It was meant to mock anticommunists who deny evidence that is right in front of them, but I guess that I should have dropped a clearer hint that I was kidding. Anyway, I feel kind of guilty about making this thread now. I’ll go eliminate it.

Guess how many people I’ve converted.

Hint: the number is identical to my annual salary.

Many adults cling to Christianity because it can function as a crude coping mechanism in an uncaring society: the appeal of a higher power caring for someone is easy to see, and religious institutions in general can be convenient sources of community, especially for somebody trapped in an antisocial culture like the United States of America. I am irreligious yet I feel more comfortable revisiting a Presbertyrian church than approaching my own neighbors.

Liberation theology is not a desperate attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. For some Abrahamists, it simply feels natural or logical to them. I am willing to agree that theology of any sort is unnecessary for emacipating oneself, but it is—at best—a waste of time trying to convince somebody to discard it since they are already on our side and their spiritual beliefs are harmless. If their beliefs remain a big deal to you, though, then you need to understand that they are symptomatic and that addressing them directly would be the wrong approach to take.

Yes, the Church has frequently been complicit in colonialism. Yes, aggressive proselytization is always wrong. Nevertheless, we also need to acknowledge that many lower‐class Christians have rebelled against their oppressors despite mainstream Church teachings, and that they are reluctant to let go of their beliefs since they are convenient sources of comfort, not necessarily because they are worried about retaliation. Religion is a double‐edged sword. The ruling class has used it as an instrument of oppression, but that does not mean that it has never backfired either.

I work as a Jewish missionary and the funny thing is that my job would handle the exact same way in a people’s republic as it would elsewhere.

Name a single time that a school shooting happened in the United States.

There has never been a mass shooting in the United States of America.

See, if I wanted educate others on a serious subject like, say, the dozens of millions who died because of capitalism or anticommunism, what I wouldn’t do is put it in a meme format so that somebody could go ‘HURHUR FUNNAY!!’

Unlike anticommunists, I can’t find anything amusing in millions of innocent lives being wasted.

Doing a search on Google Books regarding Mussolini and the United States, I came across a good work titled The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe, which in turn lead me to Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, and I found copies thereof on Library Genesis.

You mean this?

That part was what really made me want to roll my eyes. How is any adult still gullible enough to fall for this crap?

Control of fertility is a precondition of women’s enjoying equal opportunities with men. Even if there are other constraints — lack of money or education, for example — effective birth control liberates them from the tyranny of unpredictable pregnancy. In invading the private sphere, [the Third Reich] tried to deny women self‐determination and choice by restricting access to birth control for ‘valuable’ women and by imposing birth control on the ‘worthless’.

While men were undoubtedly affected by these policies, Bock is right in saying that women were particular targets of both pronatalist and antinatalist […] policy because of their biological rôle as childbearers.

[…]

For the Fascists], abortion among the ‘valuable’ was a crime, and in 1933 the paragraphs of the Criminal Code which had been repealed in 1926 were reinstated in more Draconian form, punishing with a severe prison term both the woman undergoing an abortion and anyone assisting her. Nevertheless, a few abortions were permitted in the Third Reich where the life of a ‘valuable’ mother was at risk from a continuing pregnancy.

But most birth control advice centres were closed down in 1933 along with the political parties which sponsored them: the ‘Law for the Protection of the People and the State’ (28 February 1933) was invoked to close down ‘Marxist’ birth control centres (Noakes/Pridham: 1983: 142). Some survived for a time, precariously and in great secrecy.

(Source.)

For the past thirty years and more, abortion has been legal in Poland. Even before that, it was not totally banned; the Polish Penal Code of 1932 contain several exceptions to a general prohibition. If a total ban were introduced, therefore, it would contradict decades of practice, habits, and ways of thinking about the issue.

(Written in 1991. Source.)

One of the propaganda lies of the wealthy physicians who control the American Medical Association was neatly exposed by Congressman Andrew Biemiller of Wisconsin on July 13, 1950 (Congressional Record, page 10117):

There is the slander campaign against national‐health insurance which calls it socialized medicine despite the fact that the AMA well knows it is not socialized medicine at all. Part of this campaign is the attempt to use the completely discredited alleged quotation from Lenin that “socialized medicine is the keystone of the arch of the Socialist state.” The AMA has been called upon to either document or stop using that quotation, many, many times. Its officials have admitted that the quotation cannot be documented. Experts at both the Library of Congress and the University of Chicago have declared there is no such statement in the known works of Lenin. Yet the quotation continues to be used in published material, in public speeches, and in political assaults. The use of such falsehoods is typical of the AMA approach to issues of public health, and they can no longer be defended on the lame grounds of ignorance of the truth. They are willful perversions of the truth. (Italics are mine.—M.K.)

Isn’t there something monstrous about the idea that men of power and wealth will try to block much‐needed health insurance for the poor by dangling the scarecrow of a phoney Lenin quotation? And even if Lenin had said this, what would be its relevance forty or forty‐five years later? Must millions of Americans be barred forever from adequate medical care because of something Lenin wrote? How crazy can we become?

— Morris Kominsky, 1970

So? Nazareno Strampelli was (at least technically speaking) a Fascist yet it is fair to say that he was still more sufferable than nonfascists like Nikolai II, Theodor Herzl, and Patrice de MacMahon. Even if Ukraine’s militant anticommunists did not count as neofascists, it would not be enough to make them great people.

After I woke up I noticed that I only had half an hour left to meet my deadline and share something on /c/capitalismindecay. I had a couple of suggestions noted for the Conference of Wheat Exporting and Importing Countries and the Haʻavara Agreement, but the former looked insufficiently interesting and I had too little time left to research Haʻavara more, so I quickly scanned my schedule for a video, listened to three quarters of it, and chose that instead for my topic of the day. You can tell that it was a rush job because the message is shorter than usual.

I see that the rushing did not prevent its popularity, though.

I am irreligious, so to me this seems like a small waste of time, but if it actually helps with the morale then it isn’t my place to judge.

I promise that Russia will lose the war tomorrow.

It has been a while since I watched anybody try the first Call of Duty, but there were several instances where the Soviets shot retreaters, and I vaguely remember the Soviet missions depicting the ‘human wave’ stereotype in a few scenes. I’d have to watch a longplay to be sure. The Soviet missions were not nearly as angsty as Company of Heroes 2, but there were some irksome moments.