Very little of the discourse is authentically engaging with his ideas, which range from interesting interpretations on existing ideas, to banal trad/con takes on personal responsibility.
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
It is really a sign of the times we're living in though that saying something as self-evident as "Stalin's and Mao's regimes were responsible for megadeaths due to starvation" causes people to get upset though.
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
All the deaths related to the Great Depression rest on capitalism, but somehow that doesn't get pointed out much. (And arguably those include many of the WWII deaths). We are good at seeing the sins of our enemies, but that's intellectually worthless if we can't see our own.
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Replying to @iwelsh @KennethFolk
it doesn't? are you sure? in my very conventional mainstream public high school history courses we studied the Great Depression in a lot of detail and it was represented as both a tragedy and an enormous policy failure that could have been prevented/mitigated.
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
I certainly do not see it mentioned nearly as often in public debate as the Communist famine deaths. (Or the fools screaming Venezuela, as if it isn't just a mismanaged petro state.) Nor do I see people actually tote up the number of deaths.
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Replying to @iwelsh @KennethFolk
alright, well I can't argue with your subjective experience of relative frequency of topics in the media you personally consume. have you seen anyone deny or write apologia about the Great Depression though?
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
No. But nor have I seen capitalists accept the death count of the Depression and WWII Western front as accruing to them and then comparing it to the deaths of communism. Let alone accept the death counts of various famines and genocides as in India and N. America.
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to be clear, I'm fine with accepting the famines as "Marxist". I don't care. But in the same time period as the Russian famine England caused a massive famine in India, and I don't accept that India wasn't part of the capitalist world system.
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Replying to @iwelsh @KennethFolk
mismanagement of India by the colonial authorities is very tragic and bad. the motivations for it were most likely a mixture of callousness (and racism) and desire to exploit colonies. that's substantively different than Marxist policies not working as intended.
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
No. In fact India was used systematically as a dumping ground for British manufactures, while Indian manufacture was systematically discouraged. At the beginning of British conquests India had more manufacturing than Britain.
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yes yes, we're not disagreeing about British colonialism being bad in many obvious ways. I think we're done here. This isn't the sort of conversation I look for on this site. I think you will easily find people more eager for partisan debate. I'm not one of them.
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