Well yeah, the next words are “a long time democrat”

a little fort for the night

(SHUT UP SHUT THE FUCK UP).

P.S. I like your fort.

Depends on where. In some circumstances, it’s much easier now than it was even before Oct 2023 (though it was really rough for a while after).

I love to be part of such a serious society full of intellectual integrity

I thought it was because it’s a cock, like a rooster

I toured in Afghanistan and the same thing happened to me, except I was left with one finger that I now use for peck typing. I guess I should count my blessings, which luckily is 1.

I hope that you will grant me the grace that I’m not taking a liberal approach to this topic, I’m just doing my best to evaluate evidence and arguments and I’m saying that they often don’t hold up. To explain a difference between my view and how liberals discuss this topic, I admit as Furr admits that Stalin was a homophobe and that this was an error, but I think holding him to modern standards is disingenuous when there were hardly any state-level actors outside of maybe East Germany [still much later than the main legislation in the USSR here, ca. 1936] that weren’t and Stalin wasn’t exactly trying to hunt down the gays even if he was disgusted by them (and would not have tried to genocide them like Reagan did a full ~45 years after the offending USSR legislation was established). People often point to his note on the Whyte letter, where he calls the gay communist something like a “dgenerate idiot" in his archival note, but it’s also worth pointing out that in that same letter, Whyte was himself trying to draw a line between “natural” homosexuals like himself and "dgenerate bourgeois” homosexuals. There was some analytical inadequacy on Stalin’s part here, but this modern effort to make him look like a Soviet Reagan or that his attitude on gays was like the Nazi attitude is ridiculous and ahistorical. I don’t think Furr has discussed this at length, but I believe it’s roughly also his view. If I am remembering Furr correctly, then this is a case of him not being an absolutist, because even as I call him an “absolutist,” I am not trying to be an absolutist about even that claim, and will concede not only when he makes good arguments for views that happen to align with his general absolutist attitude, but also that there are exceptions to this attitude and the label is being applied as a matter of a general trend in his writing.

I don’t think you have a realistic shot of persuading me on Beria since, to my understanding, there is evidence of the accusations totally independent of Khrushchev’s judicial assassination of him, which was obviously only carried out for careerist reasons. I figured that Katyn would come up, and I disagree with Furr there too, but we can try actually discussing arguments. I think the stuff about the badges is rather murky and doesn’t carry that much weight even if Furr is correct, and the stuff about forgeries is not adequately substantiated, and I will point out that furthermore it makes a great deal of sense for the Soviets to have done the massacre given the fact it was specifically a killing of officers (not footmen, etc.) of the Polish military, who would mostly be class enemies of the proletariat, after making some attempt of screening out sympathizers (as I believe is mentioned in some of the “Soviets-did-it” testimony, to use Furr’s term), because the Soviets understood the likelihood of these officers being broken out of prison one way or another and that they were liable to support the fascists against the Soviets as many other reactionary groups in Nazi-invaded nations did. Obviously, many things said about the massacre, like conflating in other executions (if I remember right, people do lump in massacres actually done by the Nazis relatively nearby at other times as somehow also being part of “the Katyn massacre”) or making some absurd claim about “cultural genocide” because many of the officers, outside of their military role, were part of the intelligentsia, etc. are just terrible fascist lies that are normalized in liberal spheres because the liberals are also “absolutists.”

Looking this up again, I see that some arguments come from Sergey Romanov, who I also see is a cartoonish anti-communist hack who speaks of Nazi-Soviet “friendship,” a lie that is not just disgusting but also something only believed by complete fools and which could not possibly be taken seriously by someone with his level of education (unlike some of the other accusations, even if they are false), and yet he says it anyway. Also a rather dishonest and juvenile point-scorer based on correspondence with Furr that he published. The Discourse is fucked, though that doesn’t make Furr correct here.

Good catch, and I guess we shouldn’t consider him to be above such a vapid “what’s trending on twitter?” way of communicating

I know it’s a silly detail to focus on, but this event in Berserk is literally called “the Eclipse,” prominently featuring an eclipse in many panels, and here it’s like a blood moon or a harvest moon and I don’t really see why that would be.

I’d rather not see this particular artist’s take on how the rest of the Eclipse plays out

I still remember when he was doing lableak and the liberals were all coping that it was him doing a bit because of course he’d never say something so ridiculous.

Why is “maximalism” even bad by itself?

Because I think at least in some cases he is clearly reasoning backwards from his desired conclusion to whatever evidence he can make use of from his vast research, specious or not.

Are you sure yo’re not reflexively bouncing into center?

A fair enough question, aside from the fact that the “center” here is still supporting that Stalin did tremendous good for the world and that countless accusations made against him are ludicrously false and many others are overblown.

It is certainly true that I am very wary of absolutes (in the sense of something having entirely X quality and never the opposite quality), because I like deductive reasoning but it makes me acutely aware that things that are frequently presented as absolutes aren’t and deduction is constantly misapplied. I guess you could also word my criticism of Furr as that he seems to use motivated reasoning to defend a very absolutist view of Stalin. This doesn’t mean he doesn’t ever make good contributions, and very often the criticism he receives from liberal historians and other commenters is frivolous (I’ve read some of his responses and he often does a good job of refuting them), but at base I struggle to have confidence in him because of some of his sillier arguments.

If things become what is recognized as a world war later, it will be dated as having begun before now (and whether it is dated to the US-Israel attack or Russia’s invasion may depend on things we don’t know yet).

It’s been like two years since I thought of Neera Tanden last

I certainly appreciate his research into the USSR archives and other Russian sources that get neglected, but I think his maximalism leads to making specious arguments in some cases. I think few people in the world know the archives better than him outside of the Russian government itself (and even then not that many more), but that doesn’t mean his inferences always make sense. Like, I don’t think we have good reason to think the Testament is fake, for example, and arguing about it is totally pointless when there are a dozen other things to say about the Testament itself and its handling if we want to address the bullshit narrative around it.

Agreed

It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but the first thing I think of is always this famous clip of Biden laying out part of it very plainly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYLNCcLfIkM

I think even if you don’t focus on it, mentioning the real point is still productive from a “helping onlookers” perspective.

Some people want everything to be porn, but I genuinely believe that most of this internet discourse isn’t about wanting to jerk off but about wanting to reject the idea that a woman can be valuable as anything but a sex object or perhaps home-maker. The point is to deny the humanity of women and constantly reaffirm that they need to be pleasing to misogynists in order to be anything but disgusting.

risks of unclear objectives in military affairs

I hate liberals so much that it will probably kill me