I was going to say radicalism (as a political concept) refers to the practice of looking for the root causes of society’s ills as opposed to merely fixating on (if we’re going to be charitable about it) superficial ones as reformist and reactionary politics would have us to do, and this makes radicalism an inherently left-wing thing and something reactionaries (and most of their reformist allies) will take extreme measures to prevent - including completely handing the state and it’s repressive apparatus over to reactionaries (ie, what we call fascism today).

But you know what? This…

Radical is just further left than reformer.

…is, so far, the only half-way decent response I’ve ever had to this in about five year’s time - so I’m just going to leave it as is.

I mean I guess I could use the Victoria 3

Is that one better than the cheap one CNN (and you) are using?

Should you be using terms if you don’t actually know what they mean?

If we can recycle single use plastic into this, then great.

They won’t - they’ll just use “Recycling!” as a pretext to continue business as usual… which was the whole point of “Recycling!” in the first place.

TLDR - somebody writes a wall of text about “radicalization” without understanding what the term radicalization even means.

Tell me you don’t know what the term radical means without telling me you don’t know what the term radical means.

America has always rejected fanaticism

Right… the country that literally perfected white supremacism has “always rejected fanaticism” - I guess in your book rejecting white supremacism counts as fanaticism, then?

Nor did I ever mention NASA nor make a judgment on which group was morally superior.

Oh, you didn’t have to - you just stepped in to help on of your fellow libs do a bog-standard and thinly-veiled “Jewish-Bolshevism” jig - that is all.

Aaaaaand…

It’s not terribly surprising that both NASA and the USSR space program did awful things to animals.

…the backpedalling begins.

Not very unpredictable, methinks.

And rushed it so bad they didn’t have fundamental tech that was applicable to a wider economy

I hate to break it to you, Clyde - but the central technologies developed by the space race was “applicable to a wider economy” on both sides of the Cold War. The USSR had weather and communications satellites, too - unless you want to argue that those served no economic purpose to the USSR, perhaps?. Perhaps you are a bit too dazzled by all the anciliary stuff that dominates your consumerist fantasies? I’m sure you believe NASA’s handheld vacuum cleaners made capitalism better for all the people that didn’t get to live the middle-class WASP dream thanks to the New Deal… but it really didn’t.

Handing off publicly-funded research and development to be used as a means of private profiteering for the capitalist class at the expense of everyone else (including you) is simply the way the US has always done technology - pretending that the USSR not doing the same is somehow a “flaw” is peak neoliberalism.

Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life.

I guess it’s a good thing that NASA wasn’t very forthcoming with their animal experimentation, eh? I wonder if the outcry would have been the same?

Yeah… sounds like Tuesday to me.

Khrushchev also ordered Leonid Brezhnev to head an investigation commission and go to the site.[11] Among other things, the commission found that many more people were present on the launch pad than should have been—most were supposed to be safely offsite in bunkers.

When Brezhnev arrived at the firing range on 25 October 1960, he said: “Comrades! We do not intend to put anyone on trial; we are going to investigate the causes and take actions to recover from the disaster and continue operations”

Afterwards, when Nikita Khrushchev asked Yangel, “But why have you remained alive?”, Yangel answered in a trembling voice, “Walked away for a smoke. It’s all my fault”. Yangel later suffered a heart attack and was off work for months.

After all… we can’t pretend thay the “Jewish-Bolshevist horde” would actually value human life now, can we? What would Reagan say?

Nah, I like my version better.

Yeah, you do, because you’re an edgy liberal self-applying the term “socialist” without understanding what it means because you desperately want to distance yourself from your capitalist and fascist brethren while still buying into the same beliefs they hold on to.

It’s well known that horrible things happened to animals during the Russian space program.

Yes… “everybody” knows that the “Jewish-Bolshevist horde” couldn’t possibly have an ounce of human compassion for animals, isn’t it?

But hold on there before you start calling for another go at “lebensraum,” Clyde - let’s first check who it is that you are actually comparing them to, shall we?

You sound like a liberal

Stop projecting, liberal - I’m not the one jerking off Cold War propaganda here. You are.

but they were bad at building fundamental tech.

Yeah, they were so bad at it that they ended up in space first. Just absolutely terrible.

Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life.

Show us your proof, PragerU fan.

It wasn’t built in a way where successes could be leveraged for more successes.

So the Soviet Union launching Sputnik had absolutely nothing to do with them successfully landing Venera 7 on the surface of Venus?

Absolutely nothing at all, eh?

Strange how your right-wing friends at the RAND corporation didn’t share your Ben Shapiro-level shittakes about the Soviet space program.

capitalism was able use space technology to improve the lives of the working class capitalist parasites better than a supposedly communist system did.

FTFY.

Also, learn what the word “irony” means.

As far as I’m aware, the USSR started importing grain in the 60s - primarily to feed livestock as meat became a regular thing for Soviet citizens.

It’s not just that… thanks to the USSR we have technologies that wouldn’t have even existed if it was left up to the capitalists. Such as synthetic diamonds and… you know - anything and everything to do with space.

Sure, when you can force the workforce to do a thing,

Yeah… turns out that homelessness is a great motivator.

But they’ll probably do it slower than if they chose to do it.

Soooo… just like wage slaves, eh?

food production, basic manufacturing

After 1947 there was no great problems with food production in the USSR. Still… you’re not really wrong. The capitalist mode of production does offer a feedback system for consumer goods - even though it’s a pretty terrible one that only works as long as the capitalists have to compete for a well-paid populace’s buying power.

I’d say it’s more apt to think of capitalism as a parasite that turns all the functions (as you described them) of an organism into something that induces self-destructive behavior that only serves the short-term goals of the parasite - you know, like Cordyceps fungi.

Nope. In a hundred years, bog-standard trains will still be a far superior idea.

Man, I am so glad I didn’t turn into that - my extended family actually like having me around.

stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies

The reason they only had reverse-engineered copies is because the bigwigs at the CPSU decided that the workers didn’t need personal computers, despite the fact that all the computer research facilities in the USSR (of which there were plenty) recommended that they do.

If the USSR had thrown it’s weight behind personal computing we could have had some interesting shit.

Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s.

I remember those fondly.

It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no?

You’re talking about capitalist organisations here… there’s nothing about them that isn’t short-sighted.

The raw files probably take up a few CDs’ worth of space for the entire run of the magazine.

Nope… just one cover page probably takes something around 300mbs at a minimum and could be a whole lot larger depending on the quality of the imagery used (if I remember my time in the printing/publishing industry correctly) Storage of already printed material in those days was always an afterthought.

Do they retain the files forever?

Highly unlikely - a lot of the storage just got dumped at one point or the other since there was really little reason (profit wise) to return to anything at all. There might still be an old Mac sitting around somebody’s garage or backyard which still contains the stuff, but I won’t be holding any hope out for that. There’s always the chance that some employee still has the disks somewhere (you’d be amazed at how necessary it could be have proof that you actually did work somewhere and actually did work on this or that specific thing - the bosses were notoriously petty), and I suspect that’s how a lot of stuff ends up on places like archive.org.

The corporates themselves don’t give a shit - as soon as the profits roll in, it’s all expendable as far as the overpaid geniuses in the fancy offices are concerned.

Getting blamed for their incompetence was the task.