The Western bourgeoisie are the inheritors of the unchecked great resentments, fears, and traumas of all of humanity. Patriarchy. Ownership. Paranoia. Empire. War. The West has developed these in an essentially unbroken process from the cradle of humanity. It is the pinnacle of our collective trauma as a species. Every other society that also had some or all of these was forced to confront their own inner demons when they met the Westerners. It is only th West who has not yet met the West.

Precolonial non-European societies had sports. The precolonial societies of what we call the Americas had sports. The precolonial societies of what we call Australia has sports.

It is useful to have the concept of a winner when you are trying to promote excellence of a capability that inheres in the individual. Running is a great example. There’s a reason why running has individual competitions and group competitions. The sinple foot race promotes excellence of an individual capability in all that participate, raising the level of the capability for the whole group while having an individual winner in any given competition. But the relay race has teams that win, not individuals because the problem being solved is a combination of individual excellence and excellence in communion.

Problem solving competitions are far better as team competitions than group competitions. There is a winning team, but no individualism. But, for problem solving competitions, even the losers can produce novel solutions that benefit everyone after the competition.

There are plenty of “games” that are fully cooperative and simply have a shared objective. Hunting big game is a classic problem, but the stakes are high so high that you need similar games/play to build up the skills. For this games you create a single shared objective and everyone is on the same team attempting to achieve it. Sometimes the single team is opposed to a single person or small group who are tasked with making the objective harder, as in a “find the mcguffin” style game where the elders hide the mcguffin. But sometimes games like this can ALSO be broken into teams for competition - orienteering competitions come to mind. Which team can hit the objective fastest? Similar to a relay race, while there are teams competing, they are not competing like on a football pitch.

It’s ableism to believe that team sports are limited only to the temporarily abled. Team sports are enjoyed by people across a WIDE spectrum of ability and disability.

Your tribalism point literally has nothing to do with playing a sport and everything to do with fandoms. Most people who have played sports know this, hence my derisive comment.

CTE happens to people who play sports where heads get knocked. What does that have to do with anything we’re talking about? What a ridiculous bullet point. At this point you’re just spraying and praying that just saying stuff will give you a win. Competitive much?

Arm wrestling is literally a competitive sport. People have been doing it for centuries, it developed rules and techniques, people train for it so they can compete, and eventually leagues have formed to recognize excellence in the sport.

Competition always exists is nothing like it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. In the latter, it’s a problem to solve and people are so immersed in the problem they think it’s impossible. In the former it’s literally built into the hormonal reward circuits of humans and many other animals. Play is crucial and competitive play is a form of play. Foot races are competitive.

You remember being told during nursery how to excel at a given task? Do you remember being told it’s important to wash your hands before eating, or that it’s important to clear your work area before painting, or that it’s important to hold the drum stick just so in order to bang on things to make noise?

Hell, throwing the ball in from the line isn’t even much of a competitive action. I would have thought you would say “I remember in nursery they told me to keep track of the score and make sure my team was winning”, but no, your example isn’t even about competition it’s about performance, excellence, etc.

I see you’ve never played a competitive sport.

The tribalism you talk about is branding and fandoms. Competition will always exist. People will arm wrestle, people will have contests to see who can do something better than others.

Under communism we will still have sports.

Wouldn’t it have to be sundawater?

Hope is useless. What we need is courage.

You’re fighting a losing battle. We all are. And yet the future will be secure.

And if it won’t be, would you rather have had courage?

Courage. Courage in the face of it. Not hope. Courage. We will prevail, not through hope, but through courage. We will win, not through hope, but through courage.

The people who create the conditions for winning will never see the winning. They will probably never be close to seeing the winning. They will probably never be close enough to hope.

The people who create the conditions of the future, they will create those conditions through courage without hope.

Absolutely, but Lenin also died only a decade after the revolution. There was so much more to learn from the first national experiment in socialism that he did not have chance to observe let alone write about.

My point to the OP was to acknowledge the limits on Lenin that were imposed on him by time itself and to read later writers to understand how Marxism-Leninism advanced beyond Lenin’s writings, and indeed where it has not yet advanced beyond his writings, as so much of what he wrote is still sound and applicable to the world today.

One thing to note that Mao expounded up on was that, prior to the Bolshevik revolution, it was thought that the process of socialism becomes easier after the revolution eliminates the bourgeoisie through land reform (eliminating the legal basis for private property) based on the idea that there would be no class from which reaction could be renewed.

This turned out to be wrong in practice and it wasn’t until after the Bolshevik revolution that we learned this. In fact, reaction becomes stronger after the revolution, not weaker.

So yes, if you read Lenin and don’t read Mao, you will see obvious contradictions between Lenin’s writings and the real course of history.

By withholding judgment, choosing to read the history of that place instead of the news, reading news representing as many ideological perspectives as possible, and engaging in discourse with others who are doing the same.

It takes a lot of effort to arrive at accurate conclusions and it’s never guaranteed.

1. Is meaningless. It’s been a couple months of future funding being frozen. The existing grants, the leadership, and the entire history of the org is tainted by being funded by the “soft power” arm of the US government. Just to note, the state department is the department that employed hundreds of people to flood Twitter in various languages in influence campaigns.
2. I don’t see any references to documents from Russia in the article or it’s second level links. Can you link me?
3. You can’t count children nor observe brainwashing via satellites.

Just a reminder that the US has been brainwashing it’s 100 million children for over a century through propaganda riddled public school curriculum. So the accusation that Russia is providing children with a basic education that includes things the US would find objectionable is actually more than I would expect Russia to do to take care of those kids.

That lab is funded by the US State Dept, so it makes sense to not risk your journalistic integrity on US propaganda

The stated reason is a total red herring. It’s a first step, among what will likely be several, to stop brain drain.

Uh, yes. Wikipedia is biased. There’s an entire cadre of editors on the payroll of the CIA and they have thoroughly infiltrated that organization to manage narrative.

That can’t really happen due to the problem of presenting evidence in public that would expose counterintelligence practices to a larger audience. This is sort of like resecting a cancerous tumor - you have to cut out not only the tumor but also some healthy tissue around the tumor to ensure you got all of the tumor. The risk of not doing so is that the cancer will return, whereas the risk in doing so is some healthy tissue that didn’t deserve it got destroyed.

As much as we want it to be true, it’s just not the case that a single unjust execution is reason to leave violent spy rings operational.

Hmmm. What could possibly have caused an increase in executions in July?

Could it be that enemy spies and their collaborators activated various capabilities and networks and revealed themselves and are now being rounded up and executed?

No, it must be that the evil theocracy is barbaric and bloodthirsty.

What propaganda? They have said for decades they won’t attack Taiwan and look at that, they haven’t attacked Taiwan. What exactly am I supposed to believe? That despite all the evidence to the contrary, China really wants to attack Taiwan?

Only fools would believe the incessantly lying US war machine that has lied for decades about its reasons for war, its plans for war, and its opponents. When China says it’s going to do something, it seems pretty clear that it goes and does that thing. China has been crystal clear about not using military force to end the decades of estrangement from Taiwan that the West enforced on the Chinese people with gun boats.

If you still think you can trust something that both Nancy Pelosi and Pete Hegseth agree on, I may have a bridge to sell you.

That’s because China has been saying for decades that they have no interest in invading Taiwan. And that’s because they know that invading Taiwan, even with an overwhelming military victory, will not achieve their aim. Taiwan will adopt the 1 nation 2 systems structure through a peaceful process or not at all. China has been saying this over and over again. The only people talking about invasion are the US and the only time China talks about military action on Taiwan is to stop the US from deploying significant military capabilities. Which means, that if the US doesn’t want China to invade, all it has to do is stop trying to build up its military capabilities on the island.

China lifted 800 million peasants out of abject poverty. In fact, China accounts for nearly ALL of the world’s net positive poverty alleviation in the last 50 years, as capitalist countries have produced more poor people over that time.