It’s not whataboutism, the protests are literally created by western-manufactured poverty, the US has admitted as much. Remember that the sanctions on Cuba are justified with the following:
“to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. I’m quoting official US memos here.
You don’t need to know much about Iran at all to know for a fact that US intervention will make it worse, you just need to look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Palestine, and every other “repressive dictatorship liberated by US efforts” to see the consequences of invasion.
The protests in Iran are happening because people are literally dying due to impoverishment caused by western sanctions causing the local currency to implode. Focusing only on the government reaction during a period of military buildup Against Iran amounts to atrocity propaganda, however well-meaning your intentions are. It’s meant to create mixed feelings about the invasion amongst progressives “look at how dictatorial they are”
How many people have died in Iran as a consequence of western sanctions since their currency exchange value plummeted? Remember, EU+US sanctions murder HALF A MILLION PEOPLE YEARLY
But why leave the building initiative in the hands of the market+tax instead of just collectively making political decisions about what gets built where?
I agree, that’s why we all should condemn the western sanctions that made the local currency collapse and led people to starvation and violence
Why not remove the concept of landlords altogether then? Collectivizing the lands would be an even more complete version of land tax
I don’t think most people here have any problem with collectively owned computing such as torrenting or SETI@home. The problem are private companies.
Rolling averages are used to smooth-out graphs with high-frequency noise. Since measuring the stabbings per month only gives you some 50 stabbings on average, maybe one month you’d get 30 and the next month 70 due to stochastic reasons, and so to make the graph smoother and more readable and long-term trends more visible, you can do a rolling average.
As for the “starting in 600”, that’s common practice and it’s good as long as the axes are properly labelled, which they are.
Isn’t the outcome the important thing? Like, clearly fewer people are dying/being hospitalized by knife attacks, isn’t that ultimately the relevant metric?
If it wasn’t for that we would either be homeless or be all living in my grandparents’ house
Or you could become tenants from a wholesome small landlord! I wonder why that wasn’t in your possibilities?
Are we the assholes if we rent our house in order not to force my parents to work 200 hours a week since salaries here barely reach 800€ a month?
So the people renting your apartment will be the ones working 200 hours a week instead? The lifestyle of your parents depends on other people paying them rent and you still can’t understand why private rent is theft?
what we need is strong national regulation, not banning renting houses altogether
The “stronger national regulation” needed is the expropriation of rented housing to a collectively owned rent organization, and the masse-construction of affordable housing for social rent, and the rent of all of this housing stock at production+maintenance costs.
To be clear: most people would do what you’re doing in your situation. But the fact that your family is escaping overwork and poverty through renting one of their flats simply means that another poor person who can’t afford to buy a flat is subsidizing their lifestyle. It’s not that your family are intrinsically evil people, it’s that private rent is exploitative by its very nature.
And how exactly will they purchase a home in Ukraine if they’re spending their income to pay your mortgage?
You can blabber all you want about the great leap forward, the fact still stands that Mao liberated China and Korea from Japanese occupation, removed the fascists of the Kuomintang, and doubled life expectancy. Mistakes happened, but his mandate was still overwhelmingly positive and material life prospects bloomed as a result. How many people died of starvation in China during Maoism, and how many in India in the corresponding period?
You can spread your anticommunist propaganda as much as you want, I gave you numbers and facts.
the government would also have to pay for it. That means rising taxes
Not necessarily. The government literally prints the money with which workers can be paid, there’s no need to increase taxes to pay for such housing. Modern monetary theory is cool!
But at the moment, we are quite far from that. I’d already be pretty happy if the government would stop selling their governmental buildings
Yes, we’re far, but that doesn’t make reformist measures more likely, they’re impossible to carry out without huge worker organizing through unions and socialist parties.
He didn’t starve tens of millions, millions of people starved yearly in China before Mao since it was a preindustrial country. Mao found a China with below 30 years of life expectancy, and left a China with 55+ years of life expectancy, Chinese communism literally saved tens of millions of lives in that era if you compare it to comparably developed countries such as India
Currents aren’t drawn incorrectly. Electrons do move backwards, but since their electric charge is negative, the current goes the correct way.
They also had an incredibly corrupt and repressive society
I’ve yet to find any serious study talking of “widespread corruption” in the USSR compared to countries of equal level of development. This is entirely vibes-based.
the poor struggled paid most of their income to basic necessities and the rich paid hardly anything
Income inequality was the lowest in the USSR in the history of the region, by a long shot. Again, you’re making stuff up:
housing in desirable areas and cities are hardly abundant
Yes, but housing was primarily accessed through the work union. Housing near a factory went to the workers of said factory, people mainly got to live near where they worked.
You wanted off the waiting lists, you had to bribe someone
Again, as if bribes don’t happen in capitalism. In capitalism, you don’t “bribe” someone to get a house, you’re just poor enough not to afford it and you rent for life instead. Waiting lists, while unpleasant, are the more egalitarian solution. How else do you propose distribution of limited housing in a rapidly industrializing country that’s moving tens of millions of people from the countryside to cities?
But I mean, yeah if you wanted to be miner in Siberia and live in a shack housing was cheap. Not so much if you wanted to live Moscow or St Petersberg
Care to share any of that wonderful data about housing prices in Soviet Leningrad or Moscow? Regardless: your analogy of “being a miner in Siberia” is dumb. Lifestyle in the countryside and in smaller cities was highly subsidized, but that’s a good thing. Now hospitals are closed, roads aren’t maintained, and schools are left underfunded everywhere outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, making life especially in non-Slavic regions of Russia much worse than it used to be. It’s not that people want to move to Moscow, it’s that there are no jobs or infrastructure outside three big cities, and that’s really bad for many people. I don’t see what you have against living in relatively minor cities like Murmansk, Ulan-Ude or Tomsk, provided there are jobs and infrastructure (which there were).
The many recent examples of mucipalities and states passing regulatory policies to improve rent under capitalism
Can you tell me generally big examples of places where this has happened and things have gotten better? As a European, the only cases I know of are the Berlin referenda for rent caps and expropriation, and both have had no lasting effect because higher courts have sabotaged them and declared them illegal (I don’t understand how a referendum can be illegal).
the total constructed of 2,900,000,000 sq m
Are you sure this is flat-area and doesn’t need to get multiplied by number of flats per building?
So, build the housing socially by legal mandate. Only in capitalism “housing is too cheap” can be a bad thing
Believe me, I’m a communist, there’s nothing I wish more for Iran than a secular socialist government, land reform, LGBTQ and women’s rights, economic equality… Unfortunately, the west destroyed their most recent chance at this with the total sanctioning and military intervention against Mosaddeq, because British Petroleum’s interests in the region were more important than the lives of Iranians. CIA paying mafias to perform protests against the government, MI6 paying actors to destroy private property and pretend they were communists, military blockade of petroleum exports… The whole suite.
This is why I reject so much further western meddling. If Iran is to have a socialist government, it will be by itself without meddling, and the point of focus from the west should be, IMO, preventing sanctions and military action against the Iranian people. However bad the Iranian government is currently, the only alternative for now from what I see is ISIS or Israel, and neither is better, it’s the sad truth of geopolitics.