GarbageShoot

Historically, I am referring to the Bolsheviks and then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Generally, a vanguard party is the forward segment of the population that is educated on and dedicated to the project of social revolution and agitates and organizes among the general population towards this end, and though it becomes something more administrative when it has control of the state, those two functions remain, as does the need to not (try to) compel the masses into something they don't want to do. There can be no benevolent tyrants, just educators who operate with the popular mandate.

Yes but how long did it take to get to that point? It took an incredibly large amount of time for the party to become corrupted enough to require the corruption crackdowns, which were essentially purges of this.

Depending how you count it, it took about 30 years, but really longer because Dengist-types preceded Deng's turn at the reins (they brought him from being in informal exile to toppling the Gang of Four, after all). I wouldn't know where to count to get an accurate estimate, but perhaps it would be 50 years, since the Hundred Flowers campaign's subsequent crackdown probably got rid of a lot of the ones who were festering from even during the Civil War. How old are these measures, anyway? Does this even apply?

Anyway, I think that overwhelmingly the corruption crackdowns were against people who were actually corrupt rather than ideologically compromised, and you happen to mention someone who is the inverse next.

Post ww2 the party became a "party of the people" and Kruschev deemed it was of the people because the people were participants.

It's actually worse than that. He actually said the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was over and they were now running a "Whole People's Party" as in supposedly representing the interests of the entire population, and he used this as cover for beginning the restoration of the bourgeoisie.

All ideology became muddled. It was a mess. This was because no enforcement of party line, no prevention of those uneducated in marxism was undertaken.

I would argue, based on the above and on the history of destalinization, that it was not just muddled but in fact deliberately revisionist. I don't really know where Khrushchev thought he was going with doing that while continuing to fight the west (seems like the perfect opportunity to be a compradore), maybe he just bought into pro-market propaganda. Of course, by the end of his time in office it certainly was also muddled because that's why he got ousted: for being directionless.

But part of my point is that even this dingbat revisionist and what was ultimately his substantial backing were all in the Party prior to the death of Stalin. Others, like Bukharin, were Old Bolsheviks themselves! This was a problem that wasn't started by some freak accident letting Khrushchev through, it was already consuming the Party before Khrushchev did anything and perhaps even before Stalin did.

You have not proposed alternatives?

I'm actually fine with gatekeeping a vanguard party if policy decisions are made by the people, even if that means they wouldn't do something as wise as the vanguard could wish of them. Ironically, Xi writes about just that scenario in a document that I have been looking for for like 2 years called something like "We Must Follow the People into the Fire". This is ironic, in my opinion, but we don't need to get into that and really probably shouldn't. My view is basically that of the primacy of democracy: either you give the people the ability to decide policy or you give them the ability to choose policy deciders (or vote for the people who vote, as I don't have a problem with that part of China's system).

I mean, come on, China's already got compulsory education requirements. If it's so important to have your definition of a good Marxist education, give it to people! Not that this answers the issue, since in many rural places people don't get all that much schooling still, which means this would still put privileged people on top (or further on top) politically.

Is that true? Is that how you get people in there who propose that risk is a type of labor? I am pretty sure Xi was involved in things by 2006 as a comparatively petty official, which is not to say that this is his view, but that this shit was allowed in the Party in a relevant timeframe and exams didn't stop it.

I'm sure that politicians being uneducated was a problem in the Soviet Union, but there were people who would at least turn revisionist who were among the Soviet vanguard since before the October Revolution. The problem fundamentally isn't ignorance, or it is somehow that many years of schooling are needed not to trip and fall into being a reactionary. The former means that education won't solve it, the latter is basically an excuse for having a party of the elite who the plebians can't hope to understand the intellectual workings of, who they must sit passively by and approve or disapprove from the short procession of learned individuals who had the privilege to go through all this political grooming.

But that's a counterfactual, I think the main problem wasn't a lack of education a failure to guard against the ability to be a revisionist based on choice rather than mistake. Given that, I think imposing these educational barriers, most of all ones that weren't decided on a direct democratic basis, is just enabling the party to be insular without doing a thing to protect it from intentional revisionism, the much greater threat if we're worried about an autopsy of the Soviet Union.

I can't help but notice that you didn't list a whole lot of traits that would be considered vital to having a fairly human sillhouette. There's nothing here about obligate bipedalism, for example, or having just two legs in the lower part of the body at all. There's nothing here about how the forelimbs are articulated, and whether it would look meaningfully like hands or an array of dexterous tendrils or something. And all this gritty realist speculative biology seems out of place when most sci-fi is basically a particular sub-genre of fantasy anyway. Even being generous to the sci-fi writers, supposing the universe works in a fundamentally different way from how ours does (breaking laws of relativity and entropy, commonly), why can't some ecosystems work out to stretch your imagination of what could be an advanced species? It all seems very narrowly prescriptivist, even beyond the fact that this is fiction to the point of taking negative liberties with the bounds of what is truly realistic.

Edit: idk, it just seems obtuse. Like, "Advanced life can only be carbon-based because being that way affords these benefits" without considering that other models could provide other benefits (I'm sure you know better than I about the use of silicon-based life in speculative biology). And that's if the subject is addressed at all.

Literal bootstrapism. I could present you success stories about poor people getting into Ivy League schools, and you'd rightly say that such stories are masking systemic problems.

"Just pass the test to get on the whitelist, then the whitelist doesn't impact you"

This is like an alternate version of "meritcratic" academic testing, it's still a barrier to people who don't have the same resources as others, which I would dare to assert that is a bad thing.

I support our rogues, they work hard to circumvent the combat mechanics

I don't see it as a restriction on who you can vote for, you can vote for anyone on the committee

Don't give me that. Ultimately the entire thing is meant to restrict candidates to a whitelist, the only question is whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Saying you can vote for anyone who made the whitelist and therefore the vote is not restricted is silly question-begging and it's below you.

What I didn't know was that there was a qualification check for local level delegates. Does this qualification check occur multiple times as someone goes up the chain? It seems useful to have in place to ensure someone isn't just charismatic and able to get voted up based on popularity.

Do we support restrictions on who people can vote for? I thought we usually regarded that as a bad thing.

In a lot of cases (not the people here) it's because they like having a woman they can oggle from every angle and exercise complete control over. See Shaun's most recent video; if it's enough to be a core conceit of reasonably popular video games, it's enough to motivate g*mers in other games that treat their female characters just a misogynistically.

Plenty of people have other reasons, of course.

One thing that I'm surprised is being left out is that the admins were doing outreach to various leftist groups, and they were able to get into a conversation with at least a chapter of was one of the more substantial ones (maybe PSL?) who then refused because of the website referencing El Chapo. They rightly decided it would be better for the site's public image to not have that name, and the site had somewhat grown apart from the podcast anyway.

It could never live up to that name anyway