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You probably have a decent point to make, if only you bothered to hone in on it. Sure you can say some people won't work for Google because their conscience pr
by shrimpx 5y ago
You probably have a decent point to make, if only you bothered to hone in on it.
Sure you can say some people won't work for Google because their conscience prevents them, but you can't reasonably compare getting rich by working for Google to getting rich by getting your friend arrested because they read a book or listened to a radio station... If you have a point to make, make it.
- trasz 5y agoMost (almost all) party people back them didn’t get anyone arrested, they just did their jobs in power plants, schools, and cheese factories, just like they would in the west. Same as googlers today. Sure, some did evil things. Again, just like in the west it’s easy to make money by hurting others. My point is, the perceived difference between those is really just the narrative, the way they are being described in popular media. West has much better PR.
- DarylZero 5y agoThe USA especially has roughly the same proportion of its people imprisoned as totalitarian regimes, but those people are so dehumanized socially that they are impossible to imagine as even a part of this discussion. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a woman in NYC who migrated from some former USSR country and worked as a domestic servant -- she called working for such low wage in such conditions "communism."
- trasz 5y agoUSA has a number of things in common with most totalitarian regimes, from forced labour camps, to the creepy “pledge of allegiance to the state” which all the school kids are forced to recite every day. It’s quite creepy from the European point of view.
- shrimpx 5y agoYou’re unfairly revising the communist history behind the iron curtain in order to make a biased anti American point. People went to jail for reading certain books or attempting to listen to foreign radio stations. Poets would be under watch, threatened and forced to write pro-party poems. People would get picked up by agents for being non denominational Christians, and would “reappear” again weeks later beaten and 20 lbs lighter. There was nothing resembling rule of law; Justice was meaningless. There was no market and services were primarily bribe driven. (They still are; old habits die hard.) If you wanted to fix your abscessed tooth in the “free health care system” you better come up with two cartons of Kent and a box of Nescafé. It was all in plain sight with no pretense of a “system” at work. Yes the USA has corruption, Justice has inequality problems, free speech is not always free, etc., but the problem with your perspective is that it’s binary instead of looking at the gradient. You’re like “the USA has corruption, and iron curtain had corruption, therefore they’re the same”. That’s dishonest. The USA has a functioning system of Justice that protects substantial individual rights and freedoms. Just because it’s not perfect doesn’t make it equal to the abject lack of Justice and freedoms in iron curtain dictatorships.