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Best Friends posted:"This guy, uugg, he doesn't, mmmpph (fists clenching) agree with my philosophy or its historical analysis" - man who has literally expressed the belief that the soviet union could/would have designed the iphone They would though, the iPhone was a halfass design that relased vastly underpowered and unpopular when other better smartphones were out, accomplishing nothing new. Soviets could make the hell out of the iphone, just like they made plenty of slightly worse clones of western computers in the 80s (you could even get a nice Russian 486 by the end!).
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Feb 9, 2015 06:42
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Fair enough. I think the argument was actually that they would have invented it, but I do not want to re-read enough posts to confirm that.
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Feb 9, 2015 06:43
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No, see, I was hoping that you would take the hint that you're not doing a good job of characterizing my position. In so doing, perhaps you might be interested in some clarifying follow-up discussion. Instead you wasted no time at all confirming, against all hopes, that you are more interested in being Right And Also The Winner than you are in actually holding a dialogue about these very important topics.
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Feb 9, 2015 06:45
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Line by line bad jokes are not exactly deep or insightful debate. Some might even call them "shitposts." Some.
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Feb 9, 2015 06:48
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Best Friends posted:Fair enough. I think the argument was actually that they would have invented it, but I do not want to re-read enough posts to confirm that. Right and my thing is, yes they couldn't invent the good smartphone, but Apple didn't do that either with the iphone. Their first one was almost a generation behind in most of its features, in a world where the Soviet Union was hanging out in 2007, their first attempt cloning then-current smartphones would likely be much like the real iphone. It took a while for iPhones to become both decent and powerful enough that they were actually popular with people who were not a certain small market. Maybe SovietPhone could have done that as well, maybe the couldn't have, but considering it's been a second place phone (iphones) for most of their life it doesn't seem unreasonable.
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Feb 9, 2015 06:49
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I actually edited them to be pretty generous to you, too.
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Feb 9, 2015 06:50
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I just finished reading Under a Cruel Star and I gotta say it does not make Stalinism or the post-Stalinist bloc sound like a nice place to live in.
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Feb 9, 2015 06:53
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Aeolius posted:Also, I should note that there is a certain irony barely visible here: for all the damage Stalin's era did to the left's views on "top-down" implementation, the greatest excesses during the purges were in fact a "bottom-up" phenomenon; the average citizen had far more to fear from a neighbor with a vendetta than the state acting on its own intel. Do you have any credible sources on this? I find this quite hard to believe, and suchs claims sound like creative attempts to downplay Stalinist terror.
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Feb 9, 2015 08:31
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The institutions of terror were still a Thing. For a society of rats to emerge, you need social structures in place that make ratting people out such a viable proposition. Such structures indicate a very unhealthy society at a much more fundamental level than simply "there were bad people at the top doing bad things", IMO. If this is correct, it sounds a lot like how the Nazi party operated - kick the lower rungs up into a frenzy, pick the worst idea of the lot, rinse, repeat.
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Feb 9, 2015 11:49
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On a side note I was wondering if anyone in the thread has read Marx's Theory of Price and its Modern Rivals by Howard Nicholas? I haven't seen it discussed much amongst the Marxist economics blogs but I found it to be a pretty interesting read. If anyone has read it, do you think that Marx's objective value theory has anything to contribute to a theory of socialist economics, or do you think that many socialist economists were correct to base their theories on [neoclassical] subjective value theory, or do you think that value theories like these have nothing useful to say about how a socialist economy might be organized?
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Feb 9, 2015 12:59
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V. Illych L. posted:The institutions of terror were still a Thing. For a society of rats to emerge, you need social structures in place that make ratting people out such a viable proposition. Such structures indicate a very unhealthy society at a much more fundamental level than simply "there were bad people at the top doing bad things", IMO. It helps to legitimate your tyranny if you make the people you tyrannise complicit, as well. If 1/3 of you are paid government informants, where is your 'it was nothing to do with me, I was just being brutally oppressed' coming from?
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Feb 9, 2015 12:59
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HighClassSwankyTime posted:Do you have any credible sources on this? I find this quite hard to believe, and suchs claims sound like creative attempts to downplay Stalinist terror. Howdy, Swanks. Sheila Fitzgerald's Everyday Stalinism is a pretty comprehensive treatment of 1930's urban Soviet life from the bottom up. Its discussion of the purges examines not only who was victimized during the period, but also the people who benefited by rising quickly through the ranks — i.e., the beneficiaries of the affirmative action program of the previous decade, aimed at creating a "'workers' and peasants' intelligentsia' to replace the 'bourgeois intelligentsia' inherited from the old regime." Sheila Fitzgerald posted:[T]he most spectacular episode of terror was undoubtedly the Great Purges of 1937–38, which are discussed in detail in the last chapter. Quantitatively, the scope of this terror was not too different from that waged against kulaks during “dekulakization.” What made its impact greater, at least as far as the urban population was concerned, was that the elites, including the Communist elite, suffered disproportionately. Despite the elite focus, however, there was also an important random element in this terror. Anybody could be exposed as an “enemy of the people”; the enemies, like witches in earlier ages, bore no reliable external marks. ... I'm also reminded of a passage from Anna Louise Strong's The Stalin Era: A.L. Strong posted:Was any political police needed? The Soviet people seemed to think that it was. My own husband, when he learned of the exiling of my best woman friend, said only: "Too bad that she had to get entangled with that husband." It sounds natters at a glance, but then came the deadliest war in human history. Recall also the context of the 1930's in the capitalist world generally, and more specifically the USSR's neighborhood — e.g, Germany, Japan and Italy, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Estonia, etc. It's no stretch to say everything was a goddamn mess. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 16:33
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So I'm not crazy about carrying water for Stalinism but we need to set the record straight on some things. asdf32 posted:Heh and this is supposed to contrast the Soviet Union? You do understand that the Soviet Union had the two largest wars in history fought primarily on its soil during the period that we are discussing, right? The USSR came into existence at the same time that the Germans effectively seized most of the most productive and developed areas of the Russian empire. The USSR was then forced to industrialize itself and it did so without any kind of foreign conquest, which came later from 1939 onwards. In other words the Soviets went from a completely backward, agrarian and utterly devastated society to being a world super power capable of defeating possibly the greatest fighting force in history, the Wehrmacht. So yes the record of the USSR here does favourably compare with Japan's. Stalin certainly didn't have any moral objection to conquering new territory but he wasn't in a position to do so until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact came into being, which only happened after the USSR had developed a significant industrial base. Honestly I'm just going to quote myself from a previous thread rather than rehash all this information in a slightly new format: Helsing posted:In the 1920s only about one in five Soviet citizens lived in cities. The rest lived in rural areas, mostly practising very low productivity agriculture. During the First World War the Russian empire had lost roughly between 1.62 and1.94 percent of their overall population, along with massive losses of material goods. Then from 1917 onward there was the Russian Civil War, which killed another 2,712,824 or so people if you add up the estimated casualties of both sides. Now on the population front things could have been worse given that other countries lost comparable or even higher percentages of their populations during fighting (though adding in the deaths from the Civil War gives a pretty stark picture of how horrible conditions in Russia were by the time the Soviets consolidated their power) but the overall picture is a pretty bleak one, even more so considering the Soviets also went through a series of internal power struggles during the 1920s before Stalin consolidated his control toward the end of the decades. So just to be clear here I agree that there are really really big reasons to have reservations about the USSR but downplaying the significance of their economic record from about the 30s to the 60s is ridiculous. What they managed to accomplish is nothing short of remarkable, even acknowledging the fact that they paid for a lot of it with blood and state terrorism. quote:Technology always can be transferred but it actually was, and because of reduced complexity it was actually easier in many ways to transfer technology than today. Consider that electricity, the internal combustion engine and the telephone represented state of the art at the turn of the century. There is a reason why names of individuals like Bell, Tesla and Mercedes are still attached to companies in these industries. A single workshop with a handful of people represented a car factory at the time and therefore that knowledge could be easily transferred and replicated. Both the Russia and Japan had auto manufactures by 1915 for example. The Soviets didn't outproduce the Third Reich by setting up "single workshop[s] with a handful of people". You're either being really disingenuous here or you genuinely don't understand the scale of Soviet industrialization and are talking out of your rear end. There are plenty of reasons to criticize the Soviet economy but the idea that it's growth wasn't remarkable or extremely impressive by world historical standards is ridiculous. quote:That a healthy state is probably the most important thing for economic growth? I agree. Wait, so you're saying the USSR had a "health state"? Really? The obvious implication here is that economic development is almost impossible without a strong state that is willing to ignore market signals or comparative advantage in favour of developing strategic industries. quote:We weren't actually. The soviet Union's golden years were from 1928-1970 per an earlier discussion. More than half of that came after WWII. You're ignoring the forest for the trees here. The USSR's development record cannot be looked at in isolation from its historical situation or the massive wars it was engaged in. quote:So prior to that China wanted to trade with the U.S. but the U.S. just didn't let them? It's probably some of both. I do not even understand what you're trying to argue at this point. The USSR could not just choose to trade with the USA or the rest of the capitalist world. There was some exchange in specific areas during the 1920s but the idea that the USSR's economic isolation was self imposed is a massive oversimplification of what actually happened. You can read a paper here that briefly details the Soviet's attempts to attract foreign capital in the 1920s. While the move toward autaurky in the 1930s probably discouraged further investment the overwhelming reason that the USSR didn't have access to foreign capital is, first of all, that the Soviets were poor, and second of all that the western powers had no reason to lend resources to a system that they accurately perceived to be a direct threat to their own. Western policy makers in the 20th century (and before) have been pretty blunt about the fact that they want third world countries to follow capitalist development, which means that they had a very strong motivation to impede Soviet economic growth wherever they could. quote:Yeah maybe it's "up there" but go back to the original argument that got us here. It was the idea that Soviet economic history provides examples we might want to replicate today. First it assumes we can separate its economic achievements from the political baggage. But even allowing that, I'm still not seeing exactly what I should want to take. Personally I would not want to emulate the political structure of the USSR and I agree with you that it isn't altogether clear how much we can separate the Soviet economy from Soviet politics. However, the record of Soviet development is notable because it suggests there's way more room for manoeuvre when it comes to developing economic policies than what many people would think. quote:Yeah they did. It came partially at the expense of the consumer sector. Also space and military are always government driven so it's not like their U.S. competition was drastically different in those sectors (as it was in the consumer space). Yeah but the relevant point here is that the Soviets developed a big enough economy (starting from an extremely low level of development) that they were able to compete with the world's richest capitalist power. And before you try to play this off as being purely a by-product of their large population and natural resoruces maybe you can explain why other large and resource rich countries like Brazil or India weren't also pioneering space travel in the 50s. quote:Not Socialist. Socialism means having all or nearly all capital publicly owned. Capitalism has private capital and markets. I admit there is probably room for refinement of these terms but in this specific example, China, it's not terribly contentious to use the word "capitalism". Ok. So you agree that European imperialism was an example of capitalism then? quote:The Soviet Union actually had plenty of interaction with U.S companies like public contracts with Ford for example prior to WWII. Exactly what technology do you think the Soviet Union was lacking access to prior to WWII? The USSR was a backwards agrarian country devestated by war and famine and massively lacking in capital. Your attempts to downplay this fact are starting to sound either ignorant or extremely disingenuous.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:19
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The only really important questions in relation to this are: Was the death of so many people necessary for the industrialisation? (no) and To what extent are the deaths of these people the responsibility of Karl Marx's theory (a little, but not much).
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Feb 10, 2015 22:24
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Not only were some of those deaths almost certainly avoidable, I would also say that the structure of the Soviet economy was inimical to the self stated goals of Lenin, Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership. Within a couple generatiosn the state apparatus they had built reverted to a form of capitalism far more brutal than that practised by the USA (domestically at least). So even on its own terms the Soviet economy was a failure that sowed the seeds for its own dissolution. As for whether Marxism should take any blame that's a harder question to answer, though on some level I think that attempting a massive transformation of society is inevitably going to create a lot of chaos and bloodshed. In fairness, though, liberalism could not have come into existence without the genocidal extermination of the North American natives, the enslavement of Africa or the multi-decade bloodbath that was the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. So while Stalinism is noteworthy in terms of how it compressed centuries of brutality into a few decades, communism's record of atrocity isn't unique. And if the extermination of the North American natives is too distant a point of comparison for your tastes just read what Britain was doing in India during the 19th century. British administrators were literally outlawing famine relief because it would interfere with the free market setting the prices for food, and the death toll from that decision was catastrophic. Engineering or ignoring famines out of fidelity to your chosen ideology isn't a uniquely communist phenomena, it's just something empires do when they can get away.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:35
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Disinterested posted:The only really important questions in relation to this are: Question: How many do you believe died? When? Where?
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Feb 11, 2015 00:52
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HorseLord posted:Question: I don't think I want to play unless you explain the relevance of your questions.
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Feb 11, 2015 00:54
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Because you can't begin to determine if deaths were necessary without knowing how many of them there were, or where they were, or when they were, or even who or what did it and why. I mean, Stalin was an interesting man. But I don't think any of the Kremlin's rooms had a box which contained a continuously fluctuating amount of utterly contextless cadavers. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 00:59
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Disinterested posted:I don't think I want to play unless you explain the relevance of your questions. They may be alluding to the wildly inflated claims of the John Birch Society and then others about the hundred million people Communism has killed. Anyway, we're talking about Russia. Marx would have been like "what? Russia's not ready for communism."
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Feb 11, 2015 01:01
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You can ignore the people Stalin's regime killed just through neglect and tunnel in only on the ones it killed through active and known policy initiatives (Kulak liquidation, Purges, targeted Ukranian famine) and still make my case, so I'm not especially worried about the John Birch stuff (which I didn't know about specifically, but you can sort of tell that's what Americans are thinking when they talk about the USSR). If it's about killing people with neglect then Communism is still probably the overall leader but it's not very far in the lead over colonialism or Tsarism in the picohitlers stakes. SedanChair posted:"what? Russia's not ready for communism." Yeah. I don't think Marx gets totally off the hook, but say 80-90% of the way.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:03
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Disinterested posted:You can ignore the people Stalin's regime killed just through neglect and tunnel in only on the ones it killed through active and known policy initiatives (Kulak liquidation, Purges, targeted Ukranian famine) and still make my case, so I'm not especially worried about the Birch stuff (which I didn't know about specifically, but you can sort of tell that's what Americans are thinking when they talk about the USSR). There was no targeted Ukranian famine. That season's famine happened across multiple republics and hit Kazakhstan worse.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:05
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HorseLord posted:There was no targeted Ukranian famine. That season's famine happened across multiple republics and hit Kazakhstan worse. Hahaha.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:07
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Disinterested posted:If it's about killing people with neglect then Communism is still probably the overall leader but it's not very far in the lead over colonialism or Tsarism in the picohitlers stakes. Yeah I think British policy in India deserves an honorable mention, and any difference in scale is due to circumstance rather than intent.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:08
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SedanChair posted:Yeah I think British policy in India deserves an honorable mention, and any difference in scale is due to circumstance rather than intent. It was a bit less orchestrated and the authorities eventually worked out that letting everyone starve was not A-OK, but tens of millions of people is a rather unimpressive learning curve.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:09
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Disinterested posted:Hahaha. There literally wasn't. There's never been so much as a single scrap of paper turned up showing that they deliberately caused a famine in Ukraine. Given that there's literally no evidence at all, I'm inclined to think that the famine in Ukraine was part of the famine that happened in the other republics that are literally right next to it. Either that, or Stalin had the personal good fortune of A) having a real famine break out in the USSR just as he wanted to give Ukraine one for no reason, and B) the ability to co-ordinate the entire government of Ukraine with psychic powers, so as to not accidentally write anything incriminating down.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:16
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HorseLord posted:There literally wasn't. There's never been so much as a single scrap of paper turned up showing that they deliberately caused a famine in Ukraine. HorseLord posted:Yet you mention anything positive about the USSR and you're immediately labeled a cultist worshipping stalin at his skull throne. Ironically, yes.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:26
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Even if the famine in Ukraine was not consciously intended to destroy the Ukrainian independence movement it sort of beggars belief that more could not have been done to prevent the mass starvation of millions of people. Same thing with the purges and the horrific police state that Stalin constructed. Even accepting that the potted cold war era histories of the USSR are incomplete and propagandistic cannot diminish the awfulness of Stalin's regime. Stalin pretty much doomed the USSR by saddling it with a state apparatus that was inevitably going to generate a class of privileged nomenklatura who, unsurprisingly, reverted the system to an even worse form of capitalism than what had previously existed. I really do not see why Stalin should be praised when the state he created failed in its self stated goal of creating a socialist society. Yes living standards in the USSR were better than they were for third world countries. Yes the USSR falsifies a lot of liberal myths about economic development. No, Stalin was not some great leader worthy of our reverence and affection. Disinterested posted:It was a bit less orchestrated and the authorities eventually worked out that letting everyone starve was not A-OK, but tens of millions of people is a rather unimpressive learning curve. British authorities went out of their way to prevent famine relief in India because, on the one hand, they thought it was a waste of money, and because, on the other, they thought that famine relief distorted the Malthusian nature of free markets. Sir Richard Temple is a great example of this. He successfully prevented a famine in India by distributing food and was widely condemned for this back in Britain. So the next time a famine rolled around he avoided any kind of famine relief, leading to millions of deaths. Its easily comparable to what Stalin did in Ukraine. quote:After being educated at Rugby and the East India Company College at Haileybury, Temple joined the Bengal Civil Service in 1846. His hard work and literary skill were soon recognised; he was private secretary for some years to John Lawrence in the Punjab, and gained useful financial experience under James Wilson. He served as Chief Commissioner for the Central Provinces until 1867, when he was appointed Resident at Hyderabad. In 1867 he was made Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India (KCSI). In 1868 he became a member of the supreme government,[which?] first as foreign secretary and then as finance minister. Lest that be too distant in the past let's revisit Britain's Indian policy in the 1940s: quote:And it was India that would be the greatest stain on Churchill’s record at its otherwise splendid climax. As prime minister from 1940 to 1945 he obstinately thwarted any attempt to move toward a settlement with Gandhi and the Congress nationalists. Worse still was the awful Bengal famine of 1943. Like the Irish famine 100 years before, it was not caused by the London government, but in both cases official indifference and inaction gravely aggravated the horror, and destroyed any moral authority the British claimed to rule those suffering peoples. Churchill's response to the Bengal famine was to send a telegram to the British viceroy asking why, if food was really so scarce, hadn't Gandhi died yet?
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Feb 11, 2015 01:29
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Your own example is quite a good one, since Temple represents exactly the kind of lovely with the possibility of being slightly less lovely British colonial policy we know and love. It wasn't always the maximum level of awful, but disaster was never too far away. It only took one hard-hearted administrator, viceroy, minister or prime-minister to decide a trifling sum of money was too much for a large number of people to die; some people were outraged, others thought it was a form of social darwinism. I don't like the wiki citation, since it doesn't make it clear if the words were his or the author's. All of this is especially funny since Khrushchev's careerism too played a major role in the severity of the Ukranian famine. The Malthusian point is questionable. Mathus was not in vogue any more by the time a lot of these people are doing their thing, though his ideas have some cache. It's by no means a belief system held by everyone in colonial government.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:39
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if you wan to get into the history. The argument made is that the 1931 famine was targeted based on class/occupation not ethnicity, but it wasn't targeted against simply ethnic Ukrainians but Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakh peasants. There is wide evidence that the Soviets were shipping grain to Ukrainian cities during the period which included ethnic Ukrainians. It is also why it is a complicated issue as far as nationalism/national memory.Helsing posted:Stalin pretty much doomed the USSR by saddling it with a state apparatus that was inevitably going to generate a class of privileged nomenklatura who, unsurprisingly, reverted the system to an even worse form of capitalism than what had previously existed. I really do not see why Stalin should be praised when the state he created failed in its self stated goal of creating a socialist society. Tsarist economics was unspeakably brutal itself, if anything most of the population died off early from basically living a late Medieval state of existence. You don't have to defend Stalin either to say that something needed to happen because Russia even before the war wasn't doing to last very long into the twentieth century. Russia needed crash industrialization, massive amounts of investment and likely far more government planning to get where it needed to be. Purges and grain-transfers from famine effected areas were indefensible but at the same time Russia was still very very behind. The better scenario would have been if Stalin cracked his head on some ice, but nevertheless Preobrazhensky's arguments won out (but were not as implemented like Stalin). Ardennes fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 01:56
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Ardennes posted:if you wan to get into the history. The argument made is that the 1931 famine was targeted based on class/occupation not ethnicity, but it wasn't targeted against simply ethnic Ukrainians but Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakh peasants. There is wide evidence that the Soviets were shipping grain to Ukrainian cities during the period which included ethnic Ukrainians. It is also why it is a complicated issue as far as nationalism/national memory. Even if you go down this line, there is still the issue that because Ukraine was a breadbasket, it had more kulaks to liquidate and therefore was always going to take a disproportionate hit from that policy - which you allude to. Which is not to say the nationalist argument becomes irrelevant, since it can become a good cover or bolstering argument for the collectivisation process. Add in Khruschehv wanting to look good by providing a firm grip in a troublesome place...
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Feb 11, 2015 01:59
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Khrushchev being a notable part of the fuckup is a fun little detail. Was there ever a point in his career where he was like, good at anything?Helsing posted:Even if the famine in Ukraine was not consciously intended to destroy the Ukrainian independence movement it sort of beggars belief that more could not have been done to prevent the mass starvation of millions of people. More would have been done, if they could. It's not exactly like they had a great grain surplus anywhere. Helsing posted:Same thing with the purges and the horrific police state that Stalin constructed. Even accepting that the potted cold war era histories of the USSR are incomplete and propagandistic cannot diminish the awfulness of Stalin's regime. Once you admit the histories are incomplete and propaganda, where do you draw the line between the bits that are propaganda and the bits that are true? Seems like any slightly shrewd anticommunist could draw that line just slightly behind where most anticommunists would and then claim they're being totally impartial by saying basically the same things. Helsing posted:Stalin pretty much doomed the USSR by saddling it with a state apparatus that was inevitably going to generate a class of privileged nomenklatura who, unsurprisingly, reverted the system to an even worse form of capitalism than what had previously existed. I really do not see why Stalin should be praised when the state he created failed in its self stated goal of creating a socialist society. Stalin died in 1953, I don't think we can blame him for Boris Yeltsin. Helsing posted:Yes living standards in the USSR were better than they were for third world countries. Yes the USSR falsifies a lot of liberal myths about economic development. No, Stalin was not some great leader worthy of our reverence and affection. He was a pretty great leader, if anyone wants to revere him they can go ahead I suppose. It's certainly less weird than carving some white slave owner dudes into a mountain, or writing a theme song for your leader called "hail to the chief" of all things and then playing it whenever he shows up. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 02:05
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HorseLord posted:He was a pretty great leader, if anyone wants to revere him they can go ahead I suppose. I just feel like I want to keep these gems for posterity.
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Feb 11, 2015 02:09
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HorseLord posted:He was a pretty great leader, By the same standard the British in charge of famine Ireland and India were, I suppose.
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Feb 11, 2015 02:12
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Disinterested posted:I just feel like I want to keep these gems for posterity. Listen, kid, I've some advice: If you want to try and shame somebody for the things they say, try quoting something they've said they'd find shameful.
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Feb 11, 2015 02:13
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Disinterested posted:Even if you go down this line, there is still the issue that because Ukraine was a breadbasket, it had more kulaks to liquidate and therefore was always going to take a disproportionate hit from that policy - which you allude to. Which is not to say the nationalist argument becomes irrelevant, since it can become a good cover or bolstering argument for the collectivisation process. Add in Khruschehv wanting to look good by providing a firm grip in a troublesome place... I think it is one thing to say that obviously Ukrainians suffered more from it simply because of its status as you say as a breadbasket and the particular location of the famine along the southern steppes but otherwise, I think you need more evidence to show the classic nationalist argument that this was all about Russian versus Ukrainian ethnicity. As for Khrushchev wanting to look good, yes, but more or less he followed the policy that cities would be prioritized over urban areas which was following the party line. He was always a true believer. If anything the fact he was always such a linear thinker is what got him continuously into trouble. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 02:13
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Great [at killing people].HorseLord posted:Listen, kid, I've some advice: It's not really for your benefit. Is there a more sound indication that someone is dysfunctional than when they reach for the 'kid' so fast?
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Feb 11, 2015 02:14
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Ardennes posted:As for Khrushchev wanting to look good, yes, but more or less he followed the policy that cities would be prioritized over urban areas which was following the party line. He also really loving hated Ukranian kulaks and nationalists. I don't really have to show that it was ethnically or nationalistically motivated to make my case though.
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Feb 11, 2015 02:14
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Disinterested posted:Great [at killing people]. So first you dodge important questions about the topic of discussion, and now you pose insults as questions. I think you're really rude and talking to you isn't going to be useful for anyone.
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Feb 11, 2015 02:17
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I like how Stalin capped off his decades of sage and profound leadership by holing up in a dacha defacing paintings of naked dudes with such scrawlings as "hey [guy I purged] isn't your rear end cold sitting on that rock?"
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Feb 11, 2015 02:17
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HorseLord posted:So first you dodge important questions about the topic of discussion, and now you pose insults as questions. I think you're really rude and talking to you isn't going to be useful for anyone. Given enough rope, some people hang themselves. The same kind of people who wake up and think: Stalin - a good hill to die on.
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Feb 11, 2015 02:20
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