I just bought an unbreakable Superfest glass on Etsy. When we start producing these things again we can revisit this conversation.

I hate to be the person that says "this is how capitalism works" but like, employee does $300 worth of work, boss pays $100 in wages, keeps the rest, repeat, there it's the same glitch just dressed up differently.

That was probably the training of GPT-2 or 3. I remember when the infinite nonsense conversations of the LLMs showed up, we all thought it was cute.

Which one is scarier? I tried Ubuntu 2 years ago and got scared, working up the courage to try again.

They also didn't have to deal with the sea level rise or heat domes that they caused

I don't think they were trying to restore capitalism. That's kind of what my whole critique hinges on.

I just think the revolution was a legitimate response to these grievances, and the fact that Western propaganda helped to foment it doesn't delegitimize it. The CIA's role doesn't negate the essentially democratic nature of the revolution or the heavy-handed repression carried out by the Soviets. In my opinion your interpretation removes the Hungarians' agency, and they become proxies rather than people fighting for their own political freedom and material conditions. It gives the impression that sending tanks into the streets of Budapest, and later to prevent a worker committee meeting from happening, was ok because Western Imperialism.

That's what's so baffling to me. If you read any history, e.g. the one I linked, you can also try the numerous ones on marxists.org, even wikipedia, honestly pick your source on any part of the political spectrum, you find out that there was a student movement, followed by mass protests, strikes at factories followed by a general strike, the Red Army was kicked out, a provisional worker's council committee was established that was democratically elected by workers, then the Red Army came back in force and ended it, after which there were more strikes and mass mobilizations that were repressed by the Soviet military and the Kádár government. There are many accounts of revolutionaries clarifying that they didn't want to return to capitalism, they just wanted the Red Army out so that they could build what they referred to as real socialism.

I'm well aware that Radio Free Europe was propagandizing throughout the 1950s, there were leaflet drops, and the CIA document shows a relationship with Béla Király after the revolution, when they sponsored his organization. The Artemov book on page 36-38 talks about the information warfare waged on Hungary by the West but it doesn't give an account of what actually happened.

The idea that Béla Király was training militants in the mountains with the CIA is also contradicted by the fact that he was imprisonned from 1951 until a few weeks before the revolution. As a sidenote, while he fought on the Axis side, he was later named one of the "Righteous Among Nations" by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center because of his relatively humane treatment of Jewish prisoners.

Anyway I just don't see the weight of historical evidence on the side of "reactionary coup", but I guess I should thank you for forcing me to do more research on this. I did learn a lot.

No you didn't. You think the Hungarian Revolution was a counter-revolution initiated by bourgeois reactionaries funded by the CIA, with no popular support. I think it was an uprising initiated by students that then became a massive proletarian revolution against the repression of the Rákosi government. You didn't "address" this disparity. You just insulted me.

The book you cited doesn't really talk about the revolution itself, so I have to infer that the author thinks that the psychological warfare waged by the West against the Warsaw Pact countries fooled the revolutionaries into revolting against their government because it convinced them that communism was bad. Again, although the CIA was present, I don't accept this as the primary motivation for the revolution.

Capitalism has instability built into its model because it generates inevitable class conflict that has to be resolved through violence. There is no such thing as a stable capitalist state.

I realize that continuing this is pointless but I'll just suggest that you attack the idea and not the person next time.

I'll check it out, thanks. I always just think about the way my academic department is organized as an example. There's a rotating chair, and nobody wants to do it because it's a bunch of bureacratic bullshit, but people do their time and then go back to getting actual work done. This is how politics should be.