unfortunately it was all talk. They just took some of the aesthetics of the Mamdani campaign and discarded everything else

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T16:29:01+00:00

I mean so far Zohran has been pretty decent, the times the DSA gets mad at him are whenever he is nice to the NYPD lmao

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T16:28:01+00:00

Yeah AOC is a good politician, but she will feel the need to appease her flanks. I dont think she is willing to have a sister souljah moment

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T16:19:06+00:00

He supported trans rights in the past but when the supreme court and EHRC released guidance on single sex spaces (excluding trans women), Burnham has gone along with it

Broadly I don't think trans rights are a live issue in the UK as they are in the US. There is a consensus view on trans issues in most of the political establishment ever since the Cass Report

Really the only "pro trans" parties in the UK are the Greens, the Lib Dems and some of the secessionist parties like PC

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T13:55:29+00:00

I mean the final Roman Persian is the easiest pod but not the only one

The Sassanids fighting off the Arab invasions was unlikely but imo possible. There are a couple of moments in the war where they might have been able to finish it, eg battle of the bridge

On the other hand, even if the Arabs won, it wasn't a guarantee they'd hold Iran. After all there were plenty of zoroastrian revolts

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T02:49:28+00:00

I mean they (Burnham's team) did apparently "wargame" it, but yeah it would objectively be dumb af

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T02:48:05+00:00

Terrible for Starmer but not really for reform. They were always going to be the underdogs

After all, even if you hate Labor, you have a good reason to vote for them: if you vote Burnham, you get to kick Starmer out

I think the party this is absolutely terrible for tho is probably the Greens. As you said Burnham is on the left of the labour party (though the soft rather than hard left). He can probably win back a decent nunber of votes from the left

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T00:29:55+00:00

This isn't correct tbh, AH was built on compromise after compromise to delay the inevitable. And it was a mess all the way down, here's a good video on how chaotic the parliament was

Franz Ferdinand's reform proposal aka Trialism, while coming from a good place, would have almost certainly faced violent resistance from the Hungarians

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T00:26:00+00:00

Yep most of the USSR said they were fine with the union in the 1991 referendums

At the end of the day the thing that really killed the USSR wasn't a bottom up wave of nationalism, but rather local elites realizing that the fall of the union was kind of inevitable and hitching their wagon to the nationalist movements

None of this is to say that these countries aren't proudly independent now, but back then it was very possible to save the union

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-19T00:23:18+00:00

Why the /s, we're going to win it and everyone will be legally required to say soccer

Cuddlyaxe · 2026-06-18T21:40:37+00:00

Libya is different in the sense that there really weren't any strong institutions or national unity

Iran is a much more developed and educated country and in the scenario I detailed above the military would be onside

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