That’s how the petty bourgeoisie rolls.

Oh man, it’s been so long and I tried so many that I can’t possibly offer a certain answer… but a good candidate is JumpStart Preschool, which I (barely) remember playing on a Windows computer. Otherwise, it could have been The Busy World of Richard Scarry Busytown, Richard Scarry’s How Things Work in Busytown, Gus Goes to Cyberopolis, Fisher-Price Ready for School: Kindergarten, Fisher-Price Learning in Toyland, Fisher Price Great Adventures: Pirate Ship, or Nick Jr Play Math!

There are many more that I could name, like Oddballz, Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When it’s Dark Outside, Ozzie’s World, Sesame Street: Numbers, Mr. Potato Head Activity Pack, Play-Doh Creations, and Candy Land Adventure, but I am less sure of those. Finally, there are those titles that I simply can’t find again. There was a point‐and‐click program that mainly took place in a spaceship, and another one where a character said ‘I brush my teeth before I go to bed every night!’, but I’ll be damned if I can find videos of those.

I’m surprised that they made handhelds! I was always under the impression that Soviet video games were more like experimental curiosities than a visible industry. The situation was similar in the Anglosphere back in the 1950s and ’60s: there was not much of a market for them, so they were hard to find (unless you were a computer scientist).

Finland.

The reason that MovingThrowaway said ‘Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary’ is that certain British socialists coined the pejorative ‘tanky’ to nickname communists who approved of the Warsaw Pact intervention in the Hungarian People’s Republic (and later, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), but hardly anybody uses the pejorative this way anymore.

In practice, application now varies widely, from approving of the Bolsheviki to opposing the Ukrainian government to suggesting that maybe North Korean politicians think and behave like ordinary human beings. The contemporary criteria are so variable that many would argue that the term is too vague to be useful.

Maybe I am… or maybe we’re all tankies now. What’s the difference?

The Lion of the Desert.

I frequented /v/, /int/, and a few other boards about one dozen years ago. Now the only things that I touch are a few of the archival websites, and even then only rarely. Occasionally I’ll visit an archive to look for images or clips, and more unoften I’ll look up a phrase or word out of curiosity, but that is the extent of it. I haven’t posted anything on the official website in a very long time (and I’ve never posted anything on the archival websites at all).

‘Do you, German man, and you, German woman, approve this policy of your government, and are you ready to declare it as the expression of your own views and your own will and to joyously adhere to it?’

There is no fediverse instance more queer-friendly and than Hexbear; what are you even talking about?

I am guessing that the reasoning is as follows:

1. The short twentieth century’s people’s republics were frequently heterosexist in some way
2. Many on Hexbear defend the people’s republics (within reason)
3. Ergo, Hexbear is heterosexist

This reasoning does not apply when defending dictatorships of the bourgeoisie such as Imperial America and the British Empire, because

I… never mind.

I learnt this from a commenter on Reddit’s Chapotraphouse when another user shared that same graph; the comment explained how the author miscalculated. Unfortunately, the comment vanished when Reddit deleted Chapotraphouse years ago, so now I don’t have the evidence.

However, one of the sources in that graph, The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System, does not really support the miscalculation:

The number of tsarist executions is clearly minute in comparison with the later Soviet figures, and the scale of katorga and exile is also extremely low. While this is undeniable, it is important to stress the remarkable changes and deterioration in the tsarist prison systems that came about in the last decade of tsarist rule.

My point is that ‘genocide’ was not coined to refer to massacres. It’s become an ambiguous term.

The word genocide was created in the 50s as a response to the holocaust. It was invented to create a specific method of opposition to ethnic cleansing.

Not really.

The Polish jurist Raphaël Lemkin invented the term “genocide” in a book published in 1944 - not to describe what was later called the Holocaust, but to present the grievances and claims of exiled national groups [6]. Although some of these groups called themselves “governments in exile”, their status in 1940-45 was dependent on the Allies. In particular, the US and the USSR had the military power to re-allocate territory in Europe, and did, in 1945. Some nations disappeared in 1945: others might have. Lemkin’s evident political concern was to establish the permanent existence rights of nations, and to redirect the horror at Nazi atrocities into support for nationalism in Europe. That is propaganda: nationalist propaganda, substituting pro-nationalism for anti-fascism.

(Source.)

The term populicide would be better and less ambiguous when referring to a series of massacres against the same people. Unfortunately, it’s a much less common term.

The author of that graph miscalculated and accidentally inflated the Tsarist era statistics. They were closer to this. (If I remember correctly, the original author might have misunderstood Wheatcroft when he wrote ‘These rates were extremely high in the 1880s, when they were more than five times the normal prison mortality rate[.]’)

The Tsars were still pretty awful, though, and were one of the reasons that made the October Revolution inevitable.

Not only did Finland take part in the holocaust by exterminating the Roma living in Finland (or forcing them to fight in the nazi suicide squads), but Estonia also handed over Jews to the Gestapo.

Aside from that, officials confirmed a few years ago that the Finnish Waffen‐SS participated directly in Axis atrocities. While I personally wouldn’t classify 1940s Finland as a fascist state, I understand those who do and the politics that it adopted compel me to classify it as parafascist. An example from Finland’s Holocaust:

Before taking up positions of artistic and institutional leadership in Finland, [Arvi] Kivimaa had already been an established poet, essayist, and writer. […] The views Kivimaa absorbs into Eurooppalainen veljeskunta align with those expressed in a range of German‐language books sustained by the Finnish state—many written by academics who, like Kivimaa, resumed distinguished institutional careers after the war—identifying Finland within the rhetoric of Third Reich racial and expansionist ideologies for consumption by readers of both German and Finnish.

From Finland in World War II:

The widespread Finnish animosity towards the Russians was also more or less explicitly present in the studies on Greater Finland and the occupation of Eastern Karelia. In 1986 Heikki Luostarinen’s doctoral dissertation on the enemy image of Russians and the Soviet Union in the Finnish conservative and rightwing press during the Continuation War focused on the issue in detail and showed the deep racial hatred in the wartime media and mentality.

There is a lot more to be said about Finland, but to keep things short it is a gross oversimplification to summarise its alliance with the Third Reich as only ‘picking the lesser evil’.

Now, no offence, but I think that you’d be happier or healthier doing something else with your time than trying to reason with anticommunists, seeing as how they can just make up whatever stuff that they want while instantly throwing actual research into the trashcan. Are you sure that you don’t want to try something else? Exercising? Juggling? Reading more books? Even playing drunk lawn darts would be better.