Demon Semen posted:

Stalin was one of the very few state leaders of the time smart enough to read Mein Kampf, which explicitly detailed Hitler’s lebensraum plans of Russian territory. It’s why Stalin ordered the massive industrialization of the USSR no matter the cost the moment It became clear Hitler and the nazis would rule Germany on their doorstep. Stalin’s task of business executive speech in 1931 accurately predicted that capitalist and fascist powers would invade the USSR in 10 years. Barbossa began in 1941. Stalin’s industrialization of the USSR was so massive and rapid that the nazis were completely caught off guard by their outdated maps of Russia and Eastern Europe. That book was also why Stalin refused to meet Hitler in person like other state leaders did at the time

Thanks for saving this world from industrial nazi genocide Mr. Stalin

Ardennes posted:

It seems like it.

CoolCab posted:

i was reading a bunch of wikipedia articles on mao - incidentally there is absolutely no consistency in the death estimates between the pages for, say, the cultural revolution, the great chinese famine, the great leap forward, Lysenkoism and individual people involved even when talking about the exact same event, one will say so and so million died and the next page will be ten times that number it's utterly wild- when i found this on the page for mao's fourth wife and gang of four member of many names Jiang Qing. there is this utterly bonkers section in her biography that isn't repeated on the "Death of Mao" or on Mao's page:

i mean that's a mess of citation neededs so i can't read where on earth this is coming from, has anyone heard it or have more insight on it? it reads like some kind of insane conspiracy theory lol

Raskolnikov38 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yujF8AumiQo

vyelkin posted:

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Hastings and Dawkins, two stupid tastes that taste worse together

vyelkin posted:

It's pretty field-specific. In history people actually care about your sources and if you try to make sweeping claims based on "here's one thing I found" your peer reviewers will usually eviscerate you. In fields like business, psychology, or economics, you can do a case study with like five participants or write a math equation that doesn't work and never test it in real life, and people will internalize it as a universally true part of human nature.

vyelkin posted:

profs in business schools gotta do something to pass the time in between classes where they write "profit = revenue - costs" on the blackboard and everybody nods like they're actually learning something

MeatwadIsGod posted:

Does anyone still give a poo poo about Dorkins? That seemed like a very mid-'00s cultural thing where we let incredibly cosseted British academics have an outsized influence as "public intellectuals" who refused to stay in their lanes.

StashAugustine posted:

just remembered Naomi Wolf getting owned

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Foreign lands are the substrate in which the American military industrial complex grows wars for profit. The people who profit off American wars essentially turned a occasional spasmodic national outpouring of violence into something that could be grown and provide wealth to enrich a tiny elite, just as much as Indian tea or Gabonese palm oil. The world is our war plantation, and it's turned out a heck of a crop over the years.

Spangly A posted:

Wormwood had got me mostly on board with frank olsens LSD Flight being a CIA hit for refusing to cooperate on live entemelogical warfare, then the last episode is seymour hersh showing up and looking confused and going "yeah one of my informants saw the kill order I'm pretty sure I said this before" . Then it just got added to the mental list of things that absolutely happened and you just don't discuss around people who arent already frothing communists

extensive documentation of the mosquito breeding programs used to actually kill americans in multiple different states but it's not like we'd use them for real guys

gradenko_2000 posted:

in CSPAM it's become A Thing for the kind of "we need another March to the Sea/we need Uncle Billy to make Georgia howl again" to be somewhat unseemly

Earl Hess's "Civil War Logistics" then makes a more daring claim: what if the March to the Sea was unnecessary, in the first place?

vyelkin posted:

Massive rearmament was one side of it, but parts of the citizenry were also being bought off by confiscating everything German Jews owned and firing them from their jobs and redistributing their belongings and jobs to "Aryan" Germans, which made it seem like "citizens" were benefiting from the Nazi economy because they had redefined who counted as a citizen and then redistributed existing wealth to them, like a racist shell game.

R. Mute posted:

i think this is a limited way of looking at things, and one that's far too common in western historiography about the soviet union, because it completely ignores the possibility that people actually believed in what they were doing - or in anything at all, really. it's all settling scores, self-preservation, opportunism, but the idea that people earnestly believed they were rooting out class enemies or protecting the socialist project never comes up. it also tends to view the communist party as somehow alien to soviet society, a separate entity that merely enforced its will on the soviet people, while in reality the interaction between the communist party and the society it was a part of was integral to a lot of party decisions and acts.

there's plenty of other historical examples where we do acknowledge this dynamic - the cultural revolution being an obvious one. but if you want a non-communist example, there's also the post-war repression of collaborators - where a lot of the imprisonments and executions were driven not by a sense of justice, but by a fear of what the people and the resistance groups would do if there wasn't enough of a show of retribution.

i swear someone published a book about this recently, but i can't for the life of me remember the name.

mawarannahr posted:

Helen Keller learned to write so she could write "in favor of refusing life-saving medical procedures to infants with severe mental impairments or physical deformities, saying that their lives were not worthwhile and they would likely become criminals"

mawarannahr posted:

https://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=3209

War and Pieces posted:

Everyone itt needs to go to a Yemeni cafe asap

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

The Bolsheviks were really really really horrible. I don't think every single story was overblown.

But you need to understand that every member of the Russian nobility were monsters. They only spoke French. They considered Russian the noise of peasants. As in, cows go moo, sheep go baa, peasants go Russian. I read a memoir that talked about a landowner who had his peasants pose for him in a living sculpture garden. When the Revolution came, he was strangled to death by one of his statues.

These loving people had so completely entrenched themselves into a system of oppression, while living as far separate as they could from their victims, that the system was never going to be upended without some significant loss of life and physical property. Add on to that the effects of more than 2 years of amoralizing war, and yeah, you've got some bad stuff that happened.

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

Are people joking about not knowing what a knife rest is?




Do they have saucers in America?

and if they do, do people drink tea out of the cup or the saucer?

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

Yank culture.

Canadian and American manners, according to David Hackett Fischer, differ because Canada was settled by Britons who arrived during the Georgian era, and brought language and customs directly from the Old Sod. Canada, Fischer says, was founded as a mirror of the Britain of the 1750's, while our American cousins were a century or more in the past. Because of the close association between Canada and the mother country, and British manners being de rigueur until the mid 1960's, while occasionally "provincial", Canadians generally kept up with British custom. By comparison, direct cultural exchange was severed at the moment of America's inception, and so as Charles Dickens observed in his 1842 travels in the Americas, the Americans were a people out of time.

Mr. Sharps posted:

lol at asking anybody under 30 to come up with an original idea