Don't like the communist decals on the site, but otherwise looks pretty grand!
"AE: Although the Soviet Union collapsed, the communist ideology remained strong, so I grew up in an environment where communism was still an inspiring idea. Hence, I always understood Sci-Hub as a communist project. The first version of Sci-Hub even had a small hammer and a sickle on the website, and if you hovered a mouse over it, text would pop up stating, “The communist society…is based upon common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption”
Knowledge today has become the private property of corporations such as the publisher Elsevier. These corporations are making a lot of money, while researchers are poor and exploited. Sci-Hub is against all of this. Knowledge belongs to everyone and all people should have equal access to it. Sci-Hub is fighting for communism in science."
"Why Stalin is God"[1] is the most marked example; e.g. "He [Stalin] created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG.", or "Someone may disagree by saying: there was a censorship in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible to say anything against Stalin - therefore everyone loved him. However, we must admit: the censorship was done by the people - there must be someone who sends you to prison if you don't love Stalin. Stalin obviously couldn't do this himself, on the contrary, that was done by other people for Stalin, because he was loved very strongly."
I'm not even going to spend time addressing this nonsense; it should be obvious to everyone with knowledge of Stalin Russia what's wrong with this. This article is an apologetic for evil. Sci-Hub is used as apologetics for evil. I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub.
I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers.
I know everyone here loves Sci-Hub, and I like the idea of it too. Everyone can make their own decision based on this, but for me, personally, I find it hard to support a site that explicitly defends evil in such a way.
Ugh, there are no "political ideas" here. Why does western culture always insist on viewing everything through political or ideological lens? You realise that you are literally the only ones who does that? No one else is that bothered with proper virtue signalling at the expense of objectivity.
> apologetics for evil
You're reasoning in childish categories. It's not what is going on here.
> I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub.
Sci-Hub IS her own website, deal with it.
> I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers.
Why do "people's responses" even matter here? Objective reality exists in the synergy of cause-effect relations. I don't know that your "knowledge of Stalin Russia" (which in itself is a factual error, it's "Stalin's USSR") is, but denying the historical fact that he had a personality cult (which just by definition imples enough love) is just as dishonest as denying that Hitler was loved and supported in Europe and in the US for a long time, not in the least for his antagonism towards the above-mentioned USSR. The fact that they were genocidal mass-murdurers does not eject them from history and context directly into the vacuum. Even if it upsets some people who love to pinpoint all the blame to "a single evil person", despite that history would have just as well produced someone similar given the circumstance if the above-mentioned evil person didn't exist. It's just an assessment of a historical process, nothing more.
Capitalism can take many forms and is often tempered with more socialist policies. No country – including the United States" is "pure capitalist". China has its own spin on capitalism, but that doesn't make it not-capitalism.
The PRC never embraced free markets, transitioning from state capitalism to something closer to fascist-style corporatism.
Communist economies are about the opposite of free enterprise.
Capitalism is its own purely economic animal, perhaps directly opposed to a communist economy, but not the opposite of a communist government.
Really capitalism is not conceptully supposed to be a form of government to begin with, but it can snuggle up to any government from democracy to communism to monarchy and anything in between.
And there you go.
As an "ism" capitalism has been with us since prehistoric times, any actual governance it accomplishes is effectively done by the different types of political systems it has operated with, that have come and gone over the millennia.
Sometimes the strength of the capital is greater than the resources or political will of the government in power at the time, sometimes not. Debt can distort this balance.
As we have seen.