Knowing cultists, the thought of women enjoying sex outside of transactional obligations is intimidating to them and makes them uneasy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Women_Have_Better_Sex_Under_Socialism

They were also consistently ahead of the "BRD" regarding LGBT rights. The reason gay sex was finally completely legalised in all of Germany was that it would be bad press for the "BRD" regime to take away rights from east German LGBT people when they made a new criminal code to go with the annexation of the GDR.

Literally clicked into this thread to say, 'the world's largest prison but the greatest sex on earth and a dope flag.'

man, screw bananas. if we can't have bananas without absolutely screwing over Guatemala or Colombia or whoever, we just shouldn't have them.

That’s literally the pop-history definition here why the gdr failed because of muh bananas, jeans and coffee.

one of the great baffling issues of the later soviet union was how little people appreciated things like safety nets, housing, security in old age. And how much people would really like the new phone

I’ve got the second one now and I still can’t afford fresh oranges usually smh

1. The process also happened in Poland. I even have a distant, now deceased relative that made big bucks on landlordism in the 90s. Lots of stuff about old aristocrats coming over and getting "their" land back, the church, etc. Anecdotal evidence and all, but both my parents and grandparents claim that homelessness only started showing up around the time of Balcerowicz's market reforms, roughly at the same time the unemployment offices were created.

2. Public transportation was overcrowded, but it was very well built up even in smaller towns. Besides, the wait for the car is a luxury that imperial citizens of the west take for granted, as well as tropical fruit (a German lib classic). Sure, you had Bananas, and they came from a plantation in Guatemala where pro-American militaries were killing guerrilleros in fights over land in an extremely poor countryside. For the Eastern Bloc, where could they even get those? Cuba and various civil-war ridden republics in Africa. Gee, I wonder why there was so little tropical agrarian produce there - even ignoring the environmental cost.

3. Also the influence of censorship, authoritarianism, etc. is greatly overstated. Yes, the secret police etc. were overzealous (insert Michael Parenti talking about Nicaragua, 1990) but western music was freely available on the radio, contact with the west was allowed - even in stuff like shortwave radio communications etc., western goods were advertised freely (even including a competition to win these computers). Alas, the already wealthier people were dreaming of Paris (also paraphrasing Parenti) - the "we want FREEEEEDOM" was basically a constant in all media of that time (at least in Poland), and it almost always was expressed with "They're telling us what to do, this is 1984", a juvenile yet reactionary and incredibly popular position.

Victor Grossman

I actually saw him IRL once. I didn't talk to him since he was busy talking to someone else and frankly I don't know what about.

You had to wait for a car but it’s not like in the US where a car is a mandatory (and incredibly expensive) requirement to live

In capitalist Singapore right now there is a $10,000 tax on owning a car and not many people do for this reason (on the grounds that Singapore's infrastructure couldn't work if it had to accomodate everyone in the city having a car)

It's weird my mother and her siblings all lived in the GDR. The GDR was disbanded when they were in their early to late twenties. My mother who was the oldest sibling has quite fond memories of the GDR (even though she was annoyed at some aspects so much that she considered putting forth an exit application. My uncles who where in their early twenties when the GDR fell don't think that way. They have adopted the Soviet Union bad, America good mindset.