• CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Growing up in Eastern Europe I had a romanticised picture of USA and I always wished I grew up there.

    Only until years later I realised how privileged I was not having to worry about the student debt, medical insurance and gun violence…

    • Xariphon@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s true. Everything we were told would happen if we lost the Cold War happened anyway, done to us from within.

      • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tfOP
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        1 year ago

        Most of it was already happening and only stopped because people were inspired by “The Reds” as they called them and started the labor movement.

    • BB69@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yes I’m sure the Soviet tenements were much more comfortable than the average American household.

      • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tfOP
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        1 year ago

        Well the vast majority of citizens of former Soviet states sure preferred them to what they have now, but they were definitively more comfortable than the thousands of Hoovervilles we were building at the same time the Soviets were building those tenements. And infinitely more so than the thousands of Hoovervilles we have now.

        • BB69@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          “Thousands” of Hoovervilles?

          Wanna post a source proving that’s a thing?

          • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tfOP
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            1 year ago

            There’s dozens in every major city in the country, even at a time when police are constantly storming camps and trashing everything. There’s more in western states as they migrate west, but they’re all across the US.

            https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tent_cities_in_the_United_States

            There’s nearly 100 cities listed right there, and I can name nearly 100 more myself. There’s an estimated 300,000 unhoused people in the U.S., where do you think they sleep? Under the bridges, in industrial parks, up in national parks. Some are even visible from space! Go look in city subreddits, and see how many people complain about the issue of encampments.

            • BB69@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              And that’s less than the amount of people in the Soviet Union who lived in tenements? You think there was an option to do anything besides that in the USSR? You could rise out of that and own your own home?

              And that’s not “thousands” either.

              At best your list is, what, 50? You use an anecdote that you see tent cities? Well here’s mine, I don’t see more than one or two.

              • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tfOP
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                1 year ago

                Tbh I’m done talking with you. You seem rather content to allow people to live in the streets, and that’s not the kind of person I want to waste my time with on this site. I’ll leave you with this though; do you think that these people living on the streets would rather live in a public housing project or in the shanty towns they have now? Do you think the Soviet citizens would rather have lived in Stalinkas, or in the burned out ruins of their cities? Soviet tenements were a response to millions of homeless and displaced people after a war that killed millions of their citizens and destroyed much of their resources. So what if their public housing was a little shitty, at least they had it. What’s the excuse for the US to have hundreds of thousands of its citizens living in the street?

                • BB69@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Never said I was ok with homelessness. But making Soviet ghettos seem like puppies and rainbows isn’t the answer.

                  Show me somebody who does have an answer for homelessness. China doesn’t. There’s an estimated 3.5 million homeless Chinese, versus the estimated 582k Americans. How about 271k in the UK? Non governmental sources in modern day Russia estimate over 3 million homeless, and that’s with a constitutional right to shelter.

                  So target the US, but by population, the homelessness issue isn’t nearly as bad as other nations.

  • Hextic@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That’s why you should show up to protests armed. Either they leave your ass alone cuz they’re afraid or they abolish 2nd amendment.

    • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tfOP
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      1 year ago

      If there’s anything I’ve learned from history, it’s that the police will allow Nazis to strut around with rifles, threaten violence, and sometimes even actually enact violence, but as soon as minorities follow suit, they change the laws.

      The largest successful gun control measure in the US was spearheaded by Governor Ronald Reagan in response to the Black Panther Community Policing efforts, which were widely successful in reducing police violence and false arrests in black communities in California. I’m all for what they call in The Grapes of Wrath “Turkey Shoots”, but just be aware that you can expect the rules to change as soon as you do if you’re part of a marginalized group.