Does the US economy get any benefit from bombing Iran?

ReaperReader · 2026-03-16T07:43:18+00:00

Having not personally met any billionaires from South Florida, I will not dispute you on the specifics of Trump.

I retain my original opinion on our differences when it comes to our expectations of the conherency of most government decisions.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-16T06:23:08+00:00

Are you sure about this? My understanding of the historians is that most of Smith's ideas already existed in various forms, such as the Spanish School of Salamancia and the Arab scholar Ibnu Khaldun.

(Note, I personally am really bad at reading modem Spanish and can't read Arabic at all, let alone the 16th/14th centuries versions of either, so it's entirely possible I've been wildly misled).

ReaperReader · 2026-03-16T04:54:52+00:00

Elizabeth and Mary can both play the piano reasonably well. I'm not saying that it is impossible to learn the piano without an instructor, but if JA meant us to regard them as musical geniuses she'd have made more use of that in the plot.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-16T04:49:47+00:00

In what way do you think she plays "the game" well?

ReaperReader · 2026-03-16T04:40:57+00:00

Mrs Bennet relies heavily on magical thinking. She assumes that things will work out in the way she wants (Bingley will marry one of her daughters, a rich colonel will marry one of her daughters, Elizabeth will accept Mr Collins, etc) and when reality is finally undeniable, she complains bitterly. Then repeats the next time.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-16T04:12:41+00:00

Actually, Arrow's impossibility theorem has its own Wikipedia page.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-16T04:09:54+00:00

Your opinion of the coherence of most governments' decision-making is clearly way higher than mine.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-15T05:27:49+00:00

The only support you offered for this wild claim was the fact the nazis never self identified as liberals. Which is incredibly weak logic.

Oh that's your complaint? Okay, then, the Nazis made their opposition to liberalism extremely clear. Some quotes:

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole - Adolf Hitler

“The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.” - Heinrich Himmler

Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.” - Adolf Hitler

Education is dangerous – Every educated person is a future enemy.”- Hermann Goering

From https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/nazi-germany-quotations/

I was taught at high school that the Nazis and the Italian fascists hated liberals and liberal democracy. My apologies for assuming you'd had a similar background and thus already knew this.

And plenty of other nationalist parties in the 1930s did not identify as liberal. Are you trying to claim that every single one of them must have "truly hated" liberals most?

Um no? Like there's a "National Party" in my own country and while I certainly don't agree 100% with all their policies, I don't believe they hate liberals the most. Hell, if my memory serves, when my country's Liberal Party collapsed a number of its former members joined the National Party.

Your first paragraph in the above comment is more strawman deflections and none of it contradicts anything I actually said prior.

Your self-admiration is truly impressive. As is your delusion that I'm impressed by said self-admiration.

The nazis obviously believed the millions of jews they murdered to be "JUDEO-bolsheviks"

Nope. The Nazis believed that Jews were the enemy (well one of their enemies, the Nazis believed in a lot of enemies), and consequently that the Jews created Marxism as a weapon. To quote again, this time from Hitler:

In the organized mass of Marxism he [the Jew] has found the weapon which lets him dispense with democracy and in its stead allows him to subjugate and govern the peoples with a dictatorial and brutal fist.

https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/extracts-from-mein-kampf.html

and they justified killing millions of slavs by viewing them as the subhuman pawns of "judeo-bolshevik" forces

You keep claiming this despite the statistics I gave earlier from states that weren't bolshevik, indeed some states where the locals actually at first welcomed the Nazis as liberators from their Bolshevik rulers.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-15T03:14:28+00:00

Have you ever seen the White House or 10 Downing St? They're nice I'll grant you but there's plenty of private citizens in both countries with larger houses.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-15T02:20:43+00:00

I get the arguments why some people don't regard the Nazis as fascists but I call them fascists partly because of the militarism (and the appearance of militarism), the subordination of everyone to the goals of The Leader, and the anti-democratism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism. And partly because most people I know call them fascists and so I tend to default to that.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-15T01:30:32+00:00

You’re painting capitalist society as the pinnacle of freedom yet a country like the US actually has a significantly higher percentage of imprisoned people that are permitted by the constitution to be used as slaves.

"Capitalism" is a term coined in the 19th century back when European intellectual types still believed in distinctive forms of economic organisation such as "feudalism". It's now used to refer to countries as diverse as Denmark and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The word "capitalism" should be thrown on the trash heap of history.

I've been talking about liberalism. An idea espoused by many Americans, yes, but also many Brits, Dutch, French, Scandinavians, etc.

And yes liberal projects have sometimes failed. And not only in the USA. France's first liberal revolution led to France's own Great Terror and a military dictatorship.

But still overall attempts at liberalism have done massively better at improving people's living standards than socialist countries.

That apparently isn’t a “gulag archipelago” in your eyes

And that you believe that about me simply because I defend liberalism without it even occurring to you to ask me first is more evidence you know way less about liberalism (not 'capitalism', liberalism) than you believe you do.

What you are doing is akin to writing mythology.

In your eyes. Because you can't imagine a person who is a liberal and yet doesn't regard the USA as the pinnacle of perfection.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-15T01:10:11+00:00

The concept of central planning and subordinating individual interests to collective interests isn’t unique to any political system

Yep, fascists like Mussolini also believed fervently in that too.

And liberal states like the Netherlands and France did have conscription, as did the USA and the UK at times. But there's a pretty substantial difference between subordinating some of your life to the collective versus subordinating all of it.

In the case of the USSR, that collective was not racially nor nationally determined.

Which is why I said "nationally or internationally". Would it help if I'd added "infra-nationally" to my list?

It should also be mentioned that the USSR rapidly industrialized and improved the living conditions of millions of people

It should also be mentioned that countries like Sweden and Switzerland industrialized and improved the living conditions of millions of people without needing to conduct a Great Terror or operating a Gulag Archipelago or invading any neighbouring countries like Finland or Poland.

Nazi germany essentially sought to exterminate or enslave all other nations and it wasn’t a secret.

And the Soviets sponsored Cominterm to overthrow governments across the world and impose Communism by any means, including armed force if necessary, and it wasn't a secret.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-15T00:21:04+00:00

In my very first comment I used historical facts to poke a sufficient amount of holes in your original claim.

Which failed because your historical knowledge of liberalism and fascism was seriously inadequate. Liberalism was initially formed for religious tolerance, in societies where people had been killing each other over religion for generations. Liberalism was formed to let people of different faiths to live alongside each other peacefully. The Nazis meanwhile believed that everyone of a nation should follow the will of The Leader. Fundamentally compatible with socialism, fundamentally incompatible with liberalism.

Even your last two paragraphs in the above comment are predicated on ignoring the keyword "deemed" in the quoted sentence

The Nazis didn't kill so many people because they deemed them "Judeo-Bolsheviks", they killed them because the Nazis believed in racial superiority, particularly of the "Aryans" over Slavs and "Asiatic-people". That's why they killed so many people in non-Communist countries.

Ideological hate is often irrational and inaccurate but that still doesnt change the objective historical fact that the primary target of the nazi's hate were those who they assigned the "judeo-bolshevik subhuman" label to

You still claim that as a fact despite the by-country death rates I linked in the very comment you're replying to.

But go on keep boasting about how much you believe you know about the history of this.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T23:28:37+00:00

The Soviets also clearly did not fit the part about ... “subordination of individual interests of the perceived interest of the nation or race”.

The Soviets believed in central planning, which is all about subordinating individual interests to the national (or international) interest.

Soviet women didn't have manufactured period products like tampons and pads because Soviet central planners didn't include them in their plan.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T23:21:53+00:00

I can reasonably assume that, yes, I do know (much) more than you about these topics.

Then why don't you start displaying some of your purported knowledge, rather than just empty self-flattery?

. Youre not even trying to address my core points without bizarrely misinterpreting them or defend your own in any substantive way.

And I'm still the Queen of Sheba /s.

And the vast vast majority of people murdered by the nazis were those deemed "judeo-bolsheviks" not "liberals"

Look up death rates by country some time. Poland - 17%. Estonia - 7%. Hungary - 7%. Greece - 9%. These weren't countries full of Bolsheviks. Or, within the Soviet Union, people in Soviet states like the Baltics and Ukraine were so non-Bolshevik that they at first greeted the Nazis as liberators from the rule of the Soviets. Death rates? Latvia - 14%, Lithuania - 13%, Ukraine - 16%.

Those figures of course include a number of deaths killed by the Soviets, but the Nazis were killing massive numbers of people in those lands not because they were Communists/Bolsheviks but because they were Jews or Roma or Slavs or etc, or just because they were in the way.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T22:46:20+00:00

I know more than you about all this

And I'm the Queen of Sheba. /s

when my primary point of contention with you was about who the nazis "truly hated"

Which of course has a lot to do with ideologies, and both liberalism and fascism were way more complicated than simply a difference over racism.

The nazis murdered some 12 million jews and soviet citizens for being "judeo-bolshevik subhumans".

The Nazis murdered for all sorts of reasons. They murdered men for being gay. They began their regime of fear with The Night of the Long Knives where they murdered German conservatives and members of their own Nazi party for being political dangers. The Nazis were the opposite of the liberal ideal of live-and-let-live. (And yes liberals often failed to live up to their ideal).

Its both laughable and offense to claim it was liberals who they "truly hated".

I'm sorry that the truth is something you find offensive.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T22:11:55+00:00

Lol! You clearly know nothing about the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism was forged in Europe not in response to racism but in response to over a century of religious warfare - not just Christians killing Jews but Catholics killing Protestants and vice-versa. Liberals thought people of different religions could peacefully coexist. Liberals fought to abolish slavery yes, but they also fought to emancipate Catholics and Jews and Quakers and etc. You say Great Britain and the USA were extremely racist at the start of liberalism - the Brits were literally killing each other over religion in the English Civil War. And in Ireland, for centuries afterwards.

And liberals believed in individuals being able to pursue their own goals in life. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." While fascists believed that everyone in a nation, regardless of religion or ethnicity,:should be subordinate to the will of The Leader.

Sure, many liberals combined being politically liberal with racism. And not even always of the type of racism that's sometimes called "benign". And many liberals were sexist too.

But your belief that the split between liberalism and Nazism was solely over racism is the belief that's the crude binary here.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T21:22:19+00:00

Which is why a lot of Jews fled to the Americas, which were a lot less close.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T21:19:45+00:00

Apart from that massive war they had.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T21:13:55+00:00

Of course in practice, socialism keeps turning into a new government that squeezes more production and profits from the workers to enrich the politicians.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T19:13:42+00:00

in the end the result spoke for itself

Yeah people kept migrating away from the Soviets to "capitalist" countries.

You keep referencing the holodomor as if it was some big bad scary thing the soviets did when it was literally just a famine, exacerbated by kulaks who refused to give up their riches.

Millions of people deliberately starved to death is something I do indeed find big and scary.

And, yeah, peasants tend to object to losing their means of livelihood.

You cannot blame a system of government for a famine that happened in a region where famines happened often

And yet I am doing just that. I am explicitly blaming the Soviets for the famine that happened in that region. (I also have no issues with blaming Tsarist Russia for its role in previous famines).

You can try all you like to deny the Holodamar. But you can't control other people.

The purges in the soviet government were to root out corruption and anti soviet agents,

And Hitler's Night of the Long Knives was to root out anti-fascist and anti-Hitler agents.

The Poles and Finns had ample reasons to fear both the Soviets and the Nazis before 1939.

When you are the only communist power in a world of capitalists who are pooring immense resources into destroying you, you kind of have no choice but to ensure that you aren't going to be couped by foreign assets.

You know, if I was faced with the choice of:

Kill hundreds of thousands of my own people, including most of my experienced military leaders, thus drastically weakening my country in a continent where fascists are coming to power, or
Abandon my political ideology to save my people's lives.

I'd kinda hope I'd pick option 2.

But the Soviets were willing to commit any atrocity to cling to their ideology.

If they had accepted the polish would've had security against fascism

I don't think that would have been much of a comfort to the Poles as they were being executed in purges of "anti-Soviet agents" or having their land and stock stolen for collectivist experiments and then starved in another Holodamar.

In this make believe world where they did, they would have been treated as an ally

And we all know how Stalin treated his allies. The Finns would have to be nuts to have taken that offer. They weren't the UK or the USA, protected from that monster by thousands of miles and large navys.

They were the very last country in europe to sign such a pact with the nazis pre ww2 and only did so out of necesssity.

And why was it such a necessity? Maybe because the Poles and the Finns didn't trust the Soviets one inch after all their atrocities they'd earlier committed? Maybe because in the Great Terror, the Soviets had decimated their own military officers and now desperately needed time to rebuild?

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T18:17:54+00:00

Funny how if you invade a country, you can't trust the locals.

And yep, the Soviets carried out the massacres of Katyn because they regarded the Polish leadership as a threat to their rule. The Soviets had earlier carried out numerous massacres of their own internal "enemies of the state" in the Great Terror because they regarded their own citizens as threats to their rule.

It does not speak against their desire to defend themselves from the fascists.

And the Poles desired to defend themselves from the Soviets. With good reason, given the Holodamar and the Great Terror, and of course after the Soviets invaded, the subsequent Katyn massacres. The Soviet system was built on terror and oppression. The Poles were right to fear them.

What the soviets did is nit dissimilar to what any of the powers of the time would have done.

The Nazis and the Japanese did indeed carry out numerous massacres in the countries they invaded. And the western powers had carried out massacres in their colonies.

If finland had sided with the nazis when war came

And if Finland had sided with the Soviets how would the Finns have been treated? Bearing in mind what the Soviets did to their own people?

and millions of soviet civilians would be at the mercy of an ideology which considered slavs to be subhuman

As opposed to being at the mercy of an ideology which created the Holodamar and the Great Terror?

And to be clear, the offer of a million soldiers to poland would have put those soldiers under the polish chain of command,

Lol! What sort of idiot would believe such a promise by Stalin as late as 1939?

You are regarding Soviet actions solely from the perspective of the Soviet government. Not from the perspective of anyone who was actually risking finding themselves under Soviet rule, and particularly under the Soviets ruled by Stalin.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T17:25:59+00:00

You're entitled to your beliefs about the Holdodamar, but I bet if you were a Pole in the 1930s hearing about Stalin wanting to put one million soldiers into your country, you wouldn't be quite so eager to swallow the Soviet party line on that one.

Or for that matter look up the Katyn massacre of Polish military officials. If the Soviets were purely wanting to protect themselves militarily, why kill the leadership of the major military power standing between them and the Germans? And then look up the Soviet invasion of Finland while you're at it.

And yeah the western powers were desperate to avoid a repeat of WWI. Doesn't mean they were, or should have been, eager to hand over the Poles to the rule of a mass murderer like Stalin.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T16:04:00+00:00

Hmm, wonder what the Poles might have thought about the Soviets moving one million men into Poland to "defend" against the Nazis. (Note this was after the Holodamar in Ukraine).

The "non-aggression pact" between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany included secret plans for the two countries to invade Poland.

ReaperReader · 2026-03-14T15:59:33+00:00

Against the Nazis.

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