Comments by "Piccalilli Pit" (@piccalillipit9211) on "Man escapes feared Russian agency, reveals what Russian spies are saying" video.

Thats really interesting EDIT - just for balance, Im a Brit living in Bulgaria - ex-soviet block country - millions of them didn't defect and didn't want to and many want to return to communism.
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@thecorner6316 Or sandwiches...
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@scurra1163 - well that's just flat-out dumb isnt it. For THOSE people is it was the good old days. But being capitalist America that applied to 40% of the population. Under the "communism" the good old days applied to 80% which is why 75% of people over 65 voted for the "communist" party in the last election. Those millions, in either situation, were not "wrong" about their lived experience. I dont want to live under Stalin's communism OR Eisenhower's America, my values are radically different to both of them. But that does not make the people who remember it fondly "wrong"
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@azul8811 - I dont know if you are being serious or sarcastic - but thanks either way
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@scurra1163 - Well IM the author on psychology and the collapse of civilisation that has spent 12 years collecting people's stories of life under communism for a book and you are a shouty rando on the internet... So who should we trust here??? OK - So lets say you - shouty person - could buy a house for $25,000, have a job for life that paid you $75,000 index-linked, a good union and a pension that paid you 75% of your final salary, your university cost you $5,000, great medical insurance and you had a new car you bought cash every 2 years and only one of you had to work so the other person could look after your kids - ARE YOU TELLING ME that this would be a bad life??? cos THAT is what these people are remembering, you can accuse them of not remembering the bad stuff and sure they gloss over that. But what they are NOT misremembering is that THEIR LIVES WERE VASTLY BETTER TO YOUR LIFE. And that is why you are an angry shouty person on the internet. You are not angry cos they are misrepresenting the past - you are angry they are RIGHT in many ways - your life is sh!t working an uber style contract and no hope of buying a house. My friend in America started as an intern at a company 33 years ago. She is now on $225k, she HAS a 75% pension and she just downsized her house that she bought 30 years ago for $1.1 million - now you cant hate her cos she is massively left wing and goes out every winter handing out coats and gloves she has bought to every homeless person in her city. YOU are angry cos that life is not available to you. YOU want them to be misremembering - cos that just means they are id!ots and you can write them off and that makes YOU feel better about how you have been totally and utterly shafted by neoliberalism in America.
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@seraphimaanderson2069 - You know that insufferable arguments like this make people hate the left dont you??? I know that - you know that - lets just make it simple for the ladies and gentlemen.
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@scurra1163 - Yeah nice try but you just scream insecurity and bitter resentment in every syllable you write. I got your motivation correct and you and I know it. "'now you cant hate her cos she is massively left wing ' This one get's me. Why would I even remotely care? " cos if I had not clarified that you would have gone on a 1000-word rant about it - yes you are THAT transparent - I literally put in a pre-emptive block on that cos I didn't want to read it. "The 'good old days' is almost always BS, no matter whose ideology is being discussed." and your evidence for this is...??? OH, your opinion, sorry thats not a valid argument. "and as the generation that built the current system might have regrets at screwing it up, doesn't mean there recollections were correct. Just because the current system is corrupt or ineffective(and largely their generation's fault)" oh look scream insecurity and bitter resentment in every syllable "You also make MASSIVE leaps of logic in your thoughts on my motivation" - yes I do - but Im right though, aren't I? You have no secure job, no prospects of buying a decent house, having kids will be a massive stretch is not an impossibility, university will bankrupt you - and you know what? EDIT: I don't think you are aware of just how astonishingly transparent you are. YOU ARE 100% RIGHT TO BE P!SSED you got totally screwed over and lied to and it is completely unfair. But don't tell me I don't know what I am doing or talking about. Cos you and me both know I do, and that's why you are so shouty cos truth hurts. The bottom line is - on the whole LIFE WAS BETTER for the people who say life was better in the good old days. BECAUSE life in the USA was better for young people of their demographic in the 1950's 60's and 70's. It just wasn't better for everyone, and thats the bit they forget. Anyone involved in the war effort that was white - they got an interest-free mortgage on a new house, you are going to remember that very fondly - but ONLY if you were white... They are NOT excessively romanticising their lives - they are just missing their massive privilege...
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@scurra1163 Sorry shouty person - I have TV interviews all day today - find someone else to hate.
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@deanbarnett8538 Please point me to the bit where I said " the Bulgarian people want to live under the Russian boot again" And what the hell are "pure blood Bulgarians"??? Did you just finish Nazi school this morning or something???
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@deanbarnett8538 - Im not sure its a good idea to adopt his incredibly fascistic language...! Ok - Ill be quick as Im about to go out. "Communism" which here they refer to as "socialist times" was not really "under the Russian boot" - It "under the Russian boot" in the same way that Texas is "under the Washington boot" So if some guy in 30 years in a broken up post-capitalist former USA says "75% of older Americans want to return to capitalism" it has NO connection to Washington cos socialism and capitalism are economic models. The people may have entirely independent views on Washington / Russia. But the vast majority of people would never even consider the two things connected. Only in the west does communism = Russia Its exactly like saying capitalism = America Everyone here speaks Russian [including me] cos Russian and Bulgarian are nearly as close as British English and American English, but people here are patriotic Bulgarians - Russia has not filled it with their agitating minions.
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@ArrowBast - I dont quite know what you are talking about - but Brits are fleeing Britain as fast as they can - the place is in freefall collapse due to 13 years of corrupt right wing government. An old man died of hyperthermia in his house yesterday cos he could not afford to put the heating on. Doctors' and nurses' pay has dropped 20% in the last 10 years. Its a total collapsing sh!t hole. Last month Poland overtook the UK for average standard of living, in the next 5 years Romania and Bulgaria will pass the UK.
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@ArrowBast - Yeah thats cos the right-wing government cut 40,000 [which is a lot for a tiny island] police and blocked pay rises for the rest of them so their pay has gone down as well. BUT - its the same as the "immigrant crisis". These things are massively overstated BY the right-wing media to get people to KEEP voting for the right-wing "tough on crime - nasty to immigrants party" when the moderate uptick in these problems is 100% down to the politics of the right-wing government. They also cut 30% of the courts so no one gets sentenced for anything. Its the worst for women - only 0.79% of all R and serious S/A cases even get charged and they won't release the level that actually get convicted. Because it is SO LOW women don't bother reporting it so essentially R/pe is legal in the UK. Its the same thing that happens with any right-wing government - they break stuff and then tell you THEY are the only ones who can fix it. Inflation has been close to 15% and wages have not gone up in 10 years for most people - OF COURSE, STREET CRIME IS A PROBLEM. Kids are fainting in classrooms cos they are literally starving. Nurses are going to food banks - hospitals are opening food banks IN THE HOSPITAL for their nurses to get food. I was on a long holiday / research trip here in Bulgaria when the Conservative government got elected - I never went home, I knew exactly what would happen. The same thing that happens to every country when a far right government gets in - it collapses. The one advantage the USA has is a president can only do 2 terms - so you elect the right wing GOP - they smash everything to pieces with a hammer and then the Dems [who I hate BTW] try to put it back together and then after 8 years they are out of power. In the UK they can go on for 12, 15, 18 years and its only in the last 5 can they REALLY smash the place to pieces.
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@mitotakjde9763 - Im not speaking for your country - only for Bulgaria. Where 75% of people over 65 voted communist in the last election that is just the official statistic. " life was to steal everything you saw" Im sorry for this terribly poor reflection on your country - here in Bulgaria the doors still have the old "locks" on them from the communist time. It is a piece of 3mm thick wire bent into an L shape that you turned to stop the door from being opened. People specifically talk about the low crime of the socialist period. "The communist party here has 2% support only" Yeah in Bulgaria it ranges from 21% to 26% [Edit - there was a snap election Oct 2022 when the BSP got 8.98% of the vote, this mostly reflects an effort to get the corrupt GERB party out of power, or maybe the old socialist voters are just dying off...?] "Most post soviet countries would love to have the option of cutting Russia out of Eurasia and placing them to the other end of the world so they don't have to interact with them ever again.. " I agree - no one I talk to wants to be part of Russia's sphere of influence again - but socialism is not Russia " would literally rather shoot myself in the head than to live under communism.." I have really bad news for you - capitalism is collapsing and it will in the next 50 years be replaced by some modern form of communism. Are you from Romania by any chance, they seen to have had the worst time under communism? EDIT" I dont doubt what you say BTW - the one thing I have learned about communism is it was incredibly varied, just like capitalism. In some places, it was very good and people liked it, in others is was a horror show. If you ask a homeless person on the streets of America with no money for insulin what he tinks of capitalism you will get a tory similar to the one you tell. If you ask a business owner with a nice house you will get a very very different story.
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@ostiariusalpha Can you read? " millions of them didn't defect and didn't want to and many want to return to communism." And since when did the number of votes = the total number of people with that opinion???
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@ostiariusalpha - Fine - you still cant read.
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@ostiariusalpha - Sadly you cant "millions of them didn't defect and didn't want to and many want to return to communism." I never said millions of them wanted to return to communism, I said many - and 232,958 people is by any definition "many people" End of conversation. Try harder next time.
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@lamaahruloma4270 - You are one of the few people who has replied with a reasonably accurate description of what I have learned from hundreds of interviews. The control, the paranoia and the lack of freedom were the things that people hated most - as far as I can tell. The lack of shiny consumer goods is not something people tend to mention, thats a thing we in the west obsessed about cos we had them and that is how WE measured success. People miss the lack of stress and worry, the knowledge they would have a job and a house next month no matter what. They also miss the community and feeling that everyone was connected and part of the same - everyone hated the government, you and your neighbour hated the government. Now you and you neighbour have different political views and hate each other... There is a LOT of solace to be gained from having a united enemy you all hate. As a westerner I came here expecting people to universally hate it, I believe the propaganda of the west, never even knew it was propaganda, I thought it was truth. I was incredibly surprised to find people with happy stories and many fond memories. I was even more shocked to find many people wishing to return to socialism - not to the USSR, they are not [not all anyway] Tankies - but many of them dont like democracy they feel it has turned neighbour against neighbour and pushed the job of making decisions onto them. The variety and complexity is what caused me to start recording these stories - you have to be careful. There is no point in getting a story from an ex-party member, its not going to be a tru reflection of life under communism. Equally, people who wanted to flee cos they hated it, their stories are unreliable. You need the stories of the vast majority - those who just lived from day to day. And that is the point most people miss. The vast majority complained about communism in the same way that most Americans complain about their government, its what people do, but they didn't hate it enough to ever think of leaving. The other thing people in the west get wrong is it was NOT a monolith - it was very varied from country to country and even town to town and job to job. Saying "what was life like under communism" is an unanswerable question - what is life like under capitalism? Depends who you are, who your family is, what city you live in and what country... QUOTE "you can get a better house in communism, but you must give something in exchange" Yes I think the going rate is about $1 million in the west...
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@SonicPhonic - No one I have talked to in 14 years starved. They manufactured weapons cos the USA forced them into a cold war and YES they did build bomb shelters - every building had a bomb shelter - I have one under my apartment. In the USA only the rich had bomb shelters... Thats the difference.
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@SonicPhonic - America spent $20 Trillion on wars in the last 20 years and it has 600,000 living on the street with no food and no home. QUOTE "In 2021, roughly 30 million people did not have health insurance in the U.S. This number includes all age groups" 10% of the population have NO health cover, yet the USA spent $850 billion on "manufacturing weapons" that year. The life expectancy of a man in Missipie is LOWER than that of a person in Bangladesh Capitalists are great at manufacturing weapons and [no]building bomb shelters, but for some reason, they like poor people to starve on the streets and die younger than they do in 3rd world countries.
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@SonicPhonic - I absolutely cold not agree more. Personally, I think life under the USSR's communism would be absolutely horrible. I am not an advocate for Stalin in any way shape or form. Im just playing devil's advocate an pointing out to people that the idea we were fed in the west that life was universally hellish and everyone wanted to leave is simply not true, that was propaganda. I was astonished when I arrived in 2009 from the Uk as a foaming-at-the-mouth business-owning capitalist to find that NO, a lot of people liked communism and wanted to return to it as an economic model. [NO they dont want to return to 1975, they are not idiots, they want to return to a socialist economic model but in 2023] There is absolutely NO doubt the 40 to 50 million killed by Mao were actually killed BY Mao, he was offered help by the USSR to feed them and turned it down, he is responsible. Very personally responsible, but Im not entirely sure the communist economic SYSTEM was directly responsible, he made very very very bad decisions... We dont blame Hitlers genocide on Capitalism do we? YET capitalism - specifically greedy American bankers and the Wall St collapse of 1929 is what brought Hitler to power, he ran on a platform of "the establishment sold you out to the American [J] Bankers and you lost your savings and the communists are coming to take your house off you - vote for me! It was very very specifically capitalism that created Hitler and we don't blame capitalism for the holocaust. Quarter of a billion people have died under "capitalist" famines yet we dont label them "Capitalist famines" its just a Famine - there is one in Africa now, no one is calling out the world bank [capitalist] for killing people yet we blame the Soviet famines on communism. Im not a Tanki - if "Stalin 2.0" came to power here I would leave immediately. But we need, as a species, to move on from capitalism to a more sustainable and equitable, fairer economic model. What Aron Bastani calls "Fully Automated Luxury Communism"
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@victorhopper6774 - Yeah thank you for your personal anecdote. You don't think we correct for that when collecting data? Were houses cheaper when you were 20 as a ratio of your salary? Were jobs more secure? Could most households get by on one salary? Thes are not things based on your "feelings" - these are just facts. "Things are better now than they have ever been, yo are just looking through rose-tinted nostalgic glasses" is largely [not entirely] BULLSH!T peddled by the neoliberal establishment - its the same as "you live in the greatest country on earth - SO DONT ASK FOR ANY MORE!!! Its PROPAGANDA, it has a grain of truth - but it is massively overstated.
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@victorhopper6774 - That is NOT the winning argument you think it is - "i was making 2.10 a hour and paid 8.5% interest on my first beat up little house." YOU HAD A HOUSE The millennials and Gen Z dont, that "beat up little house" is probably $250k now 8.5% on a 1970's level mortgage is the equivalent of 2.83% on a 2023 mortgage. $2.10 an hour - OH POOR YOU - THATS $18.40 in today's money So you were earning $18.40 an hour and paying 2.83% on your mortgage on a house you owned - I think 90% of Gen Z would say that is a GREAT LIFE.
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@victorhopper6774 " that type of work today pays 10-12 dollars an hour in this area|" THATS LITERALLY THE POINT $2.10 in 1970 adjusted for inflation is $18.40 but in reality people are only getting paid $10 so YOU got paid 84% MORE when you were 20 than people are today... Lets say that again YOU GOT PAID 84% MORE FOR THE SAME JOB AT 20 YEARS OLD THAN YOU JUST TOLD ME PEOPLE GET PAID TODAY "nope that house is worth 50,000 tops" Well in that case it must be in an area with absolutely NO work, which it had work around it cos YOU worked in 1970 and work that paid ENOUGH for you to earn the equivalent of $18.40 and buy the house and IF a kid today could buy a house for $50k and earn $18.40 an hour they would DIE for an 8.5% mortgage on a $40k loan - cos that would be $274 a month HAHAHHAHHAHAHAH And you are telling me that your life was so terrible...??? Kids these days have it so easy. Can you see why people hate Boomers? "what you don't know about the 6o's would fill a huge book" Dude Im nearly as old as you so shut up.
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