The brave Tianamen Square posters here envision themselves as their mythological ideal of Tank Man, which they invented without so much as even watching the video of the guy and the tank.

The things they get right (e.g., actively opposing bigotry) you don’t find in many other places, and the things they get wrong (e.g., major changes without community input) happen everywhere. Like an AES state in miniature.

Our informative well-sourced arguments, their propagandistic walls of text

If “hardcore leftist” is defined as “left of Joe Biden,” then sure. Within that group there are a wide range of opinions.

$30 per quarter pound

The second sentence of the article gives $30 as the unsubsidized price of one pound of hamburger meat, not 1/4 pound. You have to read it more carefully if you want to get into the details.

Setting aside the details for a minute, how would a subsidy of only pennies on the dollar even be plausible? One purpose of agricultural subsidies is to stabilize prices; pennies on the dollar can’t do that.

The transitory period of New Economic Policy lasted only a few years in USSR

Who’s to say that’s the best length of time for a transitory period, in all countries? Why are you sure you’re right and China’s leadership is wrong? If the USSR could allow limited private control of businesses for a time and then revoke that, why can’t China?

Note that Mao himself was far from strictly opposed to private ownership of capital, at least as long as the national bourgeoisie did not seek to undermine the socialist project:

In our country, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie comes under the category of contradictions among the people. By and large, the class struggle between the two is a class struggle within the ranks of the people, because the Chinese national bourgeoisie has a dual character. In the period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, it had both a revolutionary and a conciliationist side to its character. In the period of the socialist revolution, exploitation of the working class for profit constitutes one side of the character of the national bourgeoisie, while its support of the Constitution and its willingness to accept socialist transformation constitute the other. The national bourgeoisie differs from the imperialists, the landlords and the bureaucrat-capitalists. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods. However, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie will change into a contradiction between ourselves and the enemy if we do not handle it properly and do not follow the policy of uniting with, criticizing and educating the national bourgeoisie, or if the national bourgeoisie does not accept this policy of ours.

That said, price-wise, real meat will have to become very very expensive before lab-grown meat will be competitive.

At least in the U.S., meat production/pricing is heavily subsidized.

There are historical examples of completely and actually socialist countries

Such as?

The point about Norway wasn’t that it’s socialist (it’s not). The point was that Norway’s low rate of poverty and generous social supports come directly from parts of the economy that are publicly owned.

The notion that a country’s entire economy must be under public control otherwise it’s not Real Socialism is too idealistic. China in 1949 was a late-feudal/pre-industrial country that had just been through a century of colonial invasions and civil wars. It needed to attract capital and expertise in pretty much every field, and it needed to build an effective, modern administrative state. How was it supposed to do all of that at once, wholly through the government? The Soviets ran into the same problem and the result was the New Economic Policy, which, like China today, involved markets and some private ownership, but ultimately subjected both to real state control. You need a transitory period to go from pre-revolutionary society to whatever your vision of Real Socialism is.

For me, China is socialist because the state is ran to the benefit of the working class (see massive poverty alleviation), that state really does control the capitalist class, and China seems to be doing more of both as time goes on.

Killing another human is an issue no matter what it is.

Killing a healthcare CEO is no different than killing a mass shooter. In fact it’s better, judging by the number of people each harms.

You said:

China is capitalist… It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one.

The response was a well-souced refutation of the idea that the Chinese economy is developing like a capitalist economy. You replied with Wikipedia. All I’m saying is that you’re not looking at this in a whole lot of detail and you might have some things to learn.

For instance, you say Nordic countries have low rates of poverty and good social supports despite private ownership of the means of production. But in reality a lot of that is due to sovereign wealth funds, like Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, which is owned by the government and managed by a state-owned bank.

What makes you right and a bunch of people who actually live in China wrong?

Love how you respond to a bunch of information from the World Bank, NYT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research with a definition from Wikipedia.

Consider that you could learn more here.

Effective at what, effective for whom?

You don’t get to keep your weapons when you surrender. It’s just not an accurate summation of the situation. The big difference between surrendering to an opponent vs. agreeing to a ceasefire is that with a ceasefire you can re-start fighting at some point.

Hezbollah surrendering without a ceasefire in Gaza

I don’t think they surrendered to anyone – they just negotiated a ceasefire between them and Israel. Bad, but they’re not off the board like Syria.

Assad won’t really be missed for anything but his compliance in transporting weapons to Lebanon.

Who knows what information Hezbollah had about the impending collapse of Syria that we didn’t have? Who knows how that impacted their ceasefire decision?

things that fall off the police radar or weren’t getting any attention

Think of all the murders that happen in large American cities that don’t get anywhere near the police attention as this one.

The worst would be getting a bunch more people killed and then still losing

I don’t understand how so many Americans buy the “North Korea is a cartoonish dictatorship” line so easily. It’s obvious that you can make up any story about it, no matter how outlandish, and the media will just print it uncritically.

It’s like a kid making up crazy stories about their cousin. The kid is full of shit half the time – you don’t believe the other half, you conclude that nothing that kid has to say about his cousin is reliable.

As a result of Yoon’s enhanced role in U.S. military strategy in Asia, the disgraced president has been the darling of the think tanks and Korea “experts” in the U.S. capital. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell has even suggested that Yoon should get a Nobel Peace Prize for putting aside Korean differences with Japan to make the trilateral alliance work.

Is there even one foreign leader the U.S. likes who is actually decent?

Yet even as the United States backs Yoon’s stance on North Korea, the enhanced ties between the Pentagon and the South Korean Army, coupled with memories of what happened in Gwangju 44 years ago, is an explosive combination. Many Koreans remember that after Chun’s coup and the slaughter in Gwangju, President Jimmy Carter directed the Pentagon to help the Korean martial law command crush the uprising by sending an aircraft carrier and advanced reconnaissance aircraft to monitor the actions of the Korean troops dispatched to the city from the Combined Forces Command. After assisting Chun to reassert military control over the country, South Korea suffered seven more years of authoritarian rule.

Even in the most generous possible reading, the South Korean government has been a straight-up U.S. puppet for much of its history.