Awesome! I am very familiar with Zot, Understanding Comics and Mr. McCloud in general, but I'd never heard of this. Thanks for showing me. I'll have to check it out sometime!
wolfinthewoods
joined 1 month ago
Parenti, in Blackshirt in Reds, covers this topic excellently. He does not gloss over the flaws and corruptions in the USSR, but he is realistic in giving a fair assessment of their successes in the midst of their failures. A big point being what you mentioned above: the USSR had to continue focusing production towards just being on even footing with the US in terms of defense, to protect against the very real threat of the US overthrowing the government as they were doing in so many other communist countries. At no time during the USSR's existence were they ever not under attack by some outside force or another (the NAZIs, CIA, multi-national capitalist interests etc). Here's a good quote talking about the Stalin era and progressive policies during that time:
During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism didn't work" is to ignore that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.
Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti
That's....gross. But entirely unsurprising. I never knew that there was a neutered version in the US. I actually had to look it up. Wow. Go us. This country really just continues to depress me day after day.
For sure. I'd argue what makes it even more brutal is the friendly, artificial face it puts on the system. You can especially see it on commercials and mainstream tv. It makes it even more repulsive when the conditions of capitalism are given some utopia, Fisher Price look.
Apparently people are pretty happy in Finland, at least that's what that happiness index article said recently. Otherwise I no fuck-all about Finland lol.
Thank you. Yes, she really was. I fell in love with her the first day we met. We didn't get together until almost two years after, but I never questioned that we were meant to be together. I didn't talk about her passing to anyone for awhile after it happened. I felt like mentioning it was too close to fishing for sympathy, sometimes I still do. But at a certain point I had to say something, I can't help but feel the immensity of her loss hour after hour, day after day. I appreciate the kind words. I'm definitely in the process of healing, it's just a very long, and much of the time, lonely process.
Eh, I'm still recovering from the holidays. My fiance passed three years ago, and during the holidays I still make it out to see her family. It's always a bit bittersweet since I love seeing them, but I feel her absence so much more being with them without her. This year was tougher than the other it seemed like because of her grandma telling me how the family has kind of drifted apart since my fiance's passing. The thing that broke my heart though, was talking with her sister and her telling me that sometimes she can't remember her very well, that she has a hard time remembering her face. It really shook me to hear that. I cried intensely the whole way home. It's heartbreaking to see the toll that her loss has taken on all of us. I'm in the process of trying to work through the grief, but it's the most difficult thing I've ever head to do. Just simply accepting the new normal has been a monumental undertaking for me. I'm trying to figure out a life without her, it's just hard to imagine what that looks like sometimes :'(
Yeah, the work culture in Japan is pretty crazy. Although, same could be said about US work culture in a lot of ways. Working three or more jobs. Crazy hours with little or no overtime in some places etc.
Another sad consequence of their brutal work culture, is the fact that suicide resulting from overwork is so prevalent that they actually have a specific term for it over there. I can't remember what it is called, but it's a big enough issue that it has it's own term and social consciousness.
Right? Kind of odd. Maybe it's just because the name is cool. Better than Bickering Superheroes in the Void, I guess :D
For me it was getting into counseling to find the underlying cause of my addiction, which was my grief. There's many ways addiction is percieved in mainstream society, with the biggest focus being on addiction being a "disease". I'd avoid such thinking since, I believe, it only serves to exacerbate the problem. If you're told that your addiction is a irreversable illness than you'll attack the symptoms without getting to the root cause.
Ask yourself why you feel the need to drink to excess, what is it that you feel you are missing in your life? We tend to utilize addiction as a way to cope with uncomfortable realities in our lives. If we can figure out what that uncomfortable truth is, we are better equipped to make better, healthier decisions on how we chose to cope with that feeling.
I recommend checking out any of Lance Dodes' books on addiction, which focus on a evidence-based approach to confronting and coping with addiction. Good luck. Feel free to DM me if you ever have any more questions ;)
Just finely crush about a half a bag of salt and vinegar chips and then toss 'em in
Definitely. I try to remember that. I just get stuck in my head the ideal of what I want, and if that ideal doesn't match what I think I am able to accomplish I just don't try in the first place. It's a terrible habit I need to break, especially if I'm going to ever get any decent amount of writing done :|
I think their perfectionism is pretty well known, or at least their intense work ethic. I was just watching something recently (can't remember, a docu I believe) that had a segment on Japanese work culture and how the Japanese government had to even force workers to take a vacation because it was eating into their economic activity. The Japanese were working so much that they weren't spending enough to stimulate their economy creating a downturn. One employer locked the doors and shut the power off at the office, and the workers broke into their own office building and did their work by flashlight and their own wifi hotspots. Crazy.
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