Ah, unsurprisingly.

Unfortunately when people criticize socialist countries for the lack of “free speech,” even if with good intentions, they are usually parroting the talking points of Western, bourgeois media and only serves as to justify imperialist intervention against them.

These criticisms however derive from an ignorance of the way politics work in such countries whose only perception comes from behind the iron curtain and only through the lens of fascist and capitalist media.

In historically socialist countries, democracy had always been principally practiced on the local and communal stages, where individuals had the most capacity to take decisions regarding their daily lives and the situation of their neighbourhood, locality or commune. I highly recommend reading on this topic:

Local Communities, a Yugoslav Take on Direct Democracy.

Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan.

She deserves it as much as Kissinger and Shimon Peres deserve it.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/21562742

Communism has always been the ideal. However, we have to take into account that we do not live in a bubble insulated from everyone else. We are facing the real, global and continuous threat of imperialist invasion by the capitalist forces. See Cuba and Venezuela, for instance.

It’s really hard to not be an ultra-militaristic society when the CIA and the enemies of the proletariat are always lurking in the shadows and looking for any miniscule gap to breach socialist countries from within. Regardless, we need to diffuse a proletarian, anti-bourgeois culture among the masses in order to inhibit the possibilities of foreign intervention.

Decades of sanctioning and warmongering by the US and its allies has kept a small country like the DPRK on the defensive, which isn’t ideal if you want a thriving nation, regardless of its ideology.

FYI, Machado is a far-right plant who’s championing the sanctions and US intervention in her country and every other nation that opposes imperialism. Notwithstanding her vocal and active support for far-right parties in Europe and LatAm.

https://venezuelanvoices.org/2025/04/02/what-does-maria-corina-machados-alliance-with-the-european-and-israeli-ultra-right-imply-for-the-venezuelan-people/

https://web.archive.org/web/20240826045039/https://cpa.org.au/guardian/issue-2113/venezuelas-maria-machado-what-the-media-doesnt-say/

https://www.jurist.org/news/2024/11/venezuela-announces-probe-against-opposition-leader-over-us-sanctions-support/

You’re welcome

I’ll do you one better and recommend Dostoevsky’s The Double. Way more sinister and eerie, as it deals with schizophrenia.

Check out Cloudstream. It requires extensions to function and some of them include torrent providers.

I understand where you’re coming from, and I agree. This why I made sure to mention that this does not apply to all situations and not everyone’s experience is the same in this respect.

Precisely, what the author has in mind is when expectations do not lign up with one’s reality and how this might lead to their entire worldview crashing down. We as human beings seek comfort and certainty, which is why we tend to formulate some intrinsic meaning to the world we live in. But what happens when we don’t have the capacity anymore to find any meaning to life? Is taking one’s own life the only option? These questions are of an existential nature, which places Cioran in the same tradition as authors like Camus, Schopenhauer and Sartre.

Anyhow, this is simply my review of the book and how I understood it. I don’t particularly agree with its whole philosophy.