Recent content by Grimn

Employees banding together as a union is absolutely a good thing and should be part of any free market. Unions becoming institutionalised as closed shops, protecting seniors or the corrupt is not. It seems to me that the US has the worst of it, with the corruption etc. Teacher's unions is one...

There's a bunch lectures he gives on YT on the subject but I can't really provide a timestamp since I haven't watched any of them in a while. Loaned the books from the library too so I'm going from memory anyway.

Stephen Kotkin makes a good argument in his biography of Stalin that forced collectivisation only made sense if Stalin was a genuine Marxist. He had all the power already, increasing grain harvests, things were going well, yet he jeopardised his rule and the whole of the USSR by forcing...

But it does by virtue of them proposing it. Like Stalin thought that by eliminating private property and free markets in agriculture ie. forced collectivisation, productivity would increase, more grain could be exported funding industrialisation, increasing mechanisation in agriculture further...

If there's going to be a utopian society along the lines of anarchism or communism, I'd say it's more likely to be via technological advance. A violent revolution to that end would just end up in the opposite.

I can understand that you draw a comparison with one of the worst things one can do to another person and something you (general you) vehemently disagree with. Found this clip of Stephen Kotkin and I'd say it encapsulates the problems within communism pretty well: Ie. Marxism/socialism gives...

But rape is a physical violation of a sexual nature. Is a mugging rape? The government taxing me against my will maybe as well? Maybe you'd be better served to just call socialism 'theft' or something.

Maybe one of the primary things that made socialist revolution in most of the more industrially developed Europe unlikely was that they had instituted land reforms that made tenant farmers from likely supporters of social revolution into a conservative bulwark against revolution. Marxists...

"race warfare" instead of class warfare is pretty well put for National Socialism. And obviously workers ownership of means of production was never on the menu for nazis. Lenin was against nationalism but had to accept it. Like in the case of Poland: the Polish workers didn't recognise the...

They are in that they reject the class warfare of marxism and they rejected free market capitalism that results in economic chaos that gives rise to class warfare. From what I understand they were both more left wing in economic policy in their populist stage when they were appealing for votes...

Clearly he still has very small, yet accurate, thumbs.

"New Economic System" would be the NEP I presume, for which the main driving force was to protect the revolution with its scant few million supporters to accommodate the way more than 100 million peasants who could easily crush it. The NEP was a matter of much debate in the USSR during all the...

I've heard that the regions that have "exotic foods" have them because they underwent famines in the past and the diet stuck? It might be bullshit, we don't eat tree bark in Europe but we might if that's how we discovered that it's delicious but it isn't. Tree juice is a thing though. Edit...

I didn't experience much confusion, just the realisation that "ohh these are different timelines" in episode 4 or so. I really liked it, my only complaint is that the Nilfgaardians' armor looks really stupid compared to the mostly nice looking stuff everyone else is wearing. Superman was better...