I’d recommend considering using Balabolka as a TTS generator because if you go to Tools > Use online TTS service you can select IBM Watson as the TTS engine (and it bypass the word limit restrictions.)
I think that Michael is my preferred TTS option for Watson but it’s been a while. Whatever the case, Watson is far and away the most listenable TTS that I’ve come across.
Lmk if you want screenshots because the Balabolka UI is a bit clunky.
The past tense is in reference to the historical event, it doesn’t refer to the present state of Finland’s economy.
If someone had a post titled: “How Trump caused a rift within liberalism in the US” the past tense would not imply that Trump no longer exists or that he is no longer a politician, it would simply be referring to the political rift as a historical event.
It’s like I’d color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.
It’s strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.
If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?
Probably not.
Would you say that the swastika isn’t a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?
Maybe. I can’t speak for you.
The origin of something doesn’t determine its usage.
Can I offer you some Belgian chocolate [CW: disfigurement, discussions of racism] in these trying times?
I challenged this notion with a lib the other day.
The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn’t mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.
You can also look to the origin and continuing usage of the swastika, especially in Asian cultures, as another example here - you aren’t going to tell me that the right-angled unicode swastika being used by westerners on the internet isn’t done in service of fascism 99% of the time.
And on that matter, don’t let erm-ackshually dorks tell you that the 90 degree swastika wasn’t used by Nazis and isn’t representative of them. One of the most famous depictions of the Nazi swastika is a right angled one:
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1214749781387436032/pu/vid/450x360/o0Nxlts0lffM8lUv.mp4
No. As per the message in the image of the post, posting is not organising.
Yep. Chuev conducted a series of lengthy interviews with Molotov over the period of 1969 - 1986 and he kept extensive notes about what Molotov attested to.
While I can’t seem to find an English language translation of 140 Conversations with Molotov, his other work, Molotov Remembers, is frequently cited as a primary source by historians.
Given that it’s testimony from something which was said many years prior to the interview I’d hazard a guess that Molotov was paraphrasing because the chances of it being an exact quote are vanishingly slim but such is the nature of historical work; often the eyewitness testimony is going to be somewhat hazy, especially long after the fact.
I personally would feel comfortable in saying that Stalin had actually said something to this effect, if not exactly word for word, to Molotov.
It’s according to Molotov’s recollection. From Сто сорок бесед с Молотовым by Felix Chuev:
Stalin himself, I remember, said during the war: “I know that after my death, my grave will be piled with rubbish. But the winds of history will ruthlessly dispel it!
Huh… that’s odd. This is the exact same names and order as a list which I’ve got.
“Honestly, my stance on this isn’t gonna change. If people felt like we weren’t taking care of them, yeah, I would feel like we failed. If you wanna interpret that as a bad thing, you can, but you’re reaching pretty hard.”
Yeah, I’d say it’s about time for LTT staff to unionise.
I think that “taking care of people” smacks of the same rhetoric as “we’re like a family” and “I like to think that all staff are considered equals here” and just about any other lie I’ve heard from exploitative upper management types.
No need to apologise, I just wanted to find the source for myself and when the screenshotted page didn’t turn up in the book you mentioned I did a little bit of digging to find the right book so thought I’d make a correction to save others the time/effort of trying to find the source.
Actually it’s from page 45 of The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath by Dan Stone if anybody is interested
The worker’s councils were recreating the basis of capitalism and interfering with regional and national interests in favour of their own petit-bourgeois aspirations. They wanted to become a labour aristocracy and they threatened the economic foundations of proletarian democracy with their narrow, self-interested trade union consciousness. Yugoslavia’s model is a perfect example of what would have happened if this was allowed to proliferate and to threaten the revolution.
If the Mensheviks didn’t want to get outlawed then maybe they shouldn’t have aligned themselves with the interests of the aristocracy and the Kadets over the proletariat 🤷♂️
Imagine being salty that the October Revolution overthrew the bourgeois Provisional Government. The soviets had established themselves as the legitimate organ of proletarian power and they seized political power because the Mensheviks and the Constitutional Democrats did not represent them.
Lol, I’ll bite. How do you think that Lenin strangled the revolution in the cradle?
Do you mean libertarians, or “libertarians” as per Murray Rothbard’s quote:
“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over…”
Nah, I didn’t do that. I just pointed out that they are either a supporter of capitalism (or reactionary politics) or they support revolutionary/evolutionary socialism, all of which are inherently authoritarian in their own ways.
The material conditions that give rise to authoritarianism is a different question altogether. I was specific in my choice of words for a reason.
“We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it.”
— Marshal Zhukov
Go on then, tell me which leftist leaders you think should be upheld.