Memes

So that’s a roundabout way of saying “no, nothing will change my mind”.

No, it's a direct way of saying that you won't change my mind. I didn't wake up a Marxist one day after hitting my head or eating something spicy.

The opposite of “Estonia did not want to be in the union and couldn’t willing leave it” is that “Estonia wanted to be in the union and could willing leave it”.

I don't recall saying that 'Estonia' wanted to be in or out the Union. From the beginning, I've been saying that some people wanted in and some people wanted out. And I've been saying that their position is determined by their class position.

There's no going off on a tangent. Putting things into their political economic context is a basic element of Marxist analysis.

Some people can also live a normal life under imperialistic sphere of the US, even if they dislike US. Does that mean it suggests the opposite of your understanding of the US, and by extension capitalism? That capitalism isn’t bad?

You have severely misunderstood my argument. There's too much to unpack here for me to untangle.

doesn’t suit the idyllic vision you have of the soviet union.

1. I'm a Marxist, i.e. a scientific socialist, who rejects idealism. It is worse than useless for people who want socialism/communism to misdiagnose the problems of the USSR. I have zero interest in an idyllic fairy tale. Which is why I insist on logical and methodological rigour when forming my views about the USSR.
2. Have you even been reading what I wrote? Or are you just picking all the bits that you don't like to make yourself angry?

Guess Nazi Germany was also a success in your book. They turned a crumbling nation into something that was an existential threat even to the USSR, all in one generation, no colonialism and only at fraction of the size of the union.

Are you for real? Is this really how you understand Nazi Germany? After what you said above, I'm not so sure that you are a Nazi sympathiser. Now I think you just don't know what you're talking about. Then again, Nazi sympathisers do like their horseshoe theories to whitewash and minimise the horrors of capitalism.

I never said they were bad things.

I didn't say that you said these were bad things. I don't recall you saying anything about these things at all and I can't be bothered to scroll back up. I mentioned these things because you asked what would change my mind. And I'm telling you that with these positives on the record, nobody will ever convince me that the USSR was not a net benefit to humanity.

to see how not everything the union did was good

Please re-read what I said.

As is stands their actions in other parts of the world don’t invalidate how they oppressed the Baltic states.

This is entirely beside the point. It's you who keeps insisting on the issue. Did you forget that this all started with someone asking why communists are positive about the USSR?

Whataboutism.

If you ask someone a question about why they think X, you can't cry 'whataboutism' when they list the reasons for thinking X.

Twisting my words again. Never did I say they didn’t do a single thing right. I was simply pointing out the hypocrisy of saying the other SSRs were free and democratic, they weren’t.

I know you didn't say this explicitly. But you did imply it. You came running in to a discussion about why people are positive about the USSR to say that we're all wrong because we haven't considered your tiny bit of evidence that some people didn't like the Union (which we have seen and considered before, albeit in a different format). Your framing implies that our reasons are insignificant in the face of six people and a survey that disagrees.

Further, you can't cry 'twisting my words' in the same breath as claiming that I said 'the other SSRs were free and democratic' when I didn't say it. It comes off as a bit… disingenuous.

But it’s not like you’re going to change you mind anyway so feel free to live in your contradictions that you’re going to ignore so you could believe the lies you want to believe.

Well, I did tell you not to come back at me with anti-communism because you won't change my mind. I'm not trying to hide that. The real mystery is what made you think you could come into an explicitly communist space and turn people into liberals with an anecdote.