Tesseraction posted:

Hopefully one where one can discuss geopolitics in a more holistic way than the other threads which are more localised. Frankly I hadn't thought about it until I saw how quickly this thread burst into flames.

Brainiac Five posted:

I'm not going to answer that question because I'm afraid I don't trust you not to turn this into a giant gotcha and I really don't want to have to look at such a thing on such a beautiful evening.


No. Can I start assuming you believe stupid things too or is that a privilege reserved for cheerleaders of capitalism?

Patrick Spens posted:

That could be interesting, I'm just not sure D&D can discuss more abstract issues without it turning into a shouting match.

Giggle Goose posted:

People are asking you these questions because it would allow us to form a better baseline for discussion. I do not understand why you are being so hostile.

Brainiac Five posted:

I'm just a guy, is the thing. I'm not the avatar of the left. So I don't have to be diplomatic to you cockroaches and locusts.

Brainiac Five posted:

Okay, so do it as an SOE where you can use savings from the whole nation.

quote:

Anyways, you're backing off from your more idiotic statements, so I'll take this as an admission you were wrong without actually having to own up to it. This is also a simultaneous admission of cowardice you are making, but whatever.

Brainiac Five posted:

I'm not going to answer that question because I'm afraid

Tesseraction posted:

Yeah, that's why I've not been able to come up with a successful way to bring such a thread into existence. Was kinda hopeful for this one...

Homework Explainer posted:

Despite some impressive derails, I think there's been some all right discussion. I knew drive-bys would happen.

Brainiac Five posted:

Overthrowing imperialism is inherently worthwhile, regardless of socialism or communism.

Brainiac Five posted:

In actual practice, however, outside of Economics 101, the argument has been that comparative advantages are static, and this has been put forth by economists, most notoriously by the IMF. South Korea also did most of its economic development before trade liberalization, and indeed the vast majority of countries that developed at least moderately successfully did so before trade liberalization.
So while you may have had a humanitarian econ teacher back in high school some forty years ago, the actual practice differs. Sorry.

quote:

The exceptions are countries that relied on ignoring IP and industrial espionage to piggyback on economic development. China is doing both, funnily enough.

Fojar38 posted:

Explain to me how the Chinese proletariat controls the means of production.

Brainiac Five posted:

The theory of comparative advantage directly argues that you shouldn't attempt to develop your economy, fucko. You should probably learn to be more precise.

Homework Explainer posted:

Do you honestly believe that with a countryside blighted by a war of extermination, its wartime alliances rapidly deteriorating after a display of overwhelming atomic force from one of them and 20 million dead citizens meant the Soviet Union was "assured" of survival? I didn't think that would be the controversial part of the post.

Aeolius posted:

Peel posted:

Brainiac Five posted:

Overthrowing imperialism is inherently worthwhile, regardless of socialism or communism. If you sincerely believe that the imperial dominion of other countries is something that should only be opposed where it advances socialism, you're at best terrible at socialism and more likely a left-fascist.

Typo posted:

I'm just going to write a few points on why I think American unipolarity is a good thing

1) Unipolarity of almost any power is stabilizing, because the hegemon has an inherit interest in stability (heh). The world today is the most peaceful it has ever being for mellenias even if the media greatly amplifies any acts of violence anywhere. It is a far improvement over the cold war with its bloody us-soviet proxy wars, or the wars of the world preceding it. Today the US is vital to prevent large inter-state wars from breaking out in East Asia, former Soviet Union and other areas. China's expansionist tendencies would certainly be much more aggressive towards the Philippines and Vietnam if the US pulls out of the region, same can be said of Russia w.r.t Estonia or Ukraine in the FSU

2) American liberal international order, and global capitalism, for all its flaws, has being one of the greatest up-lifters of the poorest human being from absolute poverty in the last century. Most countries who participated in it saw huge rise in living standard of citizens.

3) A bipolar world like the one we had 1945-1989 would almost certainly involve two sides pointing thousands of nukes at each other, meaning the world is permanently a few button's push away from nuclear holocuast, a multipolar world would probably end up with multiple powers aiming nukes at each other: like India and Pakistan does today. The end of American hegemony and security guarantees gives many, many countries quick incentives to acquire nuclear weapons against their neighbors.

4) The United States is unique in having a domestic politics much more responsive to political opinions of its citizens than Russia or China, the likely replacements for American hegemon. The American population tends to lean isolationist in the majority of cases, the US is thus much more restrained than most other powers.

Feel free to disagree

Typo posted:

I'm just going to write a few points on why I think American unipolarity is a good thing

1) Unipolarity of almost any power is stabilizing, because the hegemon has an inherit interest in stability (heh). The world today is the most peaceful it has ever being for mellenias even if the media greatly amplifies any acts of violence anywhere. It is a far improvement over the cold war with its bloody us-soviet proxy wars, or the wars of the world preceding it. Today the US is vital to prevent large inter-state wars from breaking out in East Asia, former Soviet Union and other areas. China's expansionist tendencies would certainly be much more aggressive towards the Philippines and Vietnam if the US pulls out of the region, same can be said of Russia w.r.t Estonia or Ukraine in the FSU

2) American liberal international order, and global capitalism, for all its flaws, has being one of the greatest up-lifters of the poorest human being from absolute poverty in the last century. Most countries who participated in it saw huge rise in living standard of citizens.

3) A bipolar world like the one we had 1945-1989 would almost certainly involve two sides pointing thousands of nukes at each other, meaning the world is permanently a few button's push away from nuclear holocuast, a multipolar world would probably end up with multiple powers aiming nukes at each other: like India and Pakistan does today. The end of American hegemony and security guarantees gives many, many countries quick incentives to acquire nuclear weapons against their neighbors.

4) The United States is unique in having a domestic politics much more responsive to political opinions of its citizens than Russia or China, the likely replacements for American hegemon. The American population tends to lean isolationist in the majority of cases, the US is thus much more restrained than most other powers.

Feel free to disagree

Shuka posted:

I really like the point that stability is really good for a country, i honestly dont think a country can progress in any sense with instability.

USA I think has been directly responsible for instability in countries that nominate anti-USA leaders to run for office. It pours millions into elections in many countries, and supports overthrow of anti-USA elected leaders if that is what it takes.

This isnt the best post but Im on my coffee break

rudatron posted:

Typo posted:

No it doesn't and you'd know this if you bother actually reading what the model of comparative advantage is about.

The ultimate core of the comparative advantage theory is that if two countries work together, instead of refusing to trade with one another, the amount of wealth in both country increases even if one country is objectively worse at producing every good than the other country.

So let's say you have England and Portugal, and two goods, cloth and wine...

Kavros posted:

That's where a lot of the double standards in the anti-imperialist movement seem to accidentally come from -- and I am trying to say this in all fairness to the people who want to argue the anti-imperialist argument in good faith! -- the focus on 'countering' U.S. imperialism often comes packaged with support of governments who are "part of the anti-imperialist struggle" in their minds, simply because they are unable to be as imperialist as they want at this moment because of the United States.

FBH991 posted:

4) America doesn't tend to be isolationist in the slightest. That's out right false.

Aeolius posted:

If you really want to talk about idealism, look no further than all this stuff about "end-states," as though we're admitting some Fukuyamian end of history. Recall what I said to you earlier in this discussion, that it makes little sense to think of this as a "discrete bout of warfare rather than a continuous struggle." Modern imperialism, being rooted in capitalist relations, is not going to go away if a hegemonic power is upset from its throne. On this we agree. But I simply cannot see how you can reconcile a professed materialist orientation with the idea that resistance is futile. Should the entire edifice of medicine throw up its arms and stop treating people, arguing, "well, they're just gonna get sick again, and death is certain"? To the real, concrete people on the ground resisting, what is the difference between whether your opponent flies one flag or three? Moreover, even if we admit "end-state" in some qualified, intermediary sense, shouldn't this dispose you more favorably to tactical thinking, rather than less? But then, by your criterion, it doesn't seem anyone can support any course of action, ever, since apodictic certainty in predictions of human affairs is a logical impossibility.

Worst of all, you still don't seem to have noticed the word "provisional," which alone answers your entire "seeds of new imperialism" contention. Peel attempted to make this clear as well, and I thought they may have done a better job than I, but apparently none of it penetrated. So... I guess we'll leave it at "good day"?


The problem with the econ 101 explanation (and the classic cloth/wine story) is that it never gets out of econ 101. So as a result, we never consider whether the examples still hold good for nations with large wage differentials, for instance. Or the effects of divergent (i.e., increasing vs decreasing) returns to scale among trading partners. Or the various vectors of unequal exchange. And so on. And you don't even need to dig into the Marxian lit to find this stuff. For example, Kaldor is (was) among the more sophisticated critics of free trade you'll find. Myrdal did a great deal of work with him on circular and cumulative causation. Robinson wrote at length about the "beggar-my-neighbor game" played in the balance of trade.

Of course, it's hard to fault someone for not knowing about economic critiques of comparative advantage/free trade doctrine, because they're not really taught. A few years ago I set about digging through probably more than a dozen modern textbooks on macroeconomics, international econ, trade theory, etc. to see if any of them actually gave airtime to anything but the dogma, and the results were disappointing. It's a touch hazy now; I had taken notes on my findings, but I've moved since then and I'm not sure where they went. I think one of them (might have been Feenstra) had a footnote directing readers to earlier writers on scale, like Frank Graham and Bertil Ohlin (the latter obviously better known for the Hecksher-Ohlin stuff) but then only utilized it in a blinkered way. Insofar as Robinson ever gets a reference, it's generally about monopolistic/monopsonistic competition. And so on. There may have also been one Krugman book that gave passing mention to Graham, also with no payoff. Again, this was a while ago, so I may be imagining that last one. Point is, critical perspectives have not really penetrated the textbook end of things.

Incidentally, "exploitation [being] good for the people being exploited" is a case Marx treats in great detail (e.g., rising real wage coinciding with rising rate of surplus value via a larger share of increasing output still being captured by capitalists). To be clear, the exploitation is not the part of that scenario that's good for the worker.


I want to make sure you recognize how important that "at this moment" is — to say nothing of the highly limited context of said support.

A lot of people in here keep slipping, unintentionally I assume, back from provisional to general in their reading of "support." Try to keep in mind the "house on fire" example I gave back in my first post; nobody here wants the sink to leak.

asdf32 posted:

With widely varying levels of technology and capital comparative advantage is far more relevant than ever. The wine/cloth example is bad because it emphasizes natural resources which are actually less significant and chooses items which both countries could make if they needed too. Japan's lack of resources wrt car manufacturing is completely irrelevant compared to the human and physical capital they've built up in that industry. Japan is thus comparatively far better at car design/manufacture than say South Africa.

Today a small or medium size economy has zero chance of producing a complete modern basket of goods. Comparative advantage in this context says that it's better to specialize in a few things rather than try to do some of everything poorly. As it turns out, this is exactly what countries like China and South Korea have done with electronics and heavy industry respectfully.



Processes that directly lead to exploitation can be beneficial. Or to put it another way: whether something is exploitative in a Marxist sense tells us nothing about whether it's beneficial or not.

Aeolius posted:

rudatron posted:

Oh come off it, I don't recall ever saying 'resistance is futile', or even implying as such, I'm taking issue with your idea that you can neatly cut up things up in the way you want. "We only support them in the anti-imperial praxis" Do you honestly believe that you can do that, and that alone? You supported them knowing what they were, you don't get to just play it off. If you knew that they were structured in such a way that they're highly likely to act bad themselves, later on, you adopt that responsibility for those consequences, in so far as your support at all helped them achieve that end. If all you've done is change the rear end in a top hat in charge, then your quest to fight imperialism will be eternal. You will be stuck on the anti-imperial treadmill forever, toppling the same assholes you gave a leg up only moments ago.

But you seem to be okay for that, because you're immediately comparing having a goal (a world without imperialism) to loving Fukuyama. Or letting people die. All I've done is challenged you to think in a goal-oriented way. Your actions can have unintended consequences, and simply labeling those actions provisional doesn't change that. Oh, I'm sure you absolutely don't want China to demand tribute from everyone in the South China Sea, funny thing is though, that they absolutely will do that if they can get away with it, so allowing that situation to occur, bringing that situation into the present, whatever your intentions in doing so, has not helped anyone. "No no, I disavow that highly obvious & predictable future, because I only supported China against the US, I only supported them in that one area", you don't get to do that, you don't get to cut up all the reactions and counter-reactions in that way, you have to take responsibility for all of them, like it or not.

asdf32 posted:

With widely varying levels of technology and capital comparative advantage is far more relevant than ever.

rudatron posted:

Oh come off it, I don't recall ever saying 'resistance is futile', or even implying as such, I'm taking issue with your idea that you can neatly cut up things up in the way you want. "We only support them in the anti-imperial praxis" Do you honestly believe that you can do that, and that alone?

Homework Explainer posted:

Get ready for the shift key, baby.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent selling off of that country's public assets to gangs of oligarchs, there has not yet emerged a single force to rival the considerable imperial power of the United States of America. Instead, principled anti-imperialists must cobble together a host of imperfect nations and political movements to form a hodgepodge coalition against the continuing encroachment of the American ruling class and its interests over the oppressed peoples of the world. This support brings with it its own problems, but in light of the magnitude of America's crimes against the globe, such "deals with the devil" are palatable by default. As such, I thought it would be useful to lay out both the case against American imperialism and what are, to my mind, the necessarily critical sympathies that must be developed to effectively combat the empire on the geopolitical stage. Building a movement here at home that exhibits these sympathies is essential for long-term success, and every avenue must be explored — even posts on Internet joke forums about how Donald Trump is a Creamsicle clown man, which he is.

I ask that this thread not devolve into pointless digressions into how I or other anti-imperialists unequivocally love every listed government or head of state or think they never made a mistake. Besides being patently untrue, it's not the purpose of the thread. For much of these countries, my goal — and the goal of many other anti-imperialists — is improvement by means of mass workers' movements, which can better develop in periods of economic uncertainty brought on by anti-imperialist action. This isn't "accelerationism;" it's an understanding that apparatuses of repression are harder to maintain with a weakened economy. The same, of course, goes for the United States.

quote:

Observe, the ragtag collection of heads of state standing against the American empire. I've listed them in descending order, in terms of how I'd support them outside the context of American imperialism. Some, like Cuba and China, get my support generally. Others, like Russia, do not. But, as I say in the title, these "devil's bargains" are necessary to bring an end to the most destructive world power in all of recorded history. When that's happened, anti-imperialists can focus on improvements in those countries. Bringing the war machine to a grinding halt takes priority for the vast majority of the world's people.

Homework Explainer posted:

I think national policy arises from material conditions, and I'd be committing some serious chauvinism if I claimed to know better than Koreans how to handle Korea's situation. Juche is "Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics," to borrow from Deng Xiaoping. It was the result of the war and subsequent military encirclement, and has been maintained due to the near-constant antagonism surrounding the peninsula. The national question is essential for this topic, and without keeping context in mind at all times we risk falling into error.

In short, I think Juche is the policy Koreans have determined as the best course for the continuation of their nation. By the same token, imperialism is the best course for the continuation of the United States as a nation in its current form. The reason it came into being was the inevitable drop in surplus value from domestic production. Without our imperial monopolies, our economy would have stopped growing long ago. I don't blame the ruling class for making this determination — they're right! It's how to keep the power structure in place! But I want it to end nonetheless.

asdf32 posted:

With widely varying levels of technology and capital comparative advantage is far more relevant than ever. The wine/cloth example is bad because it emphasizes natural resources which are actually less significant and chooses items which both countries could make if they needed too. Japan's lack of resources wrt car manufacturing is completely irrelevant compared to the human and physical capital they've built up in that industry. Japan is thus comparatively far better at car design/manufacture than say South Africa.

Today a small or medium size economy has zero chance of producing a complete modern basket of goods. Comparative advantage in this context says that it's better to specialize in a few things rather than try to do some of everything poorly. As it turns out, this is exactly what countries like China and South Korea have done with electronics and heavy industry respectfully.

Aeolius posted:

The problem with the econ 101 explanation (and the classic cloth/wine story) is that it never gets out of econ 101. So as a result, we never consider whether the examples still hold good for nations with large wage differentials, for instance. Or the effects of divergent (i.e., increasing vs decreasing) returns to scale among trading partners. Or the various vectors of unequal exchange. And so on. And you don't even need to dig into the Marxian lit to find this stuff. For example, Kaldor is (was) among the more sophisticated critics of free trade you'll find. Myrdal did a great deal of work with him on circular and cumulative causation. Robinson wrote at length about the "beggar-my-neighbor game" played in the balance of trade.

Of course, it's hard to fault someone for not knowing about economic critiques of comparative advantage/free trade doctrine, because they're not really taught. A few years ago I set about digging through probably more than a dozen modern textbooks on macroeconomics, international econ, trade theory, etc. to see if any of them actually gave airtime to anything but the dogma, and the results were disappointing. It's a touch hazy now; I had taken notes on my findings, but I've moved since then and I'm not sure where they went. I think one of them (might have been Feenstra) had a footnote directing readers to earlier writers on scale, like Frank Graham and Bertil Ohlin (the latter obviously better known for the Hecksher-Ohlin stuff) but then only utilized it in a blinkered way. Insofar as Robinson ever gets a reference, it's generally about monopolistic/monopsonistic competition. And so on. There may have also been one Krugman book that gave passing mention to Graham, also with no payoff. Again, this was a while ago, so I may be imagining that last one. Point is, critical perspectives have not really penetrated the textbook end of things.

quote:

Incidentally, "exploitation [being] good for the people being exploited" is a case Marx treats in great detail (e.g., rising real wage coinciding with rising rate of surplus value via a larger share of increasing output still being captured by capitalists). To be clear, the exploitation is not the part of that scenario that's good for the worker.

Helsing posted:

Also, incidentally,


you are completely misapplying the idea of comparative advantage. In your hands it's a basically meaningless idea that could be stretched to apply to almost anything. The funny thing is that what you say is a "bad example" is actually the original example used by David Ricardo to justify the entire concept.

China and Japan used protectionist policies and various forms of (both covert and overt) government subsidies and protectionism to develop industrial champions and used this to kick-start broader economic growth and to gradually move up to more and more complex industries. And far from specializing, their economic development saw their economies becoming more complex and diverse rather than specializing in a single industry.

FBH991 posted:

1) Unipolarity hasn't been stabilizing though. Iraq, Ukraine, to an extent Afghanistan etc. are all products of American unipolarity. Also, all of the tendencies you've noted were either a) restrained under biopolarity (China would be worried about a soviet invasion if it turned too much force out against Japan) or b) You can't show that unipolarity restrains them (There are Russian troops operating in Ukraine without fear of the USA). I think honestly when America decided to commit random aggression against Iraq, that should have killed Hegemonic stability theory completely. It's clear that great powers still going to great power.

quote:

2) Open trade, which is what you're talking about when you say global capitalism, does not require unipolarity.

quote:

3) Unipolarity still involves people pointing nukes at one another. Read Russian nuclear doctrine. They fully planned to use nuclear weapons in the event of a US/NATO invasion, which they now regard as quite likely. A unipolar world really doesn't have much less potential for nuclear conflict than a multipolar one, possibly more, because nobody can stop the hegemon doing what it wants without the threat of a nuclear strike.

quote:

4) America doesn't tend to be isolationist in the slightest. That's out right false.

asdf32 posted:

First, no poo poo that's the textbook example. Natural resources are still a source of comparative advantage but in a world with cheap transportation its impact is diminished. Hence it only adds a tiny cost to Japanese cars which is swamped by all the other advantages they've built for themselves in that industry.

Second the observation that comparative advantage exists is seperate from a prediction that nations will or should maximize it and it's certainly seperate from whether the free market or government policy is driving that persuit.

Third no, comparative advantage does not imply the that the entire nation of Japan should persue one industry.

Fojar38 posted:

No, there is very much a historical pattern of "Americans need to be dragged kicking and screaming towards doing anything outside of North America"

Typo posted:

It would really help if you give a coherent criticism of free trade, instead of simply dropping a bunch of names and terms and claim that "it's a touch hazy" and imply that of course, the "truth" about free trade is being hidden from textbooks probably by bourgeois counter-revolutionary economists.

Nicholas Kaldor, in his 1984 'Causes of Growth and Stagnation in the World Economy,' posted:

Ricardo proceeded to demonstrate his law in terms of an example of trade between England and Portugal, where Portugal is assumed to be the rich country, with a high productivity per head, whose comparative advantage in making wine is greater than in making cloth. In that case, Portugal would be better off by concentrating on wine production and importing cloth from England, giving wine in exchange.

This proposition is valid under two suppositions, neither of which is explicitly stated. The first is that the total volume of employment in both trading countries is no smaller after the opening of trade than it was before. The second is that there are constant costs of production to transferable factors in both industries - which means that the productivity of labour and capital in either industry is the same after the opening of trade than it was before. Under these two assumptions, it is easy to demonstrate that both countries stand to gain from free trade. Portugal will be richer, having more cloth at its disposal than before, with the same amount (or possibly more) of wine; while England will have more of both commodities, or in an extreme case, more of one without having less of the other.

However, in the absence of the assumption of constant costs, either on account of diminishing returns to transferable factors, or increasing returns due to economies of scale, the proposition ceases to be true, and it is an extraordinary fact that this has never, to my knowledge, been properly acknowledged in the literature of international trade theory.

Take first the case of diminishing returns. Suppose the amount of wine produced in Portugal is limited by the amount of land suitable for viniculture (while only a limited amount of labour can be used with advantage on any one hectare of land). Production could then be limited by a land constraint, not a labour constraint. If the maximum number of people who can be usefully employed on the land is smaller than the total number available to work, the remainder can only be employed in industry or services. In the absence of international trade, the people who are not wanted on the land will be engaged in making "cloth", in the ratio, say of 1 yard of cloth = 10 litres of wine. In England, on the other hand, 10 litres of wine cost the same as 10 yards of cloth. The opening of trade will mean that the price of cloth will fall so much, both in terms of money and in terms of wine, that it will no longer be profitable to produce cloth in Portugal - the Portuguese textile trade will be ruined. (This is not just an imaginary example: according to Friedrich List this is what actually happened as a result of the Methuen Treaty with Portugal of 1704). Now, if all the workers freed from cloth-making could be employed in increasing the production of wine, in proportion to the increase in labour, all would be well: the real income of Portugal would be greater than before. Portugal would have more cloth and more wine to consume than in the absence of trade. However, if land is limited, this is not possible. Nor will it be possible to save the cloth-trade by reducing wages. For there is a minimum wage (in terms of wine) below which the cloth workers could not subsist. Hence, the result might be that while Portugal will export more wine to England, the national real income of Portugal would shrink, since the addition to its wine output may not compensate for the loss of output of the cloth trade. Portugal could well end up by being a much poorer country than before - there would be less employment and less output.

The whole classical and neo-classical conception that the opportunity to trade with abroad will necessarily benefit a country by re-allocating resources in such a way that each unit of labour will directly or indirectly make a greater contribution to the national output than it did before, is a false one. Or rather, it will only be true under highly restrictive and unrealistic assumptions.

Typo posted:

labor theory of value is wrong, the rise in real wages is more than "coinciding" with higher returns on capital and is in fact largely caused by higher returns on capital. the reason why marx isn't taught except as like a point of interest in some electives in economics isn't because conspiracy to hide truth: it's because Marx is a 150 year old textbook that's eviscerated over and over again since the 1880s when utility theory rose as a direct response to the labor theory of value and is better.

Aeolius posted:

I apologize that my recollection could be better, but it's impossible not to drop names when we're discussing textbooks, since that's how they're commonly identified. I can tell you I also definitely referred to mainstays like Varian (multiple Varians, come to think of it), MWG, Kreps, Obsfeld and more, though that probably won't mean anything to you.

As it happens, I did list several of the substantive criticisms, above the point where any names start to appear. So, what you're really asking here is for me to elaborate. So, fine, let's pick the one for which I have a text at hand. Here's a lead-in, followed by a Google Books link to continue reading.


Continue here.

quote:

Moreover, I'm not saying anything about "bourgeois counter-revolutionary economists." None of the economists I named are Marxists; hence, "you don't even need to dig into the Marxian lit to find this stuff." Ideology does play a role in what ideas get propagated, yes, and certainly anyone even passingly familiar with the history of heterodox economics knows that ostracizing and discrimination have routinely been deployed against alternative traditions (and this trend continues). Here's a whole book on it.

quote:

Anyway, I don't know why you're disputing me on this if you're ready to agree that protectionism has been key to the biggest success stories among developing nations.

quote:

"It would really help if you gave a coherent criticism of the law of value, instead of simply mentioning some years and claiming it's 'wrong' and to imply that, of course, the mere existence of one theory is sufficient to refute another." Right?

Though I think we can get away with discussing asymmetry in trade in an imperialism thread, an in-depth discussion of value theory may be stretching it (by all means, choose another venue and I'll oblige you). That said, if you're going to wax authoritative to dismiss something you do not understand, you should definitely expect to be called on it.

Helsing posted:

Typo, when you're clearly overmatched you should find a more dignified avenue of retreat than "I don't need to explain nothin, everybody knows I'm right."

Just because another person knows more than you on a specific topic doesn't mean you can't remain skeptical of their ideas or ask critical questions but you're really telegraphing your ignorance here and attempting to present yourself as an equal debate partner to somebody who has obviously spent more time actually reading and thinking about these issues.