William Hinton posted:

Lack of strategic consensus has had an incalculable influence on the reconstruction of China since 1949. The right and left swings that constantly distorted policy in the post-land-reform period were nothing new, but in the absence of consensus the swings tended to be far more extreme and far more destructive than they had before. Foot-dragging by an important section of the leadership that disagreed on strategic goals often served to undermine and slow down political initiatives. But by taking the opposite tack, these leaders could, if they felt like it, speed up those initiatives and carry them to extremes for the sole purpose of discrediting not only the initiatives themselves, but the overall direction of the movement. Once ultraleft errors make radical programs look absurd, the substitution of conservative alternatives becomes easy. Whether or not anyone ever consciously carried out such devious manurers, objectively the ball clearly bounded that way.

JohnBeige posted:

currently reading the leaked supposed Alito decision regarding overturning roe v wade

How well does it hang together as a legal argument

winebaby posted:

I left a copy of Cyclonopedia on my desk and now my partner has been ripping on the title for two days straight. "Are you enjoying Mindograms: Pescaterian Spaceship Relations?" Also the person at book store, whom I know, acted like ordering/buying it was a symptom of crisis. Fifty pages in, do not recommend.

cyclonopedia is cool imo, and your partner sounds rude as heck!

Populares posted:

Bought Das Kapital volumes 1-3. Trip report a decade from now.

Capital is a good read, might be important someday.

winebaby posted:

i love cyclonopedia but that's a brutal own lol

https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/newsletter-38/ posted:

If Stalin had in fact purged the Red Army of its best officers, if he had “betrayed the revolution” by purging all the party loyalists, then the conquest of the USSR would have proven to be the easy victory that it was scheduled to be. Instead, it was precisely because the Soviet Union did what the European nations failed to do – purged their army of fascist ‘fifth columnists’ prepared to sell out the Russian people – that the Red Army triumphed rather than sitting the war out.
Without the purges, the Red Army would have fallen apart, as previous foes of the Nazi war machine had done, unable to withstand the Nazi blitzkrieg. Were the purges brutal? Probably so. Were there excesses? Undoubtedly. But would the outcome of World War II, and the last sixty years of human history, have been much different without them? Undeniably.
As Party official Georgi Malenkov noted: “In the light of the war and its results, we perceive in all its magnitude the importance of that implacable struggle which over a period of many years our Party waged against every brand of enemy of Marxism-Leninism … the Party in good time destroyed all possibility of the appearance of a ‘fifth column’ in the U.S.S.R., and prepared the country politically for active defence. It will be easily understood that if this had not been done in time, we should, during the war, have found ourselves under fire from the front and the rear, and might have lost the war.”
So the purges achieved the desired result, but were they necessary, or was there another option? I don’t have an answer for that, but I do know this: Western intelligence agencies are remarkably skilled, now as then, at structuring the game so that it is a no-win situation for the opponent.
...
So if I have this right, this is basically what happened: Stalin was convinced that there were elements within his administration, likely working in collusion with Western interests, who were plotting against him, and just days before evidence of that plot was to be aired at trial, Stalin just happened to die. Immediately thereafter, all charges were quickly dropped against all the accused conspirators. The brave soul who felled the beast, if he was in fact assassinated, was rewarded by being sent before a firing squad. One of the men who had denied medical treatment to the fallen leader, and then lied repeatedly about it, and then arranged for Beria’s execution, rose up to assume Stalin’s throne. This same man quickly “tempered Soviet hostility,” which really means that he began working with the very same Western interests that Stalin had so feared. From the time of Stalin’s death, the new breed of Soviet leaders began covertly converting the Soviet Union to a capitalist system, while they and their Washington counterparts continued for forty more years to pretend as though the two nations were still ideological rivals. However, no one should conclude from any of that there ever was any actual plot to do away with Stalin.

marknat posted:

Great coincidence lo, what do you think about programmed to kill? I started reading it yesterday its pretty batshit insane, but im kind of convinced

i haven't really read it yet, i skimmed bits and pieces a while ago but need to actually dive in at some point. the impression i got is that many of the links between serial killers and CIA mkultra stuff seem reasonable enough, but he seems to be pushing the idea that mkultra techniques can do basically sci fi things to the mind which i am not so sure of. but i don't really have a full opinion yet because i haven't properly read it. it seems like the book covers like a million things that could all have books of their own written about them as well