JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Deportations are deportations, and genocides are genocides
True, and some deportations are ways to execute genocide. Some are not. That's what I was trying to explain. You seem to focus on "well, akshually, you should use a different word" instead of focusing on the substance. The substance is that under Stalin, there were multiple cases there whole ethnic groups were rounded up and moved to remote areas, leading to the death of some of them and destruction of their traditional way of life for all of them, in the service of soviet national policy. Which specific words you use to describe it may be an entertaining academic exercise, but it doesn't change the substantial point. Which is - the soviet modus operandi included using mass casualty actions on entire ethnic groups to further their political goals.
We can't say that the Russians were doing this to the Ukrainians
That is a good point, that there is a way of defining Russian national identity which does not make the actions of soviets "Russian", and in fact, the Russian national identity, when defined in that way, suffered as much - maybe even more - than other national identities under soviet rule. For example, the White movement (not the skin-color Whites, but the Whites who were opposed to Blosheviks about 100 years ago, those Whites) would have a good claim on that identity, and some people are still keeping it. However, one must also realize this way of viewing Russian national identity is not only a minority view, but a tiny minority view, endorsed by no official institution and only by a tiny part of Russian population. For the official Russia, and for vast majority of it population, Russian Empire, USSR, and current RSFSR are largely the same, whether it concerns the culture, the official succession or the political goals. Average Russian is an imperial Russian, and he sees USSR national policy as a natural continuation of Russian Empire's national policy, and current Russia's policies as the natural continuation of those both. If for an average Lithuanian the soviet era was an era of occupation by foreign power, for average Russian - for almost every Russian, excluding a tiny minority I described above - the soviet era had been what "we" were doing, not what had been done "to us". It doesn't mean they would endorse everything that happened - surely, mistakes were made here and there - but it is still part of historical succession that most of Russians feel. For them, "the Soviets" doing something and "the Russians" doing something is virtually one and the same. The Westerners, in their common speech, follow the same pattern, USSR essentially had always been "the Russkies" - which could be attributed to ignorance, except that virtually nobody in Russia would object it either. For them, as for the Westerners, the Soviets are the Russkies. They assumed that identity and are completely comfortable with it - so there's no reason to deny them something that they believe to be true. Of course, as a logical consequence of it, that identity also includes shared responsibility for all the actions committed by the Soviets. You can't be proud of "our space program" without being also accountable for "our purges". Most normies, of course, are much more willing to talk about the former than the latter, but it comes as a package.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I don't think that's true at all. If anything, the Western governments (at least as Europe and blue part of the US is concerned) are going to another extreme, treating any request for outside cultures to adapt their mores and behavior to the standards of Western culture as racist, and giving massive amount of deference to the foreign cultural standards. It's everywhere - from demands in schools for everybody avoiding pork in school lunches to not offend Muslims (while asking Muslims to stay away from any foods to avoid offending Westerners would be unthinkable) to criminals coming from outside cultures given massively more lenient treatment than native ones, because they are "unfamiliar" with local customs and thus should be considered exempt from the local laws. Anybody who had been reading news must be aware of it.
Note however that the case of Western governments and Stalin are radically different in one very important regard. In the case of Western government, the representatives of "diverse" culture come to the West, with their hands out for handouts, asking for help. Once admitted, they demand preferential treatment and deference to their culture - the same one that they just fled and claimed that it created conditions which require emergency rescue - and they get the full measure of that deference. Stalin, however, came to those cultures - where they lived, without being asked or invited - conquered their lands and set out to replace their culture and identity with that of "Soviet people".
If we were comparing this to, say, British conquest of Burma or similar events, then the comparison might be more appropriate - though even at the peak of their colonial pursuits, the Brits were much more adoptive of the local culture and willing to blend with it rather than eradicate it. But at least the ideological vibe had been the same. That vibe not only has long gone, it had been declared the ultimate sin of the West, for which it must be atoning forever, and this guilt is the main driver enabling the sorry state of affairs we are witnessing now on the West. Thus, your conclusion is diametrically opposite of what is actually happening.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Your argument here seems to be "what you are saying is reminding me of a meme". I am not seeing it as a refutation of anything, sorry. By necessity, wide terms like "deportation" can encompass a myriad of scenarios, from enforcing immigration law to genocide. It is impossible and not meaningful to say "every deportation is genocide" or "none of the deportations are ever genocide". The case needs to be considered on specifics - who had been deported? Why? What was the goal of it? How the process were conducted? What was the result? If you consider all these, you will be able to see, that in case of Stalin's enthic cleansing deportations, the goal was mass removal of certain ethnicities from their traditional territories, in order to destroy their way of life and national identity and transform them into "soviet people of enthnic background", and the process had been conducted with maximal cruelty and resulted in massive casualties. An action like that, undertaken now by any Western power (the other powers of course get a pass because you can't blame the oppressed people for anything anytime) would be undoubtedly called a genocide.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Not sure what you mean here, maybe speaking your point plainly would help.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
support the specific claim that the Soviets deliberately engineered famine specifically in Ukraine in a genocidal attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian national identity
They did not engineer famine only in Ukraine. The famine had been widespread. But in Ukraine, both the food production and the opposition to soviet takeover had been based on wealthy landowning peasants. So destroying them as a power was a necessity, which inevitably led to more severe and comprehensive famine than in other parts. The soviets were not intending to let the kulak class survive, and if it meant millions of Ukrainians would not survive either, so be it. Wiping out national identity had been the official policy everywhere - everywhere any sense of national identity beyond funny ethnic dresses and composing odes to Stalin in national language had been brutally repressed. Not everywhere it had been done by the means of famine - it's just the conditions in Ukraine specifically made it a convenient way to go: soviets needed food, soviets needed to destroy the kulaks, soviets needed to get rid of any nationalism-inclined groups - in Ukraine, destroying the wealthy landowning peasants achieved all of those. I do not claim if there were a way to achieve the same without the famine and the way to achieve that with famine the soviets would insist "no, we want the famine, it's famine or no go" - maybe if they found the other way, they'd use that. I am just saying that was the way they actually used.
it’s a controversial claim that’s being actively debated by academics.
Everything is a controversial claim debated by academics. That's what they do their whole life, they debate. If you want evidence, just read that debate and you'd get plenty. I am paid for doing other things, so redoing the work of the academics to reproduce it here would be a prohibitive cost for me with zero gain. I mean, just following the links in Wokepedia in the Holodomor article would get you plenty of evidence.
I’m not sure that the famine in Ukraine was part of that
Partially. In the case of Ukraine, deportations did happen, but it was not feasible, as it was with, say, Crimean Tatars, to just round up most of the Ukrainians and send them to Siberia. Ukraine is too big and there are too many of them. However, you could subjugate them by ruining their economic basis - the same wealthy landowning peasants. Then their alternative would be submit to the soviets or die horribly. After millions died horribly, the rest submitted.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Deportation – to be more precise, the involuntary resettlement of a people – does not equal genocide.
The way Stalin did it, it does. The aim was specifically to destroy the group of people and their way of life. If it didn't include murdering every single one of them personally (though of course nobody was concerned at all if any of them died) - it certainly did intend to destroy them as people.
The Gulag system was set up not with the aim of mass murder
It included mass murder as one of the intended effects. I mean, if after decades of starvation, hard work and inhuman suffering you manage to survive, fine, but if you don't, it's as good. Especially if they could get some work out of you before you croak. Of course, soviets also did outright mass murder too if they thought a specific group is too dangerous, but they were practical enough to consider working someone to death as better way of execution.
for the purpose of extracting important natural resources through forced labor
Nope, Gulag was a punishment mechanism. The fact that it also produced some resources was secondary - like, if we need repress millions of people, we better make some use of them. Of course, it also had a theoretical basis - since the bourgeois are evil and the workers are good, it is clear that more you work, the better you become. So if you engage in wrongthink, it is clear that's because not enough work. Also, if you are stuck cutting trees in Siberia, you surely won't be able to spread your wrongthink to others. The fact that the trees themsevles are also useful is good, but there are many other ways to cut trees, this one in particular had been chosen because they needed Gulag as part of the terror machine, to control the society.
The majority of the victims of political purges were imprisoned or deported, not killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
Scholars estimate the death toll of the Great Purge at 700,000 to 1.2 million.
That's only one episode of many. Really, where did you study history? Even Wokepedia is not trying to whitewash Stalin. Where do they teach that Soviet mass terror didn't happen?
JarJarJedi
3d ago
The kulak class does not equal the Ukrainian people. Not all Ukrainians were kulaks and not all kulaks were Ukrainian.
Both true of course, but it's not as big argument as you seem to think it is. A lot of Ukrainian food production relied on people who were classified as "kulaks", so with that destroyed not only kulak families themselves died, but everyone who relied on the food they produced did. And of course, the famine was not confined to Ukraine - it happened in other places too. In Ukraine these policies produced a particularly severe effects though.
the key words being as a class.
No, it's not the key. It's not like they were "reclassified" and that's it. They had been stripped of their property, deported, and often murdered. And their capacity to produce food ruined. "As a class" here means on massive, society-wide scale - it's not that some particular kulak was an asshole and had to be repressed, it's that all the backbone of the food production had been forcefully removed, which of course, predictably, caused lack of food. That policy was systemic. That lack of food was not accidental, and it did not cause anybody to stop and reverse the policy. On the contrary, it was largely accepted as the desired effect, and the confiscation policies became more severe.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Other acts of genocide? Where? When?
How ignorant are you in Soviet history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Meskhetian_Turks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Kalmyks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_deportation and others.
Their "ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes"
Dude, Gulag. Purges. I mean, they didn't exactly hide it.
Also, the elimination of nationalism necessarily entails genocide now?
Not necessarily, but the way Stalin did it - it frequently did. I mean, I understand that if you're completely ignorant of history, you find historical claims "baffling". But maybe you should fill up on that before arguing about it?
JarJarJedi
3d ago
If it were the only evidence, sure. But there's plenty of other evidence to the deliberate character of food confiscation, and to extreme hostility with which Soviets viewed the kulak class. Of course, to properly consider all that evidence, one would need to write a series of books - and there are many books on the subject, of course. I have neither ability nor desire to TLDR them all here, I am just saying this is a well-supported position, and dismissing it with a formula like "oh, that's consensus-building, therefore all that pile of evidence worth nothing" is not proper discussion of the subject.
he section on Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainians in the wikipedia
I checked Wokepedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor and it says "Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made.[46] The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of ... natural causes",[47] though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies.". Now, I have very low opinion about the veracity of any Wokepedia claim on any politically charged subject, and again, seriously evaluating such claims would take much more than I am willing to give, but in short, virtually everybody agrees Stalin did it. Now, imagine - Stalin comes out and says "we will destroy kulaks, if necessary - we will kill them all". Stalin then does things. Kulaks are destroyed, many of them dead. Many other people are dead to. We can establish the causal link between Stalin's actions and the deaths. Now, you tell me that we should seriously consider maybe it all happened on accident? That somehow he only wanted to build communism, and accidentally took all food from them and accidentally they died because they had no food? I don't know, to me it doesn't pass the smell test.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
It's a bit perverse way of saying things. Sure, if you brutally oppress a population for decades in the service of, say, vegetarianism, and then your vegetarian regime collapses, the people would acquire certain aversion to vegetarianism for a while. And maybe overall eating a more balanced diet would come out as good for them (please, vegetarians, it's just an artificial example!). But concluding from that that to achieve a balanced diet you need to brutally oppress people for decades, and that's actually a good thing because it leads to better diet, is a very perverse way of arguing.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Unless, you know, it actually was a) artificially engineered and b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians (more precisely, of course, by Soviets - which weren't all ethnically Russian, of course) and c) with genocidal intent. Given as Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose, for political aims, and their ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes, and their official position had been that any "nationalism" has to be completely eliminated (which they consistently did in all "national republics" - every single nationalist movement had been brutally repressed) - it looks like duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, so it's not a big stretch to argue it is a duck.
I'm pretty sure you yourself are aware as well that all three arguments are questionable at best.
You can question it all you like, but as I noted above, there is very good evidence pointing to it. I am not saying questioning this evidence makes you literally Hitler, I am saying if you have equally strong opposite evidence, you are welcome to propose it. Or you are welcome to just say "I just don't believe it, whatever is the evidence", that's always an option. I know one thing - dismissing all that by just saying "oh, it's consensus-building, therefore you are wrong" is not an argument.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Due to all that long and messy history, no border is ever able to express the complexity - you'll always have people that think they are Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Hutsul, Romanian, Ruthenian, Czech, and a dozen of other options leaving next to each other. Sure, in some place people would say "we are Polish and we're living here since year X" and over the hill over there people would say "we are Ukrainian and we're living here since year Y". It's always easy to find some substantiation of some politician's grand "historic" claims - but it's also as easy to find a diametrically opposed evidence which the politician conveniently ignored.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
I don't need machine translation, I speak (and, of course, read) Ukrainian freely. So I know very well what Ukrainians thought about Russians in 1980s, in 1990s, in 2000s and now. And, also, I know how wokeness is not something that is a major concern there. In 20 years, if the war ends, and Ukraine survives, and joins EU, and EU survives that long, it may become a concern. There's much about freedom, but it's only freedom from being murdered by Russians, not about freedom to trans the kids. People think because the wokes prance around with Ukrainian flags, that means Ukrainians are woke. But that's silly - they would prance around with any flags the Central Committee tells them to, be it Ukraine, Hamas, Iran or Mexico. They don't know the first thing about the actual country, and making conclusions about the country based on that is insane.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
"Until Putin took over" the trajectories of them were quite similar.
Well, yes and no. You need to look at it in dynamics, not at one moment, but over the time. In early 90s, yes, things were pretty similar, except more money in Russia, but Ukraine had its share too. Then the paths diverged. Russia essentially rejected the "Western" way - in part because people implementing it were also grotesquely corrupt, though Putin's gang (which weren't strictly speaking his yet, just the one he belonged to) were about as corrupt, but not obviously so. There were also other factors, including the Chechen war, terrorism, etc. - and, of course, the conscious choice by Putin to set up Russia in opposition to the West.
Ukraine, while being close beside in corruption, has had also strong independence/nationalist vibes - which at times had been anti-Russian but not necessarily so. There had been a lot of fractions, and most of them were for at least keeping decent relations with Russia, while staying independent. Ukraine leaned towards integrating with Europe (remember, the explosive wokification by that time hadn't happen yet and "Europe" didn't mean "import Syrians, introduce censorship and trans your kids" yet). That said, for a while they hadn't been that far apart - in fact, at one time the most popular politician, among all alive, in Ukraine had been none other but Vladimir Putin. Putin overplayed his hand though, and helped to install Yanukovich, who had proven too much even for Ukrainians that were used to corruption.
And when it went sour, instead of taking a step back and trying to play the same long game he played before - after all, there were a lot of corrupt politicians in Ukraine, and Putin probably could choose another one to puppet and keep manipulating Ukraine while seemingly staying out of the fray openly - he decided to put the boot down. In Russia, putting the boot down worked spectacularly well - billions of dollars invested in Russian opposition led to it having absolutely zero power very soon and Putin eliminating any trace of dissent. Not only that, but the "moral power" that the dissidents held in the USSR, is mostly gone too - except for rare personalities like Nemtsov or Navalny, who Putin just openly murdered with nobody being able to object, there's not ever any influential opposition figures. In Ukraine, however, it did not work at all. That's about where the trajectories, previously following if not the same then adjacent paths, split drastically. Putin chose to build his new Russian Empire, Ukraine preferred to stay out of it.
So yes, the genesis is common, and a lot of common themes, but there are very important differences.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
and apparently they've been like this since like 2010?
Yes, as mostly everything else mass-cultural, Hugos are woke now. If you want many sad details, look up "Sad Puppies". Obviously, unless you want the woke side of the story, in places other than Wokepedia. But be warned, it won't make you feel any better.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
I tried to read A Tale of Two Cities and I just can't get it. It just bores me so much. It's on practically every list of "best novels ever", and I feel weird about it. And it's not like my tastes are opposed to the general direction - I like historic novels, I've read Dickens before (though a long time ago), and I enjoyed a lot of other "classic" works on the same "best ever" lists - but this one somehow just does not "click" for me. Not sure if I'll try to get through it or just put it aside and try again, maybe in several years.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
and intimacy with me will not feel as special as it otherwise would have
As somebody who have been in relationships before "settling down", this is not true. I don't feel like my previous experiences - many of which I don't even remember now - diminish my bond to my wife in any way, and I don't think she feels our relationship is less special because she was married in the past too. It's all the past and gone, and the special thing is now.
I guess it boils down to just plain jealousy and some sense of purity.
In marriage, sometimes you need to make sacrifices. I think sacrificing the part of your selfishness that is jealousy to the past is not a bad thing to do. And if you keep in mind why you're doing it and what you're getting in return, you may feel better about it. You can't make yourself not feel things that you feel, but you can conquer those things and not let them make you unhappy. Fortunately, these are things that depend only on you alone - so nothing prevents you from doing that.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
I am not saying "Elon can do no wrong". I am saying "Elon is our only hope". That's quite different. I don't know if Elon can get us to the moon. Maybe yes, maybe not. I know NASA bullshiters can't. And won't be for a while. Yes, Elon has a lot of failures, you don't need to bother listing every one of them, I am fully aware. That doesn't change my point even a little bit - either Elon succeeds, however flawed and problematic his plan is, or nobody does. That's the only two realistic options. I can not influence the outcome in any way of form, but for people who can, I think fighting against Elon is just betting on US losing. Again, maybe it will benefit the US in the long run, but certainly not anytime soon.
Nobody has wanted that anywhere.
That's not true of course. The whole woke blue tribe wanted it and still wants it. We could have a long discussion as to why they want it, but for the purposes of now, it's enough to notice they exist and are politically active and influential - in fact, in the West, they own the majority of the media, the academia and significant part of government apparatus. It is not the case in Ukraine. Yes, there are some voices in Ukraine aping the woke slogans, but they are mostly doing it because they want their European friends to like them, and neither them themselves are not truly woke nor there are any significant woke tribes in Ukrainian politics. Ukrainian politics is a tangled and ugly mess, but woke is not a significant part of it. The situation if very different there, so trying to apply what you see in, say, Germany or Holland, to Ukraine is completely useless.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
They survived Russian Empire at the peak of its might, and the USSR - twice. And USSR is not known for its gentle approach to conquering people. By Lindy's law, I estimate their chance on surviving Putin as pretty decent.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Except that whatever things Blue Tribe did, they still did not graduate - at least in the US - to actually engineering a nationwide famine that cost millions of lives, with the explicit purpose of subjugating Red Tribe. Shit like that tends to be remembered.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
There's no such thing as "historically Poland" and these areas had been everything. These lands were conquered and re-conquered by a variety of states, which bore variety of names, many of them sounding like modern states (e.g. Grand Duchy of Lithuania) but being very different from them. Taking a random moment out of 1000 years of chaotic warfare and conquest, fixating on it as "historical" and claiming that's the "true" state of things is just nonsense. Russian official propaganda does it all the time - if any particular piece of land had been conquered by Russians even for a day over the centuries, it's "historically Russian land", from the time of Creation till the end of the Universe. Of course, if you believe silly stuff like that you may as well start doing land acknowledgments and move back to Africa since that's where "historically" humans lived.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of?
Being dead, some of them. Being subject to the same treatment as inhabitants of medieval city would be after being conquered by a foreign army (pillage, rape, all that stuff). Of course, we're in civilized time, so most pillage would not be in the form of literally Russian soldiers going door to door and taking all valuable stuff. I mean, that happened too, many times, but there's just too many doors. The main pillage would be that Russians would own everything and you would have to pay them for being their bitch. And Russia has a flourishing prison culture - in fact, most of Russian culture by now is quasi-prison-culture or heavily influenced by it - so they know very well how to make somebody their bitch and how to extract maximum value from that. If you read the history of the 90s in Russia, it happened all over - until Putin took over. In fact, one of the reasons why it was so easy for Putin to take over was because the shit that's was going on was so bad, people were thinking anything that is going to stop it would be better. So, that's what would happen to Ukraine - and since its the conquered land, it won't stop for a long while. Plus, of course, anybody who has any genuinely Ukrainian nationalist sentiment, would be ruthlessly eliminated.
The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people
There's no chance of Ukrainians surviving as "people" - collectively - as opposed to just collection of humans with no common identity, if Russia wins this war (by wins I mean full victory, capturing Kiev, overthrowing the government, etc). The whole premise of the war is that there's no such thing as Ukrainian people - it's just some Russians that are stupid enough to speak in weird broken Russian and sell out to the West, and it's time to put a stop to it. And if Russians win, they definitely will put a full stop to it. I mean, they won't murder everyone, it's not Africa, and they may allow people to call themselves "Ukrainians" if they behave, but no idea of having anything like a nation with independent identity would not be tolerated. Some Ukrainians find it unacceptable. If you want to understand why Ukrainians fight, you need to understand them, as they are, and not some weird caricature existing only in your mind.
If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways
That's complete nonsense. I mean, if you know only about problems in a handful of Western European countries, you could conclude every country is like that, but it's not. Ukraine has completely different problems and Zelensky has no intention and no inclination to do any of that, neither did any Ukrainian politicians. I realize how you want to present it as another case of evil Joos doing evil Joo stuff, but that's just ignorant nonsense, not discussing real facts on the ground.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
I don't think this is an argument for Elon Musk. If anything, Elon Musk is the only person who is preventing this outcome - if not Musk, it would be correct to conclude that the race is definitely lost and it's just a matter of time before the structural collapse reveals itself in a way that is obvious to the public (and if we're very lucky, it would not have a body count attached). As it were with the case of USSR, by that time it would be way too late to do anything - and in fact, it may be already too late to do anything 30 years before that. Not that anybody is inclined to do anything. To start thinking about change, you need to either a strong wake up call - like losing the space race - or have a person that is completely crazy and just decides to do something which had been proven many times it can't be done, and then does it. But we don't know yet which of the ways the future would go. Maybe Musk would lose and we go the wake up call way. A lot of people in the US are certainly rooting for that way, because Musk hurt their feelings and there's nothing more Hitler than that. But I am also afraid that the wake up call may arrive when there's nobody left to be woken up (insert a pun about "woke" here, I'm too lazy to follow through).
If you aim to be an elite athlete, that makes sense. If you aim to be a reasonably healthy person with good fitness, this will get you in trouble. If you are not enjoying something, you are spending your willpower every time you do it. And however determined you are, the willpower is a limited resource. For which a lot of things are competing every day. If you do not enjoy it, you will start finding excuses not to do it. You will start unconsciously arranging things so that you would do less of it. And you will feel shitty about it, because you would know the excuses are bullshit, but you will still do it because that's the nature of human brain. And feeling shitty about it would drive you to do even less of it, maybe get rid of it altogether - with a very good and strong reason of course! - so that you stop feeling shitty. That's not a good way to do things. I mean, you can power through it - but statistically, the majority of chances are you won't. I am a big proponent of "do what works for you, and fuck any third-party opinions", but my experience tells me things I don't enjoy doing are much less sustainable than things I do enjoy doing. Even if it means I'd sacrifice some reps and some lbs for it - it's better to have some consistent reps than end up with no reps at all because you grew depressed by the whole thing.
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