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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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And if you are a smart communist and realize this is not going to work? I think I can conceive of that.

The problem with communists wasn't that they weren't smart. The problem was that they had an ideology tracing all of the world's problems to capitalism, capitalists, speculators, landlords and so on, and offered full proof scientific solutions in the shape of their economic system. If the latter didn't work, the former must have been to blame. What you're doing is like speculating about "smart scientologists" that didn't blame everything on thetans and suppressive persons, or... well, "smart Nazis" that didn't blame everything on the Jews.

The problem with communists wasn't that they weren't smart. The problem was that they had an ideology tracing all of the world's problems to capitalism, capitalists, speculators, landlords and so on, and offered full proof scientific solutions in the shape of their economic system. If the latter didn't work, the former must have been to blame. What you're doing is like speculating about "smart scientologists" that didn't blame everything on thetans and suppressive persons, or... well, "smart Nazis" that didn't blame everything on the Jews.

But the specific issue was about with agricultural reforms. Even if they believed that X needed to happen, there are a number of different ways to achieve that. A smart Nazi might still think Jews were to blame, but might have preferred exile to death for them, perhaps because it might be safer for Germany.

Wasn't that exactly what the Nazis originally were trying to do? Wasn't it only after that didnt work our, and things started going worse for their country that they started coming up with "final solutions"?

Yeah, that's kind of my point. Could that have worked if they planned it better? Did Nazism requiring killing Jews? Did Communism require the famines, or could there have been other options to get the result they were aiming at?

Which is not to say that Communism or Nazism are good, but that even within these ideologies there are presumably smarter and dumber ways of going about things. How much is the blame of the ideology itself? Now, it's also true I think that an ideology that can give good results without needing a crew of geniuses is probably better than one, that only works if you have 170IQ people running the show. because you probably won't.

Yeah, that's kind of my point. Could that have worked if they planned it better?

Maybe, but the point is they'd still be the kind of people that throw a genocidal fit if things don't go their way.