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Lenin betrayed the revolution. You mention the banning of the political parties. While it’s true that they “took up arms against Sovnarkom”, you’re leaving out the part where Lenin used Sovnarkom to coup the newly elected government because his party didn’t win.

Again, Lenin was flat out wrong. But I don’t think he ever actually cared about Russia ever reaching the true Marxist communist utopia. Lenin cared about power first and foremost.

He built up that dictatorship, and then handed it over to a monster.

Tried a bunch, but tried wrong.

The Lenin model of communism is inherently flawed for one simple reason. An Authoritarian Communism is an Impossibility. It cannot exist by pure definition.

The true ideal communism is a stateless utopia.

So yeah, the Lenin model is flawed to the point of uselessness. Or worse because any authoritarian government is going to kill its own citizens, while also being a low grade threat to neighboring countries.

No. The only path to true communism is via democracy. And there are countries that are moving in that direction.

Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.

Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.

Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.

After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.

It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.

STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.

Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.

Changing the voting system so that third parties are actually possible.

You need a cardinal voting system, otherwise you’ll fall prey to Durverger’s Law and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.

I favor STAR, it’s the best system designed to date.

X-Men has always been the anti-status quo option…

But now that they’re part of Disney, you can expect the next appearance to be more pro-status quo.

The main reason to electroplate things in gold is that corrosion resistance.

The thinner the coating, the better. Mostly because gold isn’t a very good conductor.

Copper is one of the best conductors available. But the corrosion is the problem. It’s nonconductive.

Also a fun fact. Stainless steel is a better conductor than gold. But gold is slightly easier to use in electroplating.

As anyone who has lived in a Rocky Mountain town can say, Distant bullies are pretty bad too.

But that’s a sort of unique situation. Or it was until Reagan. See, the entire Rocky Mountain range is treated as a sort of internal colony.

Resources are extracted, but the people who own the companies doing the extraction all pretty much live on one of the coasts.

And then every store is also owned by someone who lives on one of the coasts.

This means that any real wealth produced in those states, quickly leaves those states.

A lot of towns in the area never really had a “down town” in the first place, and with the creation of Walmart and such, no one else gets a downtown either.

The answer of course is a bigger government. But it has to be free of corporate influence.

Which might just take a very big government. Like expanding the House and Supreme Court big.

Both are desperately needed.

Most of them were barely old enough to be fathers. Sure you had a few old guys, but most of the idea men were in their 20s or early 30s.

The Texas way. This lawsuit is pure SLAPP. Texas does not have an anti-SLAPP law, and Musk went judge shopping for this specific asshole.

It’s already happened once.

The Big Mike banana was super popular until the 1950s, when a fungal infection basically wiped them out. (they’re still grown in a few places, but are super susceptible to infection)

So, the banana growers switched over to the Cavendish banana. It was resistant to the fungus.

But the days of the Cavendish were always numbered because of how they’re grown. A seedless banana can only grow via cuttings. Which is how they’ve been grown since the beginning. Every single banana on the shelf at your local supermarket is genetically identical. They’ve been identical since the 50s, and the fungus has adapted to them. Worse still, the particular fungus that’s now attacking the Cavendish cultivar is extremely resistant to fungicides.

So yeah, without some sort of massive shift in genetic diversity, the Banana will no longer be a thing in Central America. Do note, that the banana is not a native plant in the Americas, and is cultivated widely in Southeast Asia. So yeah, the Banana will not go extinct, but it will vanish from American and European stores.

Giuliani was always obsessed with being in the spotlight. Their was a joke in the early 2000s that said the most dangerous place in NY city after 9/11 was anywhere between Giuliani and a camera.

The only thing that changed was that he’s gotten older, and less able to spin a narrative.

That’s basically the entire republican plan. It’s all spelled out in Project 2025. Literally replacing the entire government with Trump loyalists, and military tribunals for anyone who cannot be directly fired and replaced. Trump has even said that Mitch McConnell is going to be tried in front of a military tribunal.

As a note here, military tribunal means no due process, and no defense. Just straight to the guilty verdict and death penalty.