It's funny to me how both sides say this about the other. There were two rebellions in Ukraine backed by foreign powers, and which one you think is legitimate and which one was created by foreign meddling doesn't seem to have anything to do with any facts on the ground, it's entirely about which global hegemon you support.

In reality, both the succession movement and Euromaidan involved a combination of foreign agitation and popular support, and it's nowhere near as black and white as either side pretends.

As much as we might criticize the whole, "End of History" idea, I feel like the 90's was the last time Americans had anything like that kind of optimism. There was a feeling that we were entering a new age of international cooperation, and although I was only a child that was something I really believed in. But we soon found new conflicts to be embroiled in a the dream has died and was proven to be foolish and naive, and now everyone across the political spectrum is highly cynical.

I'm sure that there are many cynical people in China too, but I can hardly remember the last time I saw someone who wasn't cynical when it comes to politics. Whether or not it's naive, it hits me on an emotional level.

Completely removing any credibility from the narrative that you like Nazis by checks notes voting against condemning Nazis.

Is that also the US's justification for voting against this resolution every time it comes up, before or since?

Told you so?

The means of production are mixed between public/state ownership, collective ownership, and private ownership, actually.

I take it that your metric for whether or not a state is socialist is something like, "Worker ownership of the means of production." But that metric has a lot of ambiguities that make it difficult to apply practically in an objective way. Which workers own which means of production, and in what form? Suppose we have a system where everything is state-owned and the state determines who can use what when based on a truly democratic process - but then, an organization of trained professionals in a given field go on strike to demand things be done the way they want. If all the workers should own all the means of production, then the strikers are out of line, but if the workers in a particular field should own the means of production in that field, then the state is out of line.

And should the economy be transformed, fully and immediately, to that ideal? Historically, both the USSR and PRC attempted widespread collectivization of farms, like with the Great Leap Forward, which was an abject failure. That's not to say that farming collectives cannot be successful, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect immediate and total transformation to that model or else a state isn't socialist.

People use all sorts of metrics to determine whether or not a state is socialist or not, so it's hard to find neutral terminology everyone can agree with. North Korea calls itself socialist and has a centrally-planned economy, and has been historically aligned with other countries that also call themselves socialist (such as the USSR and PRC), so it seems reasonable enough to me to call them socialist. Should I call them capitalist instead? Seems a little odd, especially since I live in the US which has a much larger proportion of the economy in the private sector.

I haven't done any trolling at all, nor have I licked any boots. I simply refused to engage with your irrelevant tangent.

All you did was perform a purity test to see if I'm a member of your tribe in order to discredit me, whole deploying thought-terminating cliches to distract from the fact that you were objectively proven wrong.

Lmao, you literally only know two events from all of history, don't you?

You can go to archive.is and put in the url of a news story you want to read in the second box and it will usually let you bypass the paywall.

It’s cute of you to step in to defend your alt account, but you can’t be serious.

Lmao.

Is there anything that could possibly falsify any of your evidence-free "inferences?"

Also, are you aware that some of these people “lifted out of poverty” were folks in rural areas who were totally fine where they were at.

That's... certainly a take, alright. I suppose it's possible that hundreds of millions of rural Chinese were voluntarily choosing to live in extreme poverty out of some sort of commitment to asceticism. I'll admit that this was not a possibility I had considered before.

I think a correct path forward for China economically is somewhere close to where they’re at now but with more civil liberties.

So then the billionaires aren't the problem you have with China then, if I'm understanding you.

What ideals and goals might those be?