[mapt]

We don't even get that far in the US. It has been largely verboten in "nonpartisan" life, either socially or by dint of an active purge in eg academia and Hollywood, to discuss anything beneficial coming out of Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban administrations.

A partisan Republican will reliably interrupt you to shout nonsense, as if admitting a single positive outcome is trying to deceive them. As if a cost-benefit analysis can just be cut in half. As if these were not just authoritarian/totalitarian, but completely lacking domestic support.

This outcome was achieved with a great deal of money and propaganda over more than a century.

[xpe]

I often compare systems in terms of how well they tolerate adversity. To oversimplify, it feels like top-down command-and-control communism suffers under one powerful corrupting force. Capitalism can suffer from many kinds of market failures which get exacerbated when corrupt people in the surrounding government gain power.

At a distance, I've started to view disorganized, inefficient messes of systems as not all that bad in the grand scheme, because chaotic systems are often harder to co-opt.