Was the USSR really "less free" than the United States during the Cold War?
All people had access to necessary social services, while in America poverty was a death sentence in the event of a medical emergency.
Lynchings were rampant and African Americans by and large were prohibited from entering government. In the USSR, ethnic violence was ended and minorities from the provinces could (and did!) reach great heights in the government.
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Well, you can just look at numbers of deaths and compare USSR and USA directly.
Ah yes, resurrecting that old Soviet line of whataboutism.
>ethnic violence was ended
No, it wasn't. I don't know who told you that, but minorities were often picked on by the government in the Soviet Union when shit went sideways (which was 90% of the time). Saying anything bad about the party was a death sentence. Even not saying anything bad about the party could be a death sentence if you personally pissed off some official or they needed a scape goat. Don't kid yourself, there wasn't anything free about the Soviet Union. Not even the healthcare.
This, my grandpa was arrested because he said a vaguely anti party joke
That's war deaths ya shit
The poorfags in America had a higher living standard than the upper middle class in Russia, and still do.
>muh medical bills
Well it's either mortgaging your house in the US or dying in a filthy waiting room in Russia, none of which is exactly preferable. I'm from Eastern Europe and our people who visited the USSR were outright laughing at Russia for their atrocious healthcare.
I disagree with you, but I will say this.
The USSR was a shithole, but even though the US was somewhat better, it was nothing like the "land of freedom" they say it was, and it was pretty fucking shit. And to be fair, it still is to this day, lobbyism is rampant, money is the only thing moving the goddamn country, "hey are you poor for no fault of your own? well, better not need a doctor". So yeah, I guess people forget the US isn't much of a paradise
Not him, but that doesn't justify, because deaths are still deaths, if it was on war then there shouldn't be one
The US wasn't invaded, really
It wasn't even a Cold War numbers, user. USSR after Stalin was somewhat more decent.
We'll never know for sure because everyone who lived through Soviet times and even their children who are adults know were totally inculcated with this bullshit obscurantist worldview where you can never get a fucking straight answer about anything out of them. They just accuse you of being a provocateur but then are like "well maybe corruption is bad i dunno" like fuck off. Get your shit together you retards.
>poverty was a death sentence in the event of a medical emergency
It used to be that a medical emergency was just a death sentence.
But now western medicine has used the power of capitalism to change that.
>poor for no fault of your own
lol I'm poor as fuck and I know exactly who to blame for it.
Not if you're poor
Capitalism didn't discover those cures, research did.
> I know exactly who to blame for it.
We all know, user.
oh
and what funds that research?
>implying a command economy wouldn't have discovered the cures
Sure it would have cost more and taken more time and it probably would have been shelved for 20 yeas because it went against government propoganda, but it would have happened.
Public funding is always better for science, ya dumb nigger.
Why do you think governments developed computer and space travel technology decades before the private sector could even mimic them?
The public sector wastes money on unimportant meme sciences like astronomy and climatoloy while ignoring real sciences like geology.
You realize the internet only became as good as it did the second it become an open platform for private companies to use. So no, he's not a "dumb nigger" you fucking retard.
>government is always better for science
lol
>You realize the internet only became as good as it did the second it become an open platform for private companies to use. So no, he's not a "dumb nigger" you fucking retard.
Whoa, there, hold your horses. Internet only became as good as it did the second it become an open platform for PORN companies to use.
Not sure why I'm responding - I think you're intentionally treating the notion of freedom facetiously.
Either way, Russia is an excellent example of how geography determines destiny. There is a reason why Russia constantly degenerates into autocracy and the USSR was no exception.
The reason why is Russia's geopolitical strategy ever since Ivan the Terrible has primarily remained the same - for the Russian people to survive they needed large tracts of land to fall back on. This was their defence in the event of invasion as Russia's two most vulnerable areas are easily accessible via the European Plain. Examples of course include Napoleon and Hitler who both invaded Russia's most vulnerable areas - others are of course the Polish and Swedes.
So in order to maintain survival Russia has to fall back and if you look at their colonisation process they stopped every time they met a major geographical barrier and then constructed cities. Now these cities were so far apart and so isolated that they lacked the ability to be self-sufficient and all are reliant upon Moscow.
Moscow is Russia. Without Moscow there is no Russia. I know it seems silly, but think about it. The Government has to control these ethnically diverse regions, the distances of which between them increases exponentially (Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk etc but each supplies the other in a chain), - the logistics are mind boggling to comprehend. So Russia has to be autocratic, it has to follow a 'realist ideology' in regards to the international system in order to maintain its very survival.
Russia for this reason, has, is and always will be - at least until it eventually fragments via ethnic lines - has to remain autocratic. It has to control these people and control the countries on the European Plain to ensure its survival. Ukraine, Poland, Baltic's, Moldova/Romania etc. Look at the topography of Europe and it leads right to Moscow almost - just says fucking walk in.
So you're agreeing with me, but you think because it involved porn that makes it bad? You moralist commies are the worst I swear.
no he's saying that porn made the internet good.
>social services = freedom
lmao
I sayd what that user sayd
>social services
>USSR
More like
>USSR
>Don't ask what USSR can do for you, ask what you can do for USSR.
Yeah but communism chernobyl happen. In capitalism state watches that companys dont make budget cuts on safety .in ussr state was creedy (lazy) and made those cuts. Most importantly there was no way of critique what was wrong without putting yourself at risk. Trait that lives on in modern day russia.
T. Post communist shithole
My favourite:
Three men are sitting in a cell in Dzerzhinsky Square. The first asks the second why he has been imprisoned, who replies, "Because I criticized Karl Radek." The first man responds, "But I am here because I spoke out in favor of Radek!" They turn to the third man who has been sitting quietly in the back, and ask him why he is in jail. He answers, "I'm Karl Radek."
>poverty was a death sentence in the event of a medical emergency
Obscene healthcare costs are a very recent phenomenon, famski. We were doing fine throughout most of the cold war.
You Russians are weird. You claim it was bad during Communist rule, but then you go /int/ telling about how much better it was under Conmunist rule than now
Or perhaps it's different people?
>Lynchings were rampant
Is this what Russians really believe? Lynchings were most common in the 1800s. There's only like 4,000 (black) lynching deaths total in the country's history.
What caused this shit anyway?
Some will say that big pharma just wants to take you for a ride. In reality, high research costs need to be paid for somehow. Since non-American countries can only afford to pay a certain amount and are extremely unwilling to pay a little extra for better care in the future, U.S. citizens and insurance companies are essentially singlehandedly footing the bill for research costs.
Three Soviets are traveling outside of their hometown for the first time.
Two out of the three are so exhilarated with their newfound freedom that they stay up well into the night telling party-disapproved jokes.
The third guy is tired of this, so he goes down to the front desk and tells the lady to bring up tea in ten minutes.
He then goes back up to the room, picks up the lamp, and talks into it as if it were a telephone. He asks the lamp to bring up tea in five minutes.
The tea arrives five minutes later, and his two friends look at each other and go to bed.
The third man wakes up to find himself sleeping alone. He goes down to the front desk to ask where his friends have gone.
"Some men in uniform came in the night and took them away"
"why am I still here"
"the major liked that whole bit with the lamp"
Cronyism, mainly. General expenses for insurers, providers, and pharmaceutical companies have gone up, but not enough to justify exponential outpacing of the CPI. Big pharma is partially to blame, but insurance providers probably shoulder most of it. Lobbyists from both push absurd regulations that only the biggest companies can afford to meet, which in addition to increasing their expenses, eliminates the competition and creates government-sanctioned oligopolies that can fix prices as they please.
Mostly the existence of health insurance combined with medical malpractice.
Doctors feel a need to wildly over-test and over-medicate people because it offers them protection from a medical malpractice lawsuit. Because most people have insurance, the actual burden of these unnecessary medical expenses is diminished enough that patients don't call them out on their bullshit.
Plus, it's skewed by a shitty approach to end-of-life care. Sixty percent of a person's lifetime medical costs are in the last year of life, and forty percent are in the last month alone. Which also has its roots in medical malpractice. A sensible doctor faced with a terminally ill patient would just prescribe some painkillers and suggest the patient get his affairs in order. But now, you have doctors trying to operate on cancers that they know 100% won't be cured, and end up incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses to buy someone a few more weeks of miserable life. But if they don't, the patient's surviving family might sue.
Capitalism
BIG
BOLSHEVIK
>And you are lynching negroes!
Whataboutist commie pls.
you were supposed to say "cocks"
What was the joke?
On top of that, this shithole's surviving purely launching a psuedo-righteous fifth crusade into places afar by running and then running a petroleum enema back home. And I don't even get a decent share ofthe loot!
Hell, even the soldiers who make all our money get treated like shit. Why? Because the god damned false notion that they're fighting out of necessity is so heavily propagated into their undereducated brains that they don't even realize how much fucking roidmoney they're (indirectly) pumping into the empire.
It's bullshit. Nobody's calling any bluffs, nobody's demanding more money, and nobody even cares. Fucking hell this is why I sell drugs
God help America
Oil lobbyist detected
So Russia only lives to be a long slog that nobody but Russia can endure?
I always had a feeling that that was the case, but I never bothered to turn that theory more than a glaring assumption.
Would you tell me more about this vital supply chain? And maybe post a map that
It's absolutely fascinating.
Ignore that "by running" typo pretty please
The best I've heard it explained was:
Scientific/medical pioneering research is best done by government funding because private sectors prefer known paths to profit and will not do crazy expensive stuff like dropping billions into cancer cure research since there is no guarantee payoff.
After the pioneering has been done and companies can know if something is possible, then the private sector is preferred because they will always be able to do things cheaper and faster than a government program.
You know we're up to the tenth Crusade now, right bud?
Yes yes this at the end, but for a lot of deficit products people had to stand in lines for hours during whole USSR reign.
In addition -- competition is hopelessly inefficient for research, as difficult firms pour billions into developing parallel technologies
>whatthefuckisisrael.shaggydisaintweed
genuinely burst out laughing
>In the USSR, ethnic violence was ended
keked
>this is what americans actually believe to rationalise their cucking at the hands of medical companies
hahaha
>Lynchings were rampant
there was less than 5,000 between 1882-1968, it peaked in the 1920's
>in the USSR All people had access to necessary social services
>in America poverty was a death sentence in the event of a medical emergency
so we are just operating on delusion now?
20th century USA had many problems, but at least the government didn't send you to literal slave camps or murder you for dissent, real or perceived, and outside of the great depression you didn't have to line up for fucking bread and soup to not die
Even during the Great Depression, generally speaking, you didn't have to line up for bread and soup to not die.
>Was the USSR really "less free" than the United States during the Cold War?
Political Commisars and secret police
/thread
>the worst social disaster of 20th century America was rampant unemployment for 10 years
>millions didn't fucking die because America wasn't a shitshow
kek, how can Sovietcucks even compete
My country is also capitalist and our healthcare is like 10x cheaper than in the US
Oh, it was a shitshow, don't get me wrong, but it definitely wasn't Communist-induced famine tier. Bread lines and soup kitchens were designed as supplement, unlike in the Soviet Union and China where bread line and communal kitchens were designed to keep people from fucking starving to death. Even today in the U.S. you can get commodity food if you're "poor" enough. Lord knows as a college student I took advantage of that shit.
You and I both know that figure is more retarded than an autist dumped in molasses. Most lynchings went unreported
>HELLO police? Yes me and my mob of about 20 just hanged a family of 5 niggers in the middle of last night, threw the baby in the river becaue we ran out of rope. Anyway could you please arrest us? Please and thank you
Anyway, heres a (You) because you tried you dumb mongoloid
>lynchings
>arrest
The number comes from news reports gathered by the Tuskegee Institute and it's reliable +/- a few dozen. Lynchings didn't happen in anywhere near the capacity that people try to make them out to have happened. On top of this, roughly a third of the lynchings were white people being lynched.
If nobody knew about the lynchings then how the fuck would YOU know they happened?
How dare those commies get invaded by American freedom fighters™