Botond173
1d ago
As far as I know, Kim Il Sung was absolutely willing to negotiate as early as 1951 because it was clear that his original war goals were out of reach. Continuing the war was not only pointless but also rather detrimental for North Korea. It was Stalin who insisted on continuing the war and supplying the Chinese to do so with Mao's acceptance because both of them decided to make the return of POWs a central issue in order to block any agreement (because there was no way the enemy was going to forcibly repatriate all North Korean and Chinese POWs) and thus prolong the war as long as possible as they apparently thought this'd harm American interests or something (or a case of commie 4D chess, maybe). It's no surprise that a ceasefire was only reached after Stalin's death. In fact, it's reasonable to assume that Kim was willing to negotiate a truce as soon as the winter of 1950 had MacArthur not insisted on continuing the UN offensive beyond all of its original aims.
Botond173
1d ago
Cubans are too lazy for revolution
Unfortunately for the US this did not seem to have been the case in 1959.
Botond173
1d ago
I have rather cursory knowledge of the pre-1979 Iranian monarchy but based on this I can say that whatever level of economic growth it was showing was not sustainable. It was rather uneven and had a distorting effect on multiple sectors. Also the Shah was mortally ill and had zero inclination to rule as a monarch and to raise his son to be his heir, and at the same time the monarchy was losing legitimacy overall. The population was being subjected to rapid cultural and economic change that it was unable to adapt to. (One American scholar likened it to trying to make people drink water from a fire hose.) Iran was not and was never going to be South Korea or any Asian Tiger.
'I'm not mad at you!', even better. Should go to the same list as 'Bless your heart' (LOL), 'i'm sorry that you feel this way' (the way Japanese prime ministers 'apologized' for war crimes, I guess?), 'I hope one day you'll be able to feel less hated and persecuted' (h/t darwin2500).
Botond173
2d ago
OP's point was specifically about scenarios where the Left goes too far, which is arguably what happened under Allende's rule. My critique regarding this is thus that "we" do have at least one example of an antidote.
Botond173
3d ago
This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.
Why does he discount the rather obvious examples of Pinochet and Franco, for example? Genuine question, as I'm not familiar with his work in detail.
Botond173
3d ago
In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.
Romania and Albania were definitely worse (Albania was never major by anyone's standards for sure, but the GDR was also not somehow more major than Romania). Anyway, since you brought up the issue of state capacity, I'd point out that since member states of the Soviet bloc were modeled alike, so their state security agencies had roughly the same capacity as well; it's that some of those regimes enforced a less rigid system of conformity than the others that made a difference.
ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them
The central government, sure. On the other hand, they are also characterized by vigilantism, militia building and the emergence of organic local power structures.
On a different note, I'm not sure what exactly your argument is - is it that more people suffer from tyranny than from anarchy in absolute numbers, or that anarchy is overall a bigger threat to individual human flourishing, or both?
Botond173
3d ago
The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
I don't what method you used to arrive at this figure but I'd mention that according to the Pol Pot biography by Philip Short, about 3/4 of all excess deaths in Cambodia attributed to the Khmer Rogue were due to malnutrition and disease, in turn caused by government negligence and incompetence, plus the wholesale collapse of state capacity after five years of brutal civil war during the US-aligned military dictatorship.
With regard to Somalia I won't disagree with your point outright but would mention that the repression during the last years of Barre's rule was pretty damn bad by anyone's standards: the wholesale slaughter of "treasonous" clans, indiscriminate aerial bombing, mass rapes, the destruction of water reservoirs and livestock.
Botond173
5d ago
Not to mention that there has been an ongoing arms race for a long time among suburbanite normies buying bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier vehicles, as DirtyWaterHotDog alluded to it below, because they all want more comfort and more protection from accidents.
Botond173
6d ago
Because it became normalised first in sexual relationships, when men started asking for what they saw in porn.
I think that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. I suggest a different explanation which is connected to the concept of critical mass in the realm of social sciences, which I find plausible. If there's a certain human behavior that is considered abnormal but a minority of people start engaging in it more and more, there'll be a cascade effect once they reach 15 or so percent of the population (a critical mass). With increasing speed, it'll then become normalized. I guess this is what happened to casual sex.
We can assume there'll always be a subset of the female population willing to engage in casual sex (let's ignore prostitution for money as a phenomenon in this respect). In societies that are generally puritanical and restrictive, this subset is minuscule, which means men live with the assumption that casual sex is generally unavailable, even though most of them would be open to the opportunity one way or another. The most attractive ones will pursue it here and there to some extent, but it'll not be normalized throughout.
During the Sexual Revolution, due to a combination of of factors that we're mostly familiar with here, I think the subset of women open to casual sex reached a critical mass. When this started to have an effect on social norms, the idea took hold among men in general that initiating casual sex is largely OK from now on. And the cascade effect has been with us ever since. It was all downhill from there, if you disapprove of casual sex. Not only did women start competing with one another for the attention of got guys by engaging in casual sex, but they also did so by signaling their willingness to cater to the sexual preferences of those men. Hence the normalization of blowjobs. The commercialization of porn was an expression of this trend in the entertainment industry, but I doubt it was the driving force behind it.
Botond173
6d ago
It depends. Maybe OP is referring to committed relationships instead of serial monogamy and hookups, I don't know. Either way, this is just an expression of the typical male fantasy that I've mentioned here before: the gracious, modest woman who isn't a dirty slut with anyone in the world but you.
If you're an average man starting a hetero relationship in our time and the woman is swearing up and down that she's never going to give blowjobs because those are so degrading etc., you're well advised to be suspicious, because there's a real possibility that she's lying.
If your argument is that blowjobs should be moved out of the Overton window altogether or be confined to the realms of prostitution and marital relationships, I'm willing to hear you out.
Botond173
6d ago
What's the :) for?
To mark my comment as sexist humor. I'm looking at the thread and not finding the argument by @HereAndGone2 that you are referring to.
And if you press them on this they'll probably go on to clarify that the US of A as a whole has no unified national culture transcending all class, racial and regional differences, which seems like a reasonable opinion. And they'll probably concede that Appalachians or Southern whites, Mormons, prairie ranchers, New Englanders etc. do have distinct cultures of their own, even if it carries the legacy of structural racism or something. This also has parallels in Europe. There's probably no leftist there who will deny that Bavarian identity exists or that the Bretons have a culture, for example. But this has the potential to open up further cans of forms. For example, can a Somali goat herder become a Southerner or an Appalachian hillbilly? Should he even? Can a Syrian farmer become a Saxon or a Swabian? Can a Senegalese become an Alsatian?
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