Gulag Archipelago - Will it radicalise me? - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15037468
SolarCross wrote:The US penal system is not beyond criticism. Too many laws and a well funded police system will result in a big prison population. Then there is the war on drugs which is overdue some reform. But US prisons are palaces of comfort and well regulated by basic moral decency for the most part and "political" prisoners practically do not exist. There is no comparison.

Since you have read the GA then the real curiosity is not why I "shrug" at the US law enforcement system (I am not a fan btw) but why you shrug at what the Soviets did.

That commies still give each other a free pass for atrocities just underscores that not one of you can be trusted with anything.


A few quick points.

I'm not a tankie, I don't defend Stalin. I'm a non-authoritarian leftist. I don't favor hierarchical systems of government. What I believe in is a distributed system of worker control, with elected leaders who have limited and temporary powers.

I condemn states that actively perform or encourage mass atrocities, whether internal or external. This includes all the classic historical examples like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Israel, Pinochet, etc. It includes the US genocide of native Americans and African slavery. If you are a person that defends Pinochet's atrocities on the ground he prevented communism you are evil or stupid.

I condemn the mass death that has resulted from capitalism. The Black Book of Capitalism is as lengthy and filled with horror as the Black Book of Communism. This is not up for discussion. I note that both capitalism and communism have provided leverage to the usual nastiness of the human condition, and magnified suffering beyond belief. I cite just one example, although one could go on endlessly: in the US it is accepted practice that people that can't afford medical care will simply allowed to die. Patients are literally removed from hospitals and put on the street. Patients who can't afford insulin will beg online or just die.

I condemn states that engage in external oppression. The US is, and has been for decades, the worst offender, although many nations eagerly join in. The US has interfered militarily, through covert actions, supporting proxy armies, color revolutions, economic sanctions, etc in the constant undermining of other nations' right to run their own affairs. This interference has resulted in the documented deaths of thousands of innocent people. It has resulted in a dangerous state of chaos throughout the world - a deliberately planned and engineered chaos (as openly admitted by US defense planners like Ralph Peters).

I assert that as long as nations states exist, all nations have the right to be left alone by other nations - unless there is a direct, immediate, and unambiguous military threat to their neighbors. This right to be left alone gives them the unlimited right to choose whatever government they want: republican, fascist, socialist, communist etc - without the approval of @SolarCross or anyone else. Whatever consequences ensue from their bad choices are the exclusive problem of the people who make the choices. You get no say.

I don't believe in the right to exclusively and/or permanently own land, water, air, the ocean, or any of the other common inheritance of humankind. Any state that legally protects the right of individuals to engage in this practice is by definition evil and the enemy of the people it governs.

That's about all.

Potemkin wrote:You're in for a treat. Varlam Shalamov was a literary genius of the highest order, the true heir of Isaak Babel. :up:


"I saw what a weighty argument for the intellectual is the most ordinary slap in the face."

I get a little kick out of the fact that most of the dissidents @SolarCross admires were leftists. Shalamov was convicted for Trotskyite sympathies,
#15037475
@quetzalcoatl

You do double-think just as well as the rest. I say, trust not in those with an ideology made of whole cloth cognitive dissonance. Today you are all "I am a peacenik really" then when you have the chance it will be room 101 for all the wrongthinkers.
#15037481
SolarCross wrote:@quetzalcoatl

You do double-think just as well as the rest. I say, trust not in those with an ideology made of whole cloth cognitive dissonance. Today you are all "I am a peacenik really" then when you have the chance it will be room 101 for all the wrongthinkers.


No personal attacks? Attacking an ideology,not the individual?

:moron:
#15037613
quetzalcoatl wrote:I get a little kick out of the fact that most of the dissidents @SolarCross admires were leftists. Shalamov was convicted for Trotskyite sympathies,


Don't be disingenuous. I was the one who suggested Shalamov while Solarcross hasn't even heard of him.

I personally like his realist style of writing, like Tsjechov who was also a realist short story writer.
#15037626
@Reichstraten

Thanks for pointing that out. @quetzalcoatl is also showing us a common flaw in leftist thinking, common but not universal, where the rightness or wrongness of something is determined solely on how one identifies in terms of ideological allegiance, ideological tribalism one might say. He assumes I must reject anything by someone identified as "leftist" because that is what he does with anyone identified as a "rightist".

If an eminent leftist came out and said that recent scientific experiments have proven that 2 + 2 = 5 and that anyone who thinks 2 + 2 is still 4 is a stupid reactionary bigot. He will accept that unquestioningly and begin screeching furiously in the faces of anyone not identified as a leftist for getting the new math wrong because of their anti-leftist thinking.

This is how everyone of the left just accepts people like @Potemkin sitting on a trust fund inherited from a captialist parent and then never working a day in his life but for soaking up luxuries just because now and again he signals how he is "on the left" so that he can get his free pass to do as he pleases. If he did not signal his tribal allegiance then they would screech in his face about privilege and exploitation and all that sort of thing.

I can not tell how many leftists have virtually had a shriek in my face accusing me of all sorts of random crap for no more reason than that I have signalled that I do not identify as a leftist.

I am not saying all leftists are like this but a lot are, a lot. And it is this thing in particular that makes them look like escaped mental patients or just utterly duplicitous.

I would quite like to find out what causes this extremely warped way of thinking, maybe there are answers in the books we are discussing: Gulag Archipelago and Kolyma Tales. Or maybe not. I have a couple of hypothesis. One is that the cause is literal daemonic possession.
#15037638
SolarCross wrote:@Reichstraten

Thanks for pointing that out. @quetzalcoatl is also showing us a common flaw in leftist thinking, common but not universal, where the rightness or wrongness of something is determined solely on how one identifies in terms of ideological allegiance, ideological tribalism one might say. He assumes I must reject anything by someone identified as "leftist" because that is what he does with anyone identified as a "rightist".

If an eminent leftist came out and said that recent scientific experiments have proven that 2 + 2 = 5 and that anyone who thinks 2 + 2 is still 4 is a stupid reactionary bigot. He will accept that unquestioningly and begin screeching furiously in the faces of anyone not identified as a leftist for getting the new math wrong because of their anti-leftist thinking.

This is how everyone of the left just accepts people like @Potemkin sitting on a trust fund inherited from a captialist parent and then never working a day in his life but for soaking up luxuries just because now and again he signals how he is "on the left" so that he can get his free pass to do as he pleases. If he did not signal his tribal allegiance then they would screech in his face about privilege and exploitation and all that sort of thing.

I can not tell how many leftists have virtually had a shriek in my face accusing me of all sorts of random crap for no more reason than that I have signalled that I do not identify as a leftist.

I am not saying all leftists are like this but a lot are, a lot. And it is this thing in particular that makes them look like escaped mental patients or just utterly duplicitous.

I would quite like to find out what causes this extremely warped way of thinking, maybe there are answers in the books we are discussing: Gulag Archipelago and Kolyma Tales. Or maybe not. I have a couple of hypothesis. One is that the cause is literal daemonic possession.

Ah, the Dostoyevsky Hypothesis. That's actually not as far-fetched as it may appear. Any form of ideological or religious belief tends to function like a virus - it infects people. This is how Christianity spread in the late Roman Empire, and how fascism took hold in 1920s Germany. An ideology or a religion, after all, is simply a more sophisticated version of what Dawkins called a "meme", and as he pointed out, memes are self-replicating structures which spread from host to host. It is not a huge leap of logic to regard ideological or religious beliefs - of any sort - as a form of "possession", demonic or otherwise.
#15037644
B0ycey wrote:Anyone who once donned a Pinochet avatar doesn't hold the moral high ground when condemning Gulags. Or more importantly in terms of the thread has already been radicalised.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_in_Pinochet%27s_Chile


Having somebody as an avatar does not mean that I have to agree with that person even for his leading principle.

As a matter of fact, I seriously considered donning Hitler, Goering, or (in a lighter extent) Cecil Rhodes as my avatar, but in any way they probably wouldn't have liked that, and I don't want to commit blasphemy on any of these guys. After all, I am just a nobody, just like most of you are.
#15037654
Patrickov wrote:Having somebody as an avatar does not mean that I have to agree with that person even for his leading principle.

As a matter of fact, I seriously considered donning Hitler, Goering, or (in a lighter extent) Cecil Rhodes as my avatar, but in any way they probably wouldn't have liked that, and I don't want to commit blasphemy on any of these guys. After all, I am just a nobody, just like most of you are.


You clearly don't know SolarCross. He condemns Communism whilst supporting Capitalism and at the same time defends Capitalists atrocities. He has joked about supporting dropping Communists from helicopters and his love for Pinochet more than once believe me. Do you do that for Hitler?
#15037655
B0ycey wrote:You clearly don't know SolarCross. He condemns Communism whilst supporting Capitalism and at the same time defends Capitalists atrocities. He has joked about supporting dropping Communists from helicopters and his love for Pinochet more than once believe me. Do you do that for Hitler?


As a matter of fact, I sometimes have an urge to put pro-China trolls into Nazi gas chambers. I only advocate that less now because they look like losing and thus seem less worth it. Mind you, they can fill up at least several of those crematoria once stood near Brzezinka.
#15037660
Patrickov wrote:As a matter of fact, I sometimes have an urge to put pro-China trolls into Nazi gas chambers. I only advocate that less now because they look like losing and thus seem less worth it. Mind you, they can fill up at least several of those crematoria once stood near Brzezinka.


"It isn't the ideology that kills, it's the people that support it".

If you want kill for your belief then that is no different than the Soviets doing it or the Capitalist Pinochet. Like I said SolarCross has already been radicalised as he doesn't understand his hypocrisy. It sounds like you have too.
Last edited by B0ycey on 29 Sep 2019 13:23, edited 1 time in total.
#15037662
@SolarCross,

Well, the leftists I know, outside of this forum, are normal, honest and hard working people.
They have no urge to convert others whatsoever, are genuinly interested in things like history and literature, had a normal education (no university degrees here) and many of them work in the health care.
This are not evil totalitarians or political correct elitists in any way.
This are the well informed, responsible citizens who care for their direct environment we need these days, not the loud mouthed populists of this world.

Because of my very different experiences, it's sad to see how right wingers these days are more and more openly witch-hunting leftists.
I have a soft spot for anti-totalitarian literature and I genuinly believe that in the western democracies right-wing authoritarians are a bigger thread these days than left-wing totalitarians.
Also, historically speaking most anti-totalitarians have been on the left.
#15037663
Potemkin wrote:Ah, the Dostoyevsky Hypothesis. That's actually not as far-fetched as it may appear. Any form of ideological or religious belief tends to function like a virus - it infects people. This is how Christianity spread in the late Roman Empire, and how fascism took hold in 1920s Germany. An ideology or a religion, after all, is simply a more sophisticated version of what Dawkins called a "meme", and as he pointed out, memes are self-replicating structures which spread from host to host. It is not a huge leap of logic to regard ideological or religious beliefs - of any sort - as a form of "possession", demonic or otherwise.

Okay but surely there is something different going on in memes which effect a takeover of the "host". The host is a mind or brain, an engine for using, evaluating, creating and destroying memes. It, or really "we", should always be in charge of the memes not the other way around and for most of us we are in charge. There is something going deeply wrong if the memes are the ones running the show instead of just being raw material for the operations of the mind.

When I said "daemonic possession" I did not quite mean that metaphorically, to say that those in the grip of ideology are just like possessed or seem possessed. I am entertaining the hypothesis that it may be the consequence of literal possession by non-human agents.

I am wondering if this massive epidemic of daemonic possession in the last few centuries in the west was an unintended consequence of the rise of scientism. Scientism, which carries with it the belief that science has proven the non-existence of non-human intelligence, may have accidentally resulted in increasingly large numbers of people dropping their guard against what the muslims call djinns and the Christians call daemons.

For all of human history and likely pre-history humans from every place in the world have belief in non-human intelligences with some subset of them being hostile or at least a nuisance. And these people have rituals or practices with the intention of firming up their mental defences against them.

In our arrogance those of us inducted in the cult of Science, which for many of us is nothing more than a cargo cult really, just assume all that stuff is nonsense. But what if we were wrong? What if all those ancient and modern people exercising basic psychic hygiene were really aware of something and doing something effective in their rituals to ward of "evil spirits"? Then us followers of the cargo cult of science might in fact be more than usually vulnerable to malicious or hostile incorporeal life forms. And so we must suffer the plague of leftardism, apparent humans running around behaving in very unhuman ways.

I think this hypothesis explains a lot and even suggests some solutions to the problem.
Last edited by SolarCross on 29 Sep 2019 14:02, edited 1 time in total.
#15037664
B0ycey wrote:"It isn't the ideology that kills, it's the people that support it".

If you want kill for your belief than that is no different than the Soviets going it or the Capitalist Pinochet. Like I said SolarCross has already been radicalised as he doesn't understand his hypocrisy. It sounds like you have too.


If an idea tends to attract radical or crazy people then the idea itself must have some problem. I admit this is a statistical fact and should not be applied indiscriminately, so I only mention trolls who actively engage aggression.

For hypocrisy, I never deny that because it's part of human nature. It's whether, when, where and how it is applied matters.

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