Quote Originally Posted by Adam Strange View Post
They were nostalgic for the empty shelves, the long lines, the political repression, the declining living standards, and being scorned by the West.

Ah, such good times, if you were there.
They're not exactly recreating the USSR, they're just bringing back the West-Eastern Proxxy Wars. Except this time, the West looks really bad, so the bar for them to make themselves look good is really low. Right-wingers don't support the military with all the woke stuff, left-wingers are already opposed to it because it's the military and they've just been machine-gunning down Middle Eastern kids who are armed with rocks for decades, and some left-wingers unironically support machine-gunning down Middle Eastern kids who are armed with rocks because they think Islam is the most inherently regressive ideology in the world while also being biological determinists who believe Middle Eastern kids are inevitably going to grow up to propagate it further. (Source: I have seen that far-left socialists who are military members sometimes screen American Sniper for other military members and otherwise display similar propaganda.)

And when you look at who's running the government agencies, the political parties, the military members, you see how awful it is. They are absolute maniacs with no self-control; they twerk on each other to TikTok music all the time; their diet is almost entirely sloppy Joe's and similar "dishes" with canned chili and processed cheese product on some kind of bleached pesticide-laden starch such as the mentioned bread or possibly potatoes or corn chips; they watch Avengers all the time and other not very good films or even worse things like Thriller Movie 4-Pak and Red Riding Hood; their exposure to "high culture" consists entirely of things like Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and Marina Abramović; they don't know anything about science that Michio Kaku and Neil DeGrasse Tyson didn't tell them on a PBS special; they can't even do arithmetic, logical proofs, or any form of mathematics in their heads at all, and would be bewildered by references to set theory; if you decide that these people must be a bunch of evangelical hicks and think reading the Bible will impress them, they'll think you must be kidding them and no one can read the Bible more than one verse at a time and really remember it; the more left-wing ones will assume you are exactly like them regarding personal taste, beliefs, etc. or not based on skin color, gender, etc. identity politics categories and stereotype you just as much as they stereotype the minorities they try to "help."

And that's just a microcosm of the greater trends in society that put those people in charge.

I hate communism too, but this doesn't seem like Marxist-Leninism. It appears to me it could be Trotskyism like what I think Fox News is where they just pander to actual cultural conservatives out of their accelerationism, but I kind of doubt that too. I don't fully trust the ideology of the Russians, but it's very easy for them to make it look better than the ideology of the West; I'm not begging for it, I think there are probably hidden problems, but at worst it looks better than the ideology of the West in the same way taking poison and having a chance at living is better than being put with your head against a wall and shot. I'm not begging for poison either, though. I think there's still a better way. That's what I'm looking for.