This is a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow that Allende choosing reform over revolution is what resulted in the US interference. The US has been known to interfere in revolutionary movements as well.

Less left leaning than liberal? Are you suggesting the EFF is conservative?

You misunderstand. “Innocent until proven guilty” applies to both the accuser and the accused. The accused is assumed innocent of the act until proven otherwise and the accuser is assumed innocent of slander until proven otherwise.

If you have successfully proved the guilt of the accused then you have also proved the innocence of the accuser, but if you were unable to prove the guilt of the accused that does not mean the accuser is guilty of slander, not until you have independently proven otherwise.

To be clear, the Bolsheviks were definitely Communists and Socialists, and implemented a more democratic and Worker-focused society than Tsarist Russia

I agree that the USSR was more democratic and worker-focused than Tsarist Russia, but saying they were definitely Communists and Socialists depends on your definition of those words. An originalist Marxist for example would vehemently disagree that they were communist because communism was envisioned as this pure ideal stateless society, the “end goal” to work towards. Statelessness is definitely no longer a requirement of communism for modern Marxists, but it used to be.

US and Western Powers deliberately attempted to shove a wedge in the Leftist movement by trying to paint the USSR as “not true Communism.”

While this is definitely the case, people at the time had legitimate critiques of the USSR that may have led them to see it as “not true Communism,” see above. Wedges are driven into splits that already exist.

Because everyone seems to have their own unique definition of what Communism/Socialism is, saying that something is/isn’t socialist/communist should be taken more as an expression of that person’s values than a semantic argument. If someone says they are socialist and [insert government here] is not, what they are really saying is that there are aspects of [insert government here] that they disagree with to the point that it’s a dealbreaker for them.

What do the words socialist and communist actually mean to you?

I think with the way you’re using the word socialist, what you actually mean is social democrat, which is a newer term people use to mean capitalism but with heavy regulation and strong welfare / social safety nets.

When you ask people who are actually anti-capitalists and consider themselves some flavor of socialist or communist to distinguish between the two you will get as many different answers as people you’ve asked. In Marxist theory socialism is generally understood as a transitional state towards communism. Historical events led to communism being used mostly to refer to the authoritarian ideology championed by the Bolsheviks, so people started using socialism to differentiate themselves from that definition.

The only thing you’ll get most leftists to agree on is that both socialist and communist mean anti-capitalist, and those who disagree are confused liberals.

Fun fact: elephants can’t metabolize alcohol nearly as well as humans can, so they’re hopeless lightweights. Alcohol is roughly 40x more potent to an elephant than it is to a human, adjusted for body mass.

This is an idea explored in The Egg by Andy Weir.

Yes, multiple voices, probably debating what I’m going to cook for dinner later. At this point I might be going a bit too far anthropomorphizing the voices, it’s not like actual separate personalities, they’re all me. It’s more like perspective taking. I’m engaging in a conversation with myself and the different voices will take different stances. For example I might have a “lazy voice” that just wants to eat leftovers and a “craving voice” that wants to cook tacos. I decide what to do by having the voices hash it out.

As I’m describing this it all sounds very intentional and like I’m playing pretend, but it really is just automatic.

If a word does not adequately describe what I’m thinking I just use more words, or I get creative with them and use them in new ways. I guess that’s what makes me prone to getting lost in thought for long periods of time or being very long winded when I’m talking to people. When I’m talking about something I’ve recently been very interested in people often have to cut me off because I’ll essentially start verbalizing my thought process to them and forget they’re there.

For me it’s not that I can’t think without words, it’s just that the words are very useful tools for organizing my thoughts. I’ve been doing it all my life though so it doesn’t really require more effort than thinking in concepts. It’s like breathing, it happens automatically but I can stop or control it if I want to. When I stop my inner voice I would describe my thoughts as sort of fuzzy and ephemeral. I would easily forget them or have difficulty expressing them without first putting them into words.

That does make me wonder if maybe I use my inner voice as a bit of a crutch when I’m reading, but I think it helps me infer tone and get immersed in what I’m reading. Perhaps I am sacrificing some reading speed but I do believe it helps me with comprehension and memory.

Though I will add that it’s more the concepts that I remember than the words themselves. Give me a quote and I couldn’t tell you what page and where on the page it was, but I could tell you what was happening in that scene, what happened before and after, what the character was feeling and why they said it, who they said it to and so on.

Learning to get over religious shame and guilt took quite some time for me, and I still have to catch myself sometimes when an inner voice says things I no longer believe/agree with. Part of getting over that meant cultivating other voices. When one voice bites another bites back lol.

As a plus I’m very good in a debate.

That’s what irks me the most, when people act like abstaining from an election is a grand act of protest that will change things for the better. I understand the reluctance to vote, but that should never be accompanied by a reluctance to act.

Perhaps! I also think internal monologues can develop just from learning to read and write silently. Having an inner voice makes it easier to absorb the information in a book or to plan out your writing in advance.

Your anecdote seems to support that it’s a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that’s difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up “other voices” that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.

What’s your opinion of the Bolsheviks?

I would be wondering what I did to make his job more difficult.

I haven’t run into anyone who considers emulsifier a scary chemical word. Most people I know with any baking skill know what the word means and use egg yolks for that purpose all the time.

Don’t know and it doesn’t matter. The point is the kid, if informed properly and given the choice to go or not to go, is capable of making that choice.

You wouldn’t know what transexual means if you hadn’t been told or read or heard about it somewhere. That is as true of adults as it is of children. What you seem to be implying is that a child could not possibly understand the concept, and that is where we clearly disagree.

You don’t give children enough credit. Children are capable of understanding how they are different from others, even if they don’t have the words to describe it. They can understand that there are people with authority who make the rules, even if they don’t know the details. They are able to recognize when things are unfair and feel indignant about it, even if they’re unsure of why or how.

The mother can give her child the words to describe how they feel, the details of the world we live in, explain the whys and hows of it, and the child is capable of comparing that to what they know and thinking for themselves. Children are impressionable because of their lack of prior knowledge with which to make that comparison, but that does not mean they lack agency.

It is certainly possible that this mother manipulated her child, put words in her mouth, shielded her from information that could provide a basis for comparison, but that is an assumption for which you have no evidence except that you can’t imagine the alternative.

The alternative being that this mother raised her child lovingly, taught them all they could, trusted them with information from other sources, trusted them to make their own judgements with their guidance, and supported them when they came to their own conclusions.