Yup. Pretty much. Same story.

I just think this particular regime is not up to the standards o the Soviets and CCP so they are trying to imitate, but its like a bad imitation. They don't hold so much power.

Basically its what Orwell called double speak, or double think. Except despite their best efforts, there are still critics about and its not as total control that the Bolsheviks and CCP had.

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“Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,”
began Kolya in his joke-telling voice.

“Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan.
‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’
‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’
‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’
‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.”

― David Benioff, City of Thieves

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The Five Year Plan

The basic planning tool in the Soviet system was the five-year plan, as instituted by Stalin at the end of the 1920s. Early on, plan targets were pretty simple: so many tons of coal to be mined, so many tons of steel to be produced, and so on. The enterprise manager would be rewarded for meeting the targets or punished for failing to meet the objective.

In the Stalin period, not meeting your goal might mean exile to Siberia or worse—although after Stalin died, the major loss for an enterprise manager who did not meet his target would simply be the loss of the job and all the perks that went with that position.

Because the targets for an enterprise manager were always set in physical terms, this led to some pretty dysfunctional behavior. For example, if a turbine enterprise manager was given a target of 100 turbines for the month, the incentive would be to produce the smallest turbines possible, even if larger ones were needed.

The system of targets produced a strong tendency in enterprise managers to maintain the status quo. If they tried new techniques of production that might possibly be more efficient—and if the new approach failed—then they could lose their jobs.

One of the chief criticisms of the Soviet economy was its lack of innovation—in terms of production methods and in range of new products. The typical Soviet manager was not focused on minimizing costs or maximizing sales revenues.

In part, that’s because Soviet-era managers had every incentive to hire as many workers as possible. More workers meant an easier task of meeting production targets. This created excess demand for labor and was a main reason that there was always full employment in the Soviet Union.

Full employment didn’t mean efficient use of labor, of course. Often, enterprises would employ workers who didn’t do anything but were around in case production needed to be increased quickly to meet the target as the month came to a close. This practice of feverishly rushing to meet the target at the end of each month was called storming, and it’s a pretty inefficient way to get the job done.

Storming leads to shoddy quality of products and exhaustion of the workers. Afterward, the workers might need to rest a bit at the beginning of the next month. And if they rest too long, they will need to storm again. As the Soviet economy developed throughout the 20th century, this situation of shoddy and old-fashioned products became worse and worse. People in the West heard stories of Soviet citizens hounding visiting tourists for jeans, portable radios, and makeup.

As bad as Soviet consumer goods were, the problem was surpassed by the problem of consumer services. In part, that’s because in the Soviet planning system, if you couldn’t weigh or measure something, it wasn’t counted in the total production figures. So, services didn’t get counted as something valuable. Repair services, communication, personal care, restaurants, and retail sales were almost nonexistent in the Soviet economy.

• The Great Courses - Capitalism vs. Socialism: Comparing Economic Systems by Professor Edward F. Stuart, Ph.D. Northeastern Illinois University

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Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak. -- Erica Jong

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right." -- George Orwell

In George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984, doublethink is the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely. Doublethink requires using logic against logic or suspending disbelief in the contradiction.

The three slogans of the party — "War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength" — are obvious examples of doublethink. The act of doublethink also occurs in more subtle details throughout the novel.

Project Vertias - A reading from Orwell’s 1984 by James O’Keefe - Book 2, Chapter 9

@Krunoslav "Repair services...were almost nonexistent in the Soviet economy." - reminds me of the old Soviet saying "it is meant to bend not break, comrade".

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a phrase describing the persuasive power of statistics to bolster weak arguments. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point. The phrase was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain (among others).

That being said. One should never underestimate the stupidity and sheep like demeanor of large number of people. It could be true. Those 30 ish percent.

@Krunoslav a lot of people can not admit to being wrong or making a mistake or error, even if they knowingly accepted being mislead by deception.

It's being stuck in a rut, and a form of Stockholm Syndrome.

We probably will be seeing a lot of Helsinki Syndrome if you don't count the worldwide protests & the resistance to being mandatorily vaccinated by government edict at/by corporate insistence.

@Weltansicht Yeah, someone suggested that complying to the current thing is a matter of keeping access to resources, a leftover instinct that meant back in old days, if you make trouble they kick you out of the tribe and you cannot survive on your own outside the protection of the tribe and with resources it offers. So I imagine the human nature has not changed, so some still are supporting whatever the current thing is, to keep access to resources alive, knowing they are too weak to survive outside of the protection of the regime.

@Krunoslav also reminds me of:

@Weltansicht True.