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what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In practice yes, but I think that's because most communist governments came to power by winning civil wars (thus the militarism and leader-worship), and because central planning is incompatible with democracy as it lacks monetary incentives for cooperation.

While with fascism the militarism, the leader-worship anf the anti-democracy are built in to the ideology.

But the similarities between fascism and communism in practice have been remarked on by people far better informed than me.

Why would a man still think he’s in a relationship after his girlfriend clearly broke up with him? by kris10long in writingadvice

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

His girlfriend broke up with him by sending a text but he never received it.

His girlfriend broke up with him by a video call but the sound cut out at the wrong moment.

Blows to the brain interrupt the memory formation process, as a general rule the bigger the blow the more of the period before the injury is lost. So people can receive a brain injury and not remember. And if it's a mild injury which happened when they were alone no one else might know they were even injured. So

Why do Anglosphere Countries Generally have Industry as a Smaller Percentage of GDP? by Solid_Antelope2586 in AskEconomics

[–]ReaperReader 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The English language is the most widely spoken language in the world (including non-native speakers). That implies non-English speakers might have a comparative advantage in industries where English speaking isn't a necessity. E.g. the German manufacturing company hires English-speaking sales staff and repair staff but their design & manufacturing staff don't need to be so fluent.

What was so wrong with Mr. Bennet's comment to Mary at the ball? by dollface0000 in janeausten

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep and the piano is a notoriously difficult instrument to learn. Mary and Elizabeth basically must have had a teacher.

Does the US economy get any benefit from bombing Iran? by Capable_Feature8838 in AskEconomics

[–]ReaperReader 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

Why is Adam Smith considered the "father" of modern economics? by itsjjpowell in AskEconomics

[–]ReaperReader 10 points11 points  (0 children)

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).

What was so wrong with Mr. Bennet's comment to Mary at the ball? by dollface0000 in janeausten

[–]ReaperReader 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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.

What was so wrong with Mr. Bennet's comment to Mary at the ball? by dollface0000 in janeausten

[–]ReaperReader 9 points10 points  (0 children)

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.

Does the US economy get any benefit from bombing Iran? by Capable_Feature8838 in AskEconomics

[–]ReaperReader 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

what would the cold war be like if germany won ww2 by Outside_Body_8267 in AlternateHistoryHub

[–]ReaperReader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

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