Well There's Your Anticommunism, a podcast about never learning any lessons, with liberals

Okay I just skipped to a random point in the episode and heard the line

the Stasi was a couple orders of magnitude more effective than the Gestapo in WW2, like it was the worst police and fanatic police really

like Jesus fucking Christ. And the amazing thing is, in literally the next line the guy points out the contradiction

at the same time, when it came to it, when push came to shove, they didn't shove and they didn't push, which is just really kind of strange 'cause you would have expected them to shoot at people in the end

Yeah, you would have fucking expected that since you're comparing them to the Gestapo - maybe the fact that they didn't do that ought to make you rethink your evaluation of these supposedly authoritarian and highly repressive socialist states, but no, you just move right on, no light bulbs going off in your head or anything, just

another sort of context lesson here, that it is important, if you wanna do a socialist movement, to have, like, an interest in the next generation of it instead of torturing all of them

oh fuck off Alice

there were a lot of off-ramps where the Soviet Union could have created a more sustainable version of socialism, and they just chose not to

THE FUCK DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?? like, this isn't talking about Gorbachev's fuck ups or Khrushchev's reforms, it follows the previous quote so I guess "sustainability" is "not repressing people"? Like, this is what you're pointing to as the reason they collapsed, they were just too mean to their populace?

the Soviet Union was a shitty alternative, but it was an alternative, you had someone trying something else, maybe it wasn't working but they were trying something else

industrializing in like 20 years? massive increases in living standards? massively powerful industry? technological innovations? actually winning the Space Race despite what the Americans might say? um, sorry, that's not working apparently