“which spontaneous comment might generate a shitstorm”

Yeah, if it was an issue of them making off-color comments, it might be one thing. Using their position to amplify pro-genocide positions, and silence anti-genocide voices? Another thing entirely.

Putting up with some degree of eccentricity and problematic behavior is legitimately something you have to deal with if something isn’t being run by committee (which has its own set of issues). But the core issue with the Lemmy devs is that they’re fascists who seek to amplify fascist talking points, not that they’re ‘untrained’ in PR. Fuck them.

I’ve had quite enough from you! Hand over your gladius sword!

!map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz

I knew about wall guns, but I had no idea they were used in the Revolutionary War!

and Netanyahu got shot

God, if only it was a few inches towards something more vital

Definitely not absolute power, but there was no reason for radical student to ever expect absolute power. His father was a high-ranking regional bureaucrat and his mother was a wealthy landowner; someone as talented, hardworking and ruthless as Lenin would’ve easily been able to get promoted to a high government post, which would’ve made any future ambitions much easier to achieve. It’d have definitely been easier than overthrowing the government—a pipe dream as late as April 1917.

Jesus fucking Christ. You think overthrowing the Tsar was a pipe dream after the February Revolution.

The Tsarist government was widely regarded as on borrowed time since Bloody Sunday in 1905, and was regarded as unstable even before that. Not only that, but this reflects a complete lack of understanding of ambition of powerful men throughout history.

For someone who tells me that I need to study history (apparently my years in college for just that major were insufficient compared to your collection of worldview-affirming factoids garnered through online games of telephone), you have repeatedly demonstrated an appalling lack of even basic knowledge of the facts of the situation, down to the fucking existence of elections before the overthrow of the provisional government and the prominent participation of socialists from the very start.

I mean fucking yes (more or less, my personal line is February 1917)? Anyone not a true believer would’ve dropped out multiple times over. Speaking of which, is there any body of historiography you’re drawing from here or is it just your (very justified) hate for the guy? What’s your evidence here?

The issue here is, at its core, one of principle rather than Stalin specifically - you are asserting, as I have pointed out multiple times at this point in the conversation, a worldview of total incoherence insofar as revolutionaries are concerned, with any long-time revolutionary being a dedicated ideologue with no possibility of other motivations being their core impetus. In this conception, even the most venal opportunist and constant turncloak is necessarily considered a true believer regardless of their words or their actions by simple exposure to danger over a period of time, because you are apparently incapable of imagining any other reason why people stay a course of action.

It’s axiomatic, and utterly fucking braindead, the sort of thing I’d expect to hear from a religious fanatic discussing their theology, not a fucking discussion of history and politics with someone who is supposedly left-sympathetic.

Uh what the fuck? At calling them mass murdering tyrants to stress this point. If you’re just going to read whatever you want into what I say then this is a waste of time.

This fucking you, buddy?

No offense, but yeah no you have to be kidding here. Soviet rule under Lenin and Stalin was what turned Russia into a developed country. Virtually every indicator of a modern (for the time period) quality of life exploded. The idea that they did “nothing but create bureaucratized oligarchy” is simply not a serious historical position, and if you seriously believe that you should get back to studying. This is a position not worth debating.

I mean have you ever seen Trump explaining a coherent belief system?

I haven’t seen Stalin explain a coherent belief system either. Yet he’s a true believer, and Trump is not. For that matter, why does a belief system need to be coherent to be truly believed in? I can cite any number of religious maniacs with contradictory bronze-and-iron-age belief systems and texts who are nonetheless true believers.

He’s clearly in it for the grift, and he clearly believes he deserves to grift the shit out of everyone, but I doubt he has anything resembling a coherent political vision. However, he didn’t spend decades risking getting arrested or killed by secret police for it—this is what a grifter lookd like.

… Trump absolutely has spent decades risking getting arrested. For that matter, the Tsarist autocracy rarely outright killed political opponents, preferring arrest and internal exile - especially for privileged middle class kids like Lenin, who enjoyed a very comfortable exile.

I mean, the (still fascist) self-proclaimed socialists definitely thought he did up until he killed the shit out of them. Weaponized vagueness is a classic fascist tactic and absolutely does count as not believing in what he said; you’re grasping at straws here.

… his stated view of socialism doesn’t even contradict his actions. You’re ironically engaging in the traditional fascist tactic of treating words as having contradictory meanings in the same fucking argument.

Doesn’t sound like socialism to me either so no.

But the fascist conception of one-man rule in the workplace DOES sound like socialism to you?

Not to go on a tangent, but as much as you expect. There’s plenty of people comfortable enough to argue about politics online, and the obscureness of the forum is irrelevant. If you calculated the number of deaths per person you’d get a small fraction, which well I make a point of trying but there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. If you have examples I’m all ears though.

Simply by being literate, educated, English-speaking, and with enough time to argue for hours over history, you are necessarily, as am I, sacrificing time which could be spent laboring to save the lives of others.

Do you know how much it costs, even with all the graft and overhead of charity organizations, to provide life-saving supplies to individuals in areas like, say, Palestine?

Do you know how much your time is worth?

Easy, soldier! :p

Real talk - my eye for uniforms is terrible, and while I considered putting it as ‘sailors’, I also didn’t want someone to come in and say “Actually, these are servicemen of the 115th Coastal Defence Brigade and they would never actually even be onboard a ship in their term” or something like that.

I’ll change the title to something even more generic, though! XD

Either that cities have only really been around for ~5000 years, and that’s with a generous definition of ‘city’ and a very broad swathe of the world not having cities entirely for thousands of years after that; or that rural and agrarian-dominated societies historically have experienced most of the same core issues that urban-dominated civilizations have.

Explanation: At the Battle of Crecy, the English used their then-new adoption of the longbow, as used by yeomen (middle-class farmers who had time enough to practice the longbow) as a vital component in the defeat of a larger French force.

In the sci-fi franchise Battletech, one of the giant war mech designs that are foundational to the series is called the Yeoman.

READY! LOOSE!

Novgorod 💪💪💪💪💪

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript#East_Slavic_manuscripts

According to Yanin and Zaliznyak, most documents are ordinary letters by various people written in what is considered to be a vernacular dialect. The letters are of a personal or business character. A few documents include elaborate obscenities. Very few documents are written in Church Slavonic and only one in Old Norse. The school exercises and drawings by a young boy named Onfim have drawn much attention.[32][33][34] Since the manuscripts were written by laypeople and consist of casual notes, it has been suggested that there was widespread literacy across large segments of urban society in medieval Russia; according to one estimate, 20% of the urban male population in Russian city-states were literate around the mid-13th century.[35]

The contents of the birch bark writings included not only religious writings but also document death of princes, conclusions of peace, dignitary arrivals, folk verses and local proverbs, even casual doodles. While legal related matters include accusations, witnesses and the procedure of evidence, payments and fines, theft, fraud as well as wife-beating. One mundane personal writing reads “Sell the house and come to Smolensk or Kiev; bread is cheap; if you cannot come, write to me about your health”.[36]

That may seem like a neat narrative, but I would very much argue that it’s false. Wish we could blame the slavers for this one, but the planter class had much of its influence over foreign affairs reduced after the Civil War, even as they clawed their way back into regional power. Their restoration of the racial caste system in the South was predicated on acquiescence, going forward, to the interests of the industrialist class of the North, rather than antagonism.

Unfortunately, the installation of brutal dictators to oppress laborers in other countries was just a natural outgrowth of the period of capitalist imperialism and ‘great power politics’ of the late 19th and early 20th century, and then of the insanity of the Cold War.

Explanation: During the Roman Republic and Early Empire, a strong sense of civic participation fueled the loyalty of the Roman Legions, making them willing to endure significant losses for relatively little reward in service to a Res Publica they felt they were meaningfully a part of.

However, by the Crisis of the Third Century, much of the civic participation (and basic rights) of the Roman people had been stripped by an increasingly autocratic imperial government, and the military - along with the breakdown of almost all basic government institutions of the period - became increasingly prone to extortion and revolt against the central government.

Explanation: During the Roman Republic and Early Empire, a strong sense of civic participation fueled the loyalty of the Roman Legions, making them willing to endure significant losses for relatively little reward in service to a Res Publica they felt they were meaningfully a part of.

However, by the Crisis of the Third Century, much of the civic participation (and basic rights) of the Roman people had been stripped by an increasingly autocratic imperial government, and the military - along with the breakdown of almost all basic government institutions of the period - became increasingly prone to extortion and revolt against the central government.

PERISH THE THOUGHT!

They only vote on the divine nature of DEAD Emperors! AS IS PROPER AND REPUBLICAN

Explanation: Romans are sometimes seen (especially by Romaboos) as a rational and practical people. And certainly, there is some degree of truth in this perception - certainly, the Romans considered themselves as such, with disdain for ‘superstitio’ and tall tales of magic!

… but what is magic? Isn’t discovering the deeper mysteries of the world just a form of KNOWLEDGE!? For this reason, the same Roman authors you can read condemning superstition and magic will just as quickly recommend far-fetched rituals and religious prayer as a means of achieving particular goals. IT’S NOT MAGIC, IT’S SCIENCE

So you definitely see such things as magic words and incantations enthusiastically adopted as some means of triggering the inner harmonies of the world for USEFUL, PRACTICAL purposes - including the famous ABRACADABRA as a means of preventing malaria!

Explanation: Romans are sometimes seen (especially by Romaboos) as a rational and practical people. And certainly, there is some degree of truth in this perception - certainly, the Romans considered themselves as such, with disdain for ‘superstitio’ and tall tales of magic!

… but what is magic? Isn’t discovering the deeper mysteries of the world just a form of KNOWLEDGE!? For this reason, the same Roman authors you can read condemning superstition and magic will just as quickly recommend far-fetched rituals and religious prayer as a means of achieving particular goals. IT’S NOT MAGIC, IT’S SCIENCE

So you definitely see such things as magic words and incantations enthusiastically adopted as some means of triggering the inner harmonies of the world for USEFUL, PRACTICAL purposes - including the famous ABRACADABRA as a means of preventing malaria!

This was not the argument. You are moving the goalpost. The argument was:

the fundamental functioning of people does not require ordering to be viable. Self-ordering is still ordering.

That’s a misunderstanding of what I said, though I’ll gladly concede to poor wording on my part. Ordering in the sense that it is imposed by someone else; self ordering is thus innately opposed to ordering in the sense I was using it in the original claim; though, again, I concede to poor wording. “does not require ordering” was meant in the definition 2 sense, not definition 1, which I thought was implied by the imperative infinitive.

Self-ordering is still ordering. Whether a government is involved in enforcing it or not is irrelevant, there will be enforcement of agreements even if the only ones conducting the enforcement are the concerned parties. That is order.

Sure.

Sure, they don’t have to be planned and regulated in advance, but eventually common agreements will produce a regulating group with enforcement authority because organizing in this way is more efficient for the market overall.

This is a point of legitimate disagreement - while it is more efficient (and desirable), I agree, it is not inevitable.

In any case, your argument is in agreement with the core point - that people do not NEED ordering (definition 2) from an authority to organize their own affairs.

Soldiers instinctively trust a beefier looking bullet and the heft and wood stock would have been more familiar in the 1960s than some “gee whiz plastic fantastic” gun pushed by those damned nerd engineers. “7.62mm is a Proper Manly caliber. Not some dinky varmint caliber- my dang ol’ .22 at home for shootin’ squirrels is the same caliber!”

lmao, that was in-large-part my grandfather’s complaint about the gun. I remember being into firearms a bit and asking him the specifics of his opinion, and it was very much along the lines of “It felt delicate in my hands, like it would snap like a toy, and fired a dinky little cartridge.”

Even though I was a little smartass just going into college, between the thrill of getting some of my grandfather’s war stories, and that bickering about nerd shit with someone who had to deal with the real-world conditions, whether rightly or wrongly perceived by them, was a bit of a dick move, I wisely kept my mouth shut about my own opinions on the 5.56. :p

He was an artilleryman and by his own admission only fired his M16 a handful of times - usually not in clear combat conditions (he said boar was a welcome change from C-rations, lmao).

But agreement without hierarchical imposition is self ordering. Common currency and measurement standards can and do arise without the imposition of state fiat.

The great advantage of markets, as observed by Adam Smith, is that they’re self-ordering. No grand plan has to be drawn up by any central authority, not even an advisory one, for even very complex and completely disconnected supply chains to be coordinated between firms with great geographic distance and numerous degrees of separation between them.

Explanation: Due to the general design excellence of the Soviet AKM, and a variety of problems with the early releases of the American M16 rifle*, US troops in the Vietnam War are recorded as having sometimes preferred the AKM (something NOT sanctioned by regulations) for combat. This creates… logistical issues, and in the low-visibility conditions of jungle warfare, often friendly-fire issues as well, since the sound of an AKM firing is distinctly differently from an M16.

It must be enemy fire if it’s an AKM, right?

It fucking should be, but hey, no one ever said war was simple…

My grandfather, a Vietnam vet, held a lifelong dislike of the M16, and spoke highly of the AKM, though he never ‘swapped out’ his own firearm.

*included, but not limited to, poor maintenance instructions issued to poorly trained recruits, susceptibility to jamming in the harsh elements of the wet and muddy Vietnamese jungles, a round that had trouble maintaining accuracy and power through dense jungle foliage, and a general distrust of the lightweight M16 by soldiers used to more ‘sturdy’ and heavy firearms.