So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.

I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.

Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?

Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.

My household celebrates two different winter-related holidays, Christmas included.

I have some connectors there on my ESPHome devices to string up intelligent LED strands. I even got some RGBW LED strands so that I can have more pleasant-looking lights.

I’ve got a fake tree and some other decorations, plus a blob of older LED and incandescent strands.

…and I just haven’t felt any real holiday spirit the past few years so none of it’s been put up.

I’d ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of “What was the Soviet Union’s history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?”

For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn’t find.

One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding … well, I guess good intentions? There’s kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. “Do this or you will be executed” doesn’t work very well… not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.

But, even today, there’s tons of “Good idea, bad implementation” things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.

The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be “convinced” to do the new thing. First the “useless” hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn’t have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.

tl;dr: In a sense, it’s as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.