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9 anni fadiscuss

I'll admit, they had me fooled, and they weren't even trying to fool me; at first I thought that this was an authentic Amazonian or South Pacific language, until I started reading the article more carefully. The part about only having words for 'one', 'two', and 'many' particularly reminds me of Daniel Everett and the Pirahã...

11 anni fadiscuss

Solzhenitsyn on Stalin, to be honest. _The First Circle_ is fiction, but I find it hard to imagine that he would have described Stalin as not caring about burglars unless that could be imagined of him...

Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR wanted to keep things more or less held together, but wasn't that concerned about people who fell between the cracks.

11 anni fadiscuss

Really! I hadn't known that -- I'm delighted to learn that most came back alive!!! Thank you!

11 anni fadiscuss

I may be in the middle of an argument about Communism (which is the last thing I was expecting here!), but you and everyone in France are in my prayers.

11 anni fadiscuss

It looks like you're not quite as naive as you'd sounded at first...

Remember, Stalin didn't go in for executions; he preferred slave labor. Deaths in the GULAG -- which could be as high as in the non-death-camp Nazi concentration camps, or higher -- should be counted as well as executions. (Remember how part of Stalin's price for peace with Japan was 300,000 Japanese slaves, none of whom ever returned to Japan after the war.)

Also, some deaths in the war should be attributed to Stalin -- at the very least, deaths in the punishment brigades. If you force someone to march through a minefield, and he hits a mine and dies, it's your fault.

11 anni fadiscuss

> You didn't study your history, comrade! Communist orthodoxy believed in a historical inevitability that overlapped very closely with a sort of man-made Divine Providence. The Nazis had their own set of religious and spiritual motivations, their racial destiny and so on.

> They differed from Abrahamic religions in the sense that they expected "victory" in this world and in their time, as opposed to vague posthumous compensations and end-of-times prophecies; but they did believe in a "greater power" manifesting itself in their successful deeds.

Good point; I forgot about the historical-determinist side of Communism. I'm more familiar with the Nazis, who believed in an empty, Providence-less cosmos that was more or less Lovecraftian (and who accordingly made themselves a pretty convincing Cthulhu) -- see _Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning_ for the details.

> That's a false dichotomy. The problems in Syria won't go away with bombs, and it was manifestly stupid for Hollande to join the party willy-nilly, especially after having experienced first-hand the inefficiency of his security apparatus. What is needed is a real agreement between the real power brokers (Turkey, Saudi, Russia, Iran) to cut off the crazies for good. We need hard diplomacy, not hard policies.

Surely both at once wouldn't hurt. We need concerted ground action to defeat ISIS -- and in particular, we need Turkey to decide once and for all which side they're on -- but I don't think it's a bad idea to present a united front; I _do_ think that it's a bad idea to imagine that making concessions will inspire fewer lone wolves and opportunists, rather than more.

11 anni fadiscuss

I definitely put all three in the same category. Stalin was probably less bad than Hitler (he killed more people than Hitler did historically, but imagine the body count if Hitler had won); but it's not easy to choose among totalitarian regimes -- or aspiring totalitarian regimes, in ISIS' case.

11 anni fadiscuss

I said that concessions will work no better with ISIS than they will with Nazis and Communists. Both the Nazis and the Communists were revolutionary movements convinced that the world was going their way. When they got concessions, they became emboldened; the only way to be left alone by them was to challenge and defeat them.

11 anni fadiscuss

If they're trying to provoke Christian involvement in Syria, they've succeeded; Pope Francis has called on the community of nations to restore order in Syria and suppress ISIS, and has stopped just this side of explicitly calling a crusade...

11 anni fadiscuss

They've inspired a lot of lone-wolf and copycat attacks, though, and I think they endorse the idea that if you can't get to Syria, you can at least kill people at home. I doubt that ISIS' actual government had anything to do with this, but the attackers were clearly thinking of ISIS -- "For Syria!" and all that.

11 anni fadiscuss

I'm talking about Lenin (founder of the VChK/KGB), and Stalin, and Mao, and Pol Pot, and the Shining Path, and the Red Army Faction, and I could go on but the other names escape me. When a political movement kills more people than Hitler, I'm fine with mentioning it in the same breath as Hitler.

11 anni fadiscuss

Why downvotes? At a wild guess, 100 million dead.

11 anni fadiscuss

I hadn't known that it was as bad as that! (Other posters here mention old Soviet arms caches, and the general surplus of weapons spread by the fall of Communism.) It sounds like the UK benefits quite a bit from being on an island... (Are they in Schengen or not?)

11 anni fadiscuss

The Eastern Bloc had plenty of terrorism, as well as organized crime -- who do you think was supplying all those black markets?

Being a police state is one thing; being an _effective_ police state is something else, much harder (at least in the pre-computer era). In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...

11 anni fadiscuss

It used to be rational, rather. The classic terrorists of the '70s wanted "a lot of people talking but not a lot of people dead" -- and also wanted to survive the experience. The new breed of terrorism in the '80s and '90s was different from those; the IRA, the PLO, and various state-sponsored terrorists in that period had/have more in common with each other, despite their obvious differences, than any have with al-Qaida and ISIS, which aim for suicide missions with high body counts.

This particular operation is either ISIS-conducted or ISIS-oriented vigilanteism; whichever it is, backing down in Syria will only embolden them. (Or rather, embolden those like them; I don't imagine that very many of the specific attackers here are going to have particularly many opportunities to do this again in the future.)

ISIS is specifically out for either world empire or apocalyptic defeat (see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi... ); tactical concessions will work about as well as they did with the Nazis and the Communists -- or even less well than that, since neither Naziism nor Communism believed that success was a sign that Divine Providence was smiling on them.

11 anni fadiscuss

I'm very curious about where the attackers got those firearms. France isn't as heavily disarmed as England, but it isn't exactly the United States for firearms availability; if any of the offenders' weapons can be recovered, I'm sure there will be interesting things to learn from their serial numbers.