• Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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    12 days ago

    Which black book are you pulling your numbers from and how high will they be this time?

          • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            12 days ago

            Wikipedia is where liberal nerds go to slapfight, inconsistently using various rules to push their agendas. There is, for example, someone that spends a ton of her time fighting Nazi apologetics on Wikipedia that would otherwise still be there and she receives a lot of pushback. While her task is just, ask yourself why she needa to do it in the first place. Why is Wikipedia so friendly to Nazi apologetics? Why is it so hostile to corrections of it? Do you think the reasons might apply to other articles?

            Wikipedia will mislead you on topics with more room for politics. It is fine if you want to use it to learn some math or something, but on anything social or political you should assume it has been written by someone sympathetic to Nazis and instead read books before forming any opinions.

            Wheatcroft (who you have already cited) and Davies have some good overviews based on thr archives. Instead of using selected quotes provided by Wiki editors, I would recommend reading the source material. And then compare it, critically, to the intended message from Wikipedia.

            • Sundial@lemm.ee
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              12 days ago

              Sure, it might have some contentious pages, but it does get edited by people who care enough. Just like the article you linked says.

              And you said it yourself the source I used was fine. If I misinterpreted the quote or of there’s more to the story you can clarify that and I’ll correct myself.

              • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                11 days ago

                Sure, it might have some contentious pages, but it does get edited by people who care enough. Just like the article you linked says.

                Why does a page need to be contentious to be biased and misleading? As you yourself demonstrate in this thread, media literacy and criticism are not widely adopted.

                I already asked you some simple challenging questions that addresses this. Can you think about answering it? Why didn’t you already answer it? Why do you make me repeat myself?

                And you said it yourself the source I used was fine.

                I told you to read the actual books by Wheatcroft and Davies and suggested applying the mildest or critical thinking. Do you believe you are doing that right now or arw you being defensive and deflecting from critique?

                If I misinterpreted the quote or of there’s more to the story you can clarify that and I’ll correct myself.

                It seems you have missed the point entirely. Citing Wikipedia is like saying your mom you something once. Nobody has the onus of disproving what mommy told you. It is your job to actually study something before adopting the pretense that you understand it.

                To do otherwise is arrogant and dishonest. And as we can see here, you are tryjng yo flip the onus and would like to believe you are right about what mommy yold you untio someone corrects you. Of course, as we have seen in this thread, when someone takes the time to do that, you respond in bad faith and deflect. All you’re really doing is building stratagems for being lazy and wrong.

                Are you surprised when you aren’t taken seriously?

                • Sundial@lemm.ee
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                  11 days ago

                  Citing Wikipedia is like saying your mom you something once

                  Not it’s really not. And like you and I both said the numbers quoted aren’t incorrect or come from a non-factual source. So saying this man killed a lot of people is not something incorrect. Regardless of your political ideologies or affiliations. So what critical thinking do you want me to employ here? Even if I read the book, what context would I be missing?

                  Someone else in this thread tried giving me the same message. Recommended a few books to me. One of them was written in the 30s so before a lot of the shit Stalin did. Another one literally backed up the numbers I quoted. So what are you and every other person in this thread arguing with me about here? Are you simply trying to tell me that wikipedia isn’t reliable? I would disagree as nothing you or anyone else has said has led me to believe that my understsnding of this topic is incorrect, but I’ll leave you to your opinion in the matter. Just because you take issue with some articles that has millions of articles from a community built site does not delegtimize it in my eyes. Are you trying to tell me that Stalin did not cause a lot of deaths? That’s not really an argument up for debate as its well documented that he was.

                  • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                    11 days ago

                    Not it’s really not.

                    Yeah it really is. It has no academic rigor. This is why teachers don’t let you cite it.

                    And like you and I both said the numbers quoted aren’t incorrect or come from a non-factual source.

                    Actually I didn’t say that and so far you haven’t even responded to my comment on your numbers. I’m not going to repeat myself so if you want to discuss the numbers maybe you could deign to directly respond, O Great Wiki Warrior.

                    So saying this man killed a lot of people is not something incorrect.

                    Saying that Stalin killed a lot of people would be unanimously accepted by every person on this website and Wikipedia isn’t how we know it lmao. We can all see the responses to you saying he killed lots of Nazis, for example, but you seem to be afraid of internalizing anything we say to you - or not saying silly things while being defensive.

                    Just try being honest. Kill the person in your head that says you can never admit fault. That person is a coward and full of shit and as you can see here, nobody likes them.

                    Regardless of your political ideologies or affiliations. So what critical thinking do you want me to employ here? Even if I read the book, what context would I be missing?

                    There is no mystery to what critical thinking I’ve asked of you. I asked you questions for you to yhink about two comments ago (that you ignored) and the comment you’re trying to ignore is quite clear. I think you can figure it out. I’ll help you out and repeat myself if you say, “sorry Barx, my bad. I went and triex to figure out what you meant by critical thinking and, shucks, I just couldn’t do it! Can you help me please?”

                    Someone else in this thread tried giving me the same message. Recommended a few books to me.

                    Because you display ignorance. They are being nicer to you than you are to them. They, unlike you, actually do the reading. Unlike you, they don’t rely on chickenshit rhetorical circles to avoid doing so.

                    One of them was written in the 30s so before a lot of the shit Stalin did.

                    That’s not a reason not to read it. See what I mean by chickenshit? If anything something from the 30s will be favorable to anticommunism simply because the Soviet archives were not available. If you weren’t deathly afraid of challenging yourself, you would learn that the archives largely contradicted Western exaggerations and guesses as well as Kruschevite antistalinism.

                    Another one literally backed up the numbers I quoted.

                    Did you read it? And for the third time, I’ve already replied to your numbers and you’ve not responded.

                    So what are you and every other person in this thread arguing with me about here?

                    I have been very clear. You can respond to what I say instead of pretending it’s a mystery.

                    Are you simply trying to tell me that wikipedia isn’t reliable?

                    What have I said about Wikipedia? Can you read it and tell me?

                    I would disagree as nothing you or anyone else has said has led me to believe that my understsnding of this topic is incorrect

                    Yes, it is quite clear that you have made the propaganda you wish to believe unassailable. This is not because it is valid, but because you are being intellectually dishonest with yourself and others. For example, pretending to not know my criticism of you using Wikipedia, ignoring 75% of what I say to you, and relying on blatantly absurd rhetoric.

                    but I’ll leave you to your opinion in the mattyou

                    Difference being that I read the books while yoi skim Wikipedia to confuse yourself, so my opinions are correct and yours are propaganda.

                    Just because you take issue with some articles that has millions of articles from a community built site does not delegtimize it in my eyes.

                    The thing I told you to do is to read actual history books, including the ones you listed from Wikipedia despite not having read them, because Wikipedia is poisoned by, for example, Nazi apologetic debate perverts when it comes to social and political issues. You need to actually read critically, not just absorb whatever fits the bullshit you spent all of 10 minutes absorbing from others.

                    This is, apparently, too much for me to ask of you. God forbid you read a book or challenge the logic of a Wikipedia page. You might die in the process.

                    Are you trying to tell me that Stalin did not cause a lot of deaths? That’s not really an argument up for debate as its well documented that he was.

                    You thought this was such a good zinger you said it twice lmao.

                    So hey, what about the 80% of my comment you didn’t reply to? Why take up so much space saying silly nonsense instead of just replying to what I say?

                    I think I know the answet. But do you have the self-posession to say it?

                  • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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                    11 days ago

                    And like you and I both said the numbers

                    Unironically, are you dyslexic? No shame if you are, it’s just that you keep saying we say things we haven’t said, and understanding why you do this would be helpful. If you’re gonna have a discussion with people, please relate to what is actually being said, rather than what you would like had been said instead.

                    Someone else in this thread tried giving me the same message. Recommended a few books to me. One of them was written in the 30s so before a lot of the shit Stalin did.

                    I don’t know if you’re doing this on purpose, but at this point I’ve gone thru this with you enough times that you should know better by now. Let’s look at what actually happened. I told you wikipedia wasn’t useful. You asked what you should read instead. I gave you some good places to start for a basic education. I then made sure to make it very clear that no single source would every function as a panacea for ignorance:

                    There’s no single place I can point you to though. Education isn’t simple or easy, but being curious is. Not just taking everything you assume to be true for granted is important, and feverishly searching for keywords on wikipedia when your views get challenged is not the signs of someone with a solid intellectual foundation for their worldview. When you encounter heterodox opinions, take the time to consider that those that hold them have, like you, grown up in the same environment and so they’ve heard the same things you have. They do not think what you think because they haven’t heard what you have heard. They think differently because they have heard what you have heard and then they decided to look into it. Be curious, be humble when you get challenged and if you have no basis for thinking what you’re thinking, figure out why you think that. To quote a great man: “No investigation, no right to speak.”

                    Now this is not the first time I tell you this, as my immediate response to you then was

                    I haven’t made any claims towards a specific period, you asked for reading material and I presented some to you. Of this I gave you material that was an indepth detailing of the soviet gulag system up to world war 2, and several other pieces of reading material. You asked what you were supposed to read and I gave you some pointers, does your elevator not go all the way to the top or?

                    Yet you keep talking about this interaction as if what happened was that you made some statement like “Stalin ordered the death of 2.7 million people, of which less than half were wehrmacht soldiers. This is found in sources [1] [2] [3]” And I then came in and said “oh yeah, what about source X Y Z?” But that’s not what happened. We’ve been begging you to specify your claims and source them, you fail continually.
                    On top of that you, for some reason, lend more credence to second hand sources rather than first hand sources, which is laughable. ON TOP OF THAT the only “source” you’ve posted was a pretty obvious asspull from a wikipedia article, where you didn’t even have the common decency to admit that was what it was. It’s pretty clear you’re defensive and unwilling or incapable of engaging in civil discourse. You speak of civility as if it merely pertains to “not saying mean words” and not “not behaving like an absolute asshat”.
                    You keep isolating statements from context and then go a step further to refer to those statements in the vaguest sense possible. “Declassified documents” became the 13th citation from a wikipedia article. Not trying to be creepy, but are you a child? Have you yet to learn critical thought? Academic analysis? Source critique?

                    Another one literally backed up the numbers I quoted.

                    What? You haven’t quoted any numbers my guy. If you’re talking about the 13th citation of a wikipedia article then I’m baffled. You were so deep in discussion at that point and, again, you’re quoting a source speaking about a specific timeframe in a specific section of soviet society, while your statement that started this interaction was “stalin killed a lot more than CEOs”. You’re being incredibly unspecific, as it serves your agenda to be so. And still we treat you kindly and take you as seriously as it is possible. You keep asking questions you’ve gotten answered, yet you ignore. You then ask the same questions to different people, ignoring the answers you’ve already gotten. Rude, churlish, uncivil.

                    I haven’t made any claims towards a specific period, you asked for reading material and I presented some to you. Of this I gave you material that was an indepth detailing of the soviet gulag system up to world war 2, and several other pieces of reading material. You asked what you were supposed to read and I gave you some pointers, does your elevator not go all the way to the top or?

          • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.net
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            12 days ago

            No sort of serious review. Known to keep outright bad and highly (and intentionally) misleading material even after it is conclusively proven to be wrong. Have stuff like ‘Radio Free [something]’ listed as good sources.

            The only stuff that you can trust Wikipedia on is math, basically, and even then only because they provide the proofs, and even then they also keep errors found in their sources with no notes on the matter.

        • slartibartfast@lemm.ee
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          12 days ago

          And a lot of others. He wasn’t very discriminatory in that regard.

          Clearly in relation to killing others, but you’re too dishonest to follow the comment chain.

          • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            12 days ago

            If we’re being intellectually honest, we actually do have to hand it to Stalin that he did many good things. You’re proving the meme correct because I guarantee you don’t hold any other world-historical figure to the same standard.

            • slartibartfast@lemm.ee
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              12 days ago

              I can admit he did some right.

              Can you admit he did some wrong without your comment being deleted or you eventually banned?

              • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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                12 days ago

                We participate in good faith criticism of ourselves and each other all the time. Along with historical figures who share our views. We just don’t abide bullshit statistics from made up sources that are pushed by organizations like the Victims of Communism to serve imperial interests and whitewash Nazi crimes.

                  • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                    12 days ago

                    What’s your idea for addressing the problem of Russia’s emerging petty bourgeois using anti-semitic violence to protect their power? I’m sure you have a good faith, reality based solution to offer.

                  • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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                    12 days ago

                    So you see the way good faith interaction works is that it requires you don’t start out with being an insufferable asshat. People like you keep coming in, say some smug cliché, respond with more smug clichés whenever users try to engage with you, and then finally you act indignant when people treat you like you treat others. Please learn what “self-crit” is and then do it.

                  • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                    12 days ago

                    well feel free to fuck off and never return then, nobody asked for your presence and we certainly don’t appreciate it

              • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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                12 days ago

                Lmao do you think we’re democrats or something? We can critique political leaders whose ideology aligns with our own, that critique is just more substantial than saying “joe steel bad 100 gazillion” because, again, we’re not american liberals.

                I wish Stalin had been better on queer rights. Reinstating sodomy laws was shitty. I think he fucked up when he assumed fair play from the US and stopped supporting socialist movements internationally. I think it’s sus as fuck that he kept urging Mao to work with the fascists, especially when later developments in Asia follow a pattern of the USSR being much too hands off. I get being harrowed by decades of war and capitalist siege, but that same experience should make him realise they couldn’t get to the “rebuilding” phase until they were actually safe.

                Lysenkoism was cringe as hell.

                While the gulags were far better than the prison systems in the west, had a much lower recidivism rate, a higher rate of survivability, a better standard of living an so on, they were still incredibly horrendous. “Better than the west” is a bar that is so low it might as well be in hell.

                I won’t get banned for this because critiquing anyone is completely fine, as long as the critique is actually sound and you don’t act like a jackass. Something that cannot be said for people like you. Saying “100 million stalin gulag” isn’t “critique” it’s propaganda and saying it like you do is also just annoying. From the way you interact with others it’s clear you’re dishonest and you look down on people who disagree with you.

                edit: other bureaucrats are free to add more if they fear their own accounts getting hit with the mods comically large ban spoon for daring to critique our great leader

                • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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                  12 days ago

                  The point about Mao really got me. The nationalists betrayed and slaughtered the communists on multiple occasions because Chiang Kai-Shek was pissy that the workers liked them more. And every time someone asked the USSR for advice, they were like “just work it out, trust me” like ???

                  I think that significantly contributed to modern China’s views on foreign interference and language about others meddling in their domestic affair. And the hundred years of colonial pillaging, of course.

                  • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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                    12 days ago

                    Yeah the more I learn about the sino-soviet split the more annoyed I get. It kinda reeks of colonizer brainworms. Then the chinese got those brainworms wrt Cambodia and Afghanistan. I know it’s more complicated than that and I’m being reductive as hell and it’s just now something I’m only kind of learning about so I know my views can change again, but as I see it now, it gives me the vibes of “we need them to live in suffering for a few decades more until we’re ready” (I heard blowback pod quote Molotov about “needing 5-65 years” and I’ve been looking for the quote ever since). I get that mentality, but it’s kind of just reformism with more steps.
                    I do kinda get it though, it’s easy to say I would’ve done otherwise after several million dead and the first opportunity for peace in several decades.

              • Lyudmila [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                12 days ago

                Check this out: good faith criticism of Stalin coming from a Hexbear admin. We don’t ban people or remove their comments just because we disagree with them. We wait til they start slinging slurs or say something so outrageously in bad faith that there’s nothing worth continuing.

                Letting Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria operate and purge without accountability or oversight were three major examples of wrongdoing.

                While his motivations were anti-eugenicist in nature, Stalin’s backing of Lysenko’s Neo-Lamarckist agricultural programs were a huge misstep which negatively impacted food security in the socialist world for decades.

                Okay, there’s two I’m sure you’d agree with. Now it’s your turn.

                • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                  12 days ago

                  In order to agree with you they’d have to know wtf you’re talking about, but since they’re just browsing Wikipedia for random contextless facts of dubious validity motivated purely by vague “Stalin = Hitler” rhetoric that’s been pre-baked into their brain, I don’t think we can get that far.

                • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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                  12 days ago

                  uhhh but this isn’t critique you’re not acknowledgeing the billion people he killed you’re just using big words to sound smart! where is the cirtique? just say he killed all ukrainians bet you cant because you cant criqitue stalln!

                  uj/ Until this thread I thought the meme about “discussing theory with liberals vs. discussing it with other leftists” was too self-congratulatory, but now I realise it’s just facts.

                • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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                  12 days ago

                  Letting Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria operate and purge without accountability or oversight were three major examples of wrongdoing.

                  Under Beria arrests numbers fell down by 95% and executions by 99%. One of them is not like the others, and you should perhaps shed the popular but unfounded khrushchevism-montefiorism on this case.

                  • Lyudmila [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                    12 days ago

                    You’re totally correct and I apologize for the lack of clarity in my statement. Beria was absolutely a more measured and sensible man than the others, there’s no denying that and you’re absolutely correct that the numbers do corroborate the facts. He absolutely was smeared and was largely held responsible for Yezhov’s crimes, rather than any he himself committed. The supposed evidence of his personal misdeeds was largely fabricated.

                    I still believe he was given far too much latitude to operate in his role without sufficient oversight. That he was far more restrained in his actions than his predecessors is a testament to his own more judicious nature, rather than an example of sufficient oversight of his role.

                    Basically, I mean to say that while he wasn’t personally excessive in his actions, someone else in his position and with the same freedom to act indiscriminately may have continued to act as his predecessors did. A bullet dodged, rather than an example of appropriate harm reduction. Hopefully this makes more sense!

              • blakeus12 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                12 days ago

                i’ll step up to the plate, i guess.

                stalin did a lot of bad shit, and made many, many, mistakes.

                i won’t get banned for this because hexbear isn’t the evil shithole that everyone over on lemmy.world makes it out to be. we can just recognize the successes and failures of past historical leaders.

                happy?

                  • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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                    12 days ago

                    Nukes are scary and at that point the soviets had been fighting since 1918 (at the earliest, before that they were imperial citizens in a war and before that they were doing civil war stuff I’m sure)

              • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                12 days ago

                If you spend more time here you will find that good faith criticisms happen all the time. It just has to be both in good faith and coming from an educated perspective.

                Popping into a thread to say, “yeah well have you considered Stalin Bad?” merely because someone mentioned a good thing about Stalin is cringe and annoying.

                Yeah, I think most people do consider it considering we all steeped in the fucking Cold War propaganda in our formative years.

                The more you learn about Stalin — even those periods which are the least flattering — the more sympathetic the picture becomes. I don’t think many MLs think he was literally Jesus, but a human who did far more good than bad; and a higher proportion of good, I might add, than any of his Western peers.

          • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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            12 days ago

            Intellectual honesty is when you make vague unfounded claims and broad statements about moral values that are immediately contradictory to what you’re doing in the very same moment. If you then get pissy when people aren’t taking things seriously then you’re being very intellectual

      • Lyudmila [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        12 days ago

        Unfortunately, because Stalin didn’t go to medical school as a small child and perform open heart surgery on a grandmother in Tashkent in 1912, he was required to stand down and let Hitler take over the world.

        Stalin’s greatest crimes were his failures to discover and implement penicillin and the polio vaccine, directly making him at fault for everyone who died of any disease or old age in the Soviet Union.

      • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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        12 days ago

        Because this is your 2nd comment, I’m assuming you hopped over to .ee from .world. I hope you don’t get banned so you can actually learn something. In the meantime, please send us your pacifist manifesto.

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        12 days ago

        Wait so who’s the one person you can kill before you become indefensible?

        Everyone gets their one guy they can beat to death with hammers before it stops being cool.

      • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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        12 days ago

        If you truly believed that then you’d be a vegan hermit living in the mountains, and you’d be doing all you could to strike those who crossed your indefensible number

        In other words, this you? a-guy