Sometimes clicking on the fediverse button is worth it
Sometimes clicking on the fediverse button is worth it
"Muh Soviet in a supermarket" story in 2023? My comment was also about McDonald's in the USSR, so they're feeling super exceptionalist over fast food slop.
Link You can't see this through Hexbear because they were banned for racism, war crime apologism and ableism 
Meanwhile on Sunday I went to my local grocery store and they had no carts. They said they removed carts because people kept stealing by filling them up and walking out the door. I wandered around a few minutes and wasn't able to find much on my list because they were out of what I needed. And then I left without getting anything and ate out instead.
Sounds like capitalism grocery store isn't so good after all
Critical support for the capitalist grocery store for letting people have free food 🫡
Some shops here have started requiring you to surrender your photo ID to the customer service staff as collateral for a plastic hand basket. I actually couldn't believe it.
Communist theory is thousand page tomes. Liberal theory is a series of unverifiable anecdotes.
Excuse me but Harry Potter is not an anecdote.
There is actually a pretty sizeable corpus of liberal philosophy and theory, but it's not really meant for the average non-bourgeois lib, especially since those types of guys are generally pretty uncurious and operate mostly on vibes (and propaganda)
All the important foundational liberal economic theory was written before or during Marx's lifetime and Marx tore it to shreds. He dedicates tens of thousands of words and dozens of citations to discussing Adam Smith alone, and he actually kinda likes Adam Smith. All liberal economics since Marx has been lame attempts at repudiating or obfuscating the existence of surplus value, or class in general.
And likewise, there's plenty of propaganda for dumb communists too - it's called "work"
I see you've not lost your touch.
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yo this mf spittin straight fire you should write some books
Go on then, dismiss me with your hexbear memes and be gone.
So pouty
New tagline just dropped
context for the Supermarket
The great American supermarket lie
author of "Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race"
So while middle-class consumers enjoyed a bounty of cheap and convenient food, small farmers, farmworkers, low-income consumers and supermarket employees suffered to make it all possible. Instead of embodying the supposedly inherent superiority of capitalism, the supermarket demonstrated how it produced winners and losers.
WaPo published this????
As if liberals will bother reading anything about subjects they’re self-proclaimed experts in
Real choice is going into the cereal aisle in a grocery store and seeing eighteen different brands of HFCS all owned by the same company.
So many times when I go to the grocery store I end up thinking of the Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin's dad loses his shit over peanut butter
Commies say the dumbest shit
Okay guy who named themself after a Nazi warplane
Okay now do uninsured person from a former Soviet state trying to get health care
Always funny when someone thinks American Exceptionalism means America is exceptionally great
She was probably crying at the price
USSR: Supermarket items are a little basic, the interiors aren’t too ritzy, etc. but everyone is well fed and there wasn’t a horrifying system of exploitation that was needed to put food on the shelves. This is literally 1984.
‘Murica: one thousand flavors of sliced white bread brought to you by millions of suffering workers, plus they painted the interior green so it’s basically a luxury hotel. Behold, freedom and democracy!
I grew up in a family of colonial enforcers
I can't imagine why someone would include this information and expect anyone would take them seriously
Reminder that a lot of the food sitting on the shelves in pretty much any western grocery store is not even going to get sold but will just end up in a landfill.
That person hates communism so much holy shit. They're definitely clinging to "communism bad" to justify some fucked up shit in their life.
My favorite is when the non-bear link will have several times the comments but they're all trash.
I'm glad storm.front pre-emptively final resortedly defederated from us, because their comments are always by far the worst.
Stories that totally happened for $500, Alex
And that Soviet's name was Albert Einstein
And then the Navy Seals came out and clapped and a bald eagle flew through the store as the national anthem came on the speakers
In the unlikely chance this story is true then the reality is that yeah, someone coming from the Eastern bloc might initially be overwhelmed to tears by the illusion of choice provided by western supermarkets. Thats all thats going on though. Just being overwhelmed by the flashiness of it. That doesnt prove its a good thing or that capitalism is better.
We just had this discussion as well with the 'bananas under socialism' discourse.
You get choice because others don't.
Capitalism is wonderful! Look at all these cheap bananas for sale in the temperate zone! It's like magic with absolutely no externalized consequences!
The GDR imported some food items from Vietnam and other fraternity socialist countries. Those items were often not so well stocked in the FRG. You can ask around in urban centers after gentrification today would they rather have bananas only rarely but a flat that is theirs or bananas but no flat?
There was also a ton of propaganda spread to Eastern Bloc countries by the US and its allies, and there were obviously people who believed everything was better in the West. Parenti mentions this in Blackshirts and Reds as one of the biggest problems for AES countries.
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I always love how these are the same people who will scream how "anecdotal claims aren't evidence!"
Someone posted a bunch of pictures from the Soviet Union a while back. Their grocery stores looked just like grocery stores anywhere, except the Soviets apparently didn't give a fuck about facing (lining goods up to the front of the shelf) (they weren't wrong).
I remember my first job was in a CVS and I would spend 4 hours a day fronting and facing. I remember thinking that having hundreds of thousands of people wasting half their week facing was a social crime and that this time could have been better spent playing video games.
Despite not being 16 anymore, I stand by my analysis.
I was working in a workshops store room once and did order stuff so that you could easily access it, but also that you see how many are still there and if you have to re-order (so not facing if two lines were next to each other). One of my bosses was really angry at that and argued it looks nicer if it is done the other way. This did cost plenty of time we couldn't use for maintenance and led to equipment breaking down more often. There also were the days in which the bosses system (who also undid the markings we did for low stock count) lead to stuff we needed not being available. Yet he did pay two months salary of us for training for himself and conferences to know the latest in storage logistics and such and came back from them shit faced.
Capitalists, owners and bosses often work against the interests of the company, cherishing their control over other people's time for useless tasks. However unless in D/s this is involuntary and without consent this is a relationship that has to be surpassed.
"zoning"
someone who had been there for a while
"I've never seen so much food in my life"
So this lady who had been there for a while had... never been to a supermarket? But was showing a new lady the supermarket?
This shit isn't even believable if taken at face value
Has anyone noticed a huge uptick in libs saying the phrase "historical revisionism" in the last couple years? What drove this? Ukraine?
EDIT: Even google trends sees it
It's libs getting exposed to actual history for a change when mainstream narrations are getting a bit too cognitive dissonant, and they are violently refusing to acknowledge it instead of just ignoring like previously.
I bet you're right about Ukraine, since now they have to whitewash the Holocaust more and more, they must accuse people of doing a revisionism if they get called out on it or even to just keep their facade of righteousness going (No, it's the tankies who are wrong)
It might be that or there might be a specific incident that brought the word into mainstream use. Did Putin use it in any of his speeches about the war that the libs did huge campaigns about because they didn't want anyone to learn too much about the conflict and didn't like that he was giving a thorough background of events leading up to it?
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this is such classic cold war copium
ppl are still making tiktoks trying to grift with it, e.g. here's an alleged gusano going into an american walmart for the first time and being overwhelmed because "there are no eggs in cuba"
He was overwhelmed because he remembered Castro took away his grandpa's egg monopoly and that's why, to this day, there are no eggs in Cuba.
Curiously there are no videos about homeless people, shouldn't it be overwhelming to him that there are so many people living on the street in such an abundant and wealthy country? These are obvious grifts.
Unironically becoming more authoritarian every time I see another right wing person
I bet American supermarkets were better for the elites than soviet markets. That's kind of the point.
I bet American supermarkets were better for the elites than soviet markets. That's kind of the point.
Friends of mine did regularly break out in tears in Western supermarkets. Mostly cause we didn't have enough money to buy what we needed. I however only cried seldomly!
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and then SHE BURST OUT CRYING and EVERYONE CLAPPED
Stoned rant, coming through.
This is all nonsense, of course, but one thing stuck in my craw here. The weird idea that diplomatic staff were somehow sad to be there or unhappy with their conditions. This was a cushy position that people wanted. I don't know that capitalism supermarket is such a great draw to give that up. Sure, I'll be happy to leave my easy job to be just another Eastern European immigrant. Maybe make a side hustle as (very) minor celebrity dissident, if I manage to drawn enough attention. (
Actually, is there a list somewhere of famous "dissidents"? I'd love to see some data what their demographics are like.
A fucking shitjustworks poster arguing against this poster's shit? Wild.
there are comrades in unexpected places
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brought to tears by the sight of chunky and creamy peanut butter on the same shelf.
Isn't competition great uwaaaaaaaaa
because they were banned for racism, war crime apologism and ableism
every time
I remember when I broke down crying and shitting myself when the first supermarket opened in my city when I was 12. I was not able to cope with that so much that I remained bedridden for a year.
Yeah i remember this guy from his unhinged posts on lemmy. I don't think i ever seen a post by him i didn't downvoted or reported.
They've been clinging to this meme since the Boris Yeltsin story. I know a lot of people who immigrated from poverty-stricken nations and the supermarkets aren't the thing that they're having emotional reactions to. It's the relative safety they feel compared to their home countries. Being able to have an abundance of food is nice, but it's even nicer to take a walk without worrying that a street gang or cartel member will fuck you up for looking at them the wrong way.
UMMM I WAS A MILITARY BRAT AND I HAVE EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE BEING A BOURGEOIS FAILSON SO I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT
Aw what? There's a hidden layer of comments I can't see? How do I turn them all on?
You need to find an instance that federates with the posters from those instances and view the thread through it. lemmy.ml usually works for this.
Usually none of them are worth seeing.
I notice that in this story the Soviet lady did not inquire after the working conditions of the grocery workers or the people who harvested the produce or cared for/slaughtered the animals for meat, so what's actually going on is she's a fucking lib who needs to read theory
And yet today we see grocers shrinking their selections for more efficient supply chains and more negotiating power with suppliers. We also see grocers tailoring their produce selection based on what's more affordable to import rather than what's more nutritious or more tasty.
Really makes you think.