Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[tussock]

Vikings weren't superior, they just broke the Peace of Christendom. Europe stored nearly all it's wealth in churches; which was because the better-decorated churches got more donations, and as donations were nominally used to help the poor it was very important the church take everyone's money away and make pretty churches out of it all.

Anyhoo, the Vikings walked in and took it all away, seeing as how churches weren't protected by anything other than the threat of eternal damnation that no one had told the northerners about. The armed response of the time simply could not handle small groups of highly mobile armed criminals killing men of the cloth at random and not trying to claim anyone's land. Those young Nordic spree-killing nobles returned home wealthy. Their great-grandchildren pissed away that wealth to build armies with which they took over a small portion of Europe for a short amount of time.

If there was anyone who was awesome it was the Habsburgs. Such a pure bloodline.

[name_here]

Partially, there simply was not sufficient organization and roads for the Europeans to effectively counter Viking raids. They hardly only raided churches, but any given location couldn't stop a certain number of longboats full of large angry men in armor. And sufficient force to stop them usually couldn't show before they loaded everything up in boats and left.

Also, they were tall and big in a time when that actually mattered in wars. Plus, I believe they had a higher percentage of actually trained fighters.

[Username17]

If there was anyone who was awesome it was the Habsburgs. Such a pure bloodline.

For certain values of pure, yes.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Also, some Vikings are time traveling Navy SEALs.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay, that's fine and all, but the viking stuff isn't exactly answering my original question.

[hyzmarca]

Okay, that's fine and all, but the viking stuff isn't exactly answering my original question.

Alright, the big problem for the Communists was that they were encumbered by their own ideology. It droves them to make policy decisions that were, in hindsight, terribly bad. Letting ideology drive policy decisions in opposition to actual science is never a good idea.

Then when those policies fail they blame everyone but themselves because they know that they can't be wrong. If collectivist farming isn't working then obviously the rich peasants who are pissed of at loosing their farms are sabotaging it and hiding all the grain and need to be punished.

This, of course, is combined with an attitude that you need to break a few omlettes to make a socialist utopia and a pathological lack of empathy for the peasants they're supposedly trying to save from oppression.

So it isn't that the Scandinavians are awesome so much as the Communists have historically been horrible.

That being said, the Scandinavians were always quite progressive. The Vikings practiced trial by jury back when most other Europeans were still using trial by ordeal.

[Username17]

Farming collectives did work. Tractor depots are awesome. The example you want to use is Lysenkoist biology - which fit snugly into Communist ideology of everyone being born with equal potential - but actually less than useless for trying to improve crop yields.

The big deal in the Soviet Union is that growth is always measured as a percentage, rather than an absolute. And that isn't just raw GDP, but also economic opportunity. The children of illiterate peasants are not going to have the same opportunities as the children of well read lords.

Even if the development plan of the soviets had been perfect, the reality is that you don't go from a GINI of 85 to a GINI of 20 in a single generation. The people who grew up with private tutors, cutting edge technology, and 3000 Calories a day simply do not compete on an even field with the people who grew up starving and illiterate in the unelectrified wilderness. They just don't.

Of course, the soviet plan wasn't perfect, and the lack of real democratic oversight made it almost impossible to improve that plan once it had been undertaken. But in the 1920s, the Soviet Union really does get a free pass from the fact that the empire they had taken over from was a grotesque mockery of benighted unfairness and underdevlopment.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Farming collectives did work. Tractor depots are awesome. The example you want to use is Lysenkoist biology - which fit snugly into Communist ideology of everyone being born with equal potential - but actually less than useless for trying to improve crop yields.

Tractor depots are awesome, yes. The law of spikelets, not so much. The fact remains that the initial attempts to force collectivism in both the USSR and China were utter disasters due to shitty implantation and a blame-the-peasants mentality that lead directly to widespread famine in both cases. But that was mostly a case of too much done too fast combined with unrealistic quotas than an innate flaw with collectivism.

Lysenkoism certainly didn't help, of course.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Even if the development plan of the soviets had been perfect, the reality is that you don't go from a GINI of 85 to a GINI of 20 in a single generation. The people who grew up with private tutors, cutting edge technology, and 3000 Calories a day simply do not compete on an even field with the people who grew up starving and illiterate in the unelectrified wilderness. They just don't.

So what about near the endgame? Did the SU abandon the more aggressive initiatives Reconstruction-style or was there was some other factor?

[Koumei]

which fit snugly into Communist ideology of everyone being born with equal potential

Is this where the Capitalist strawman of "In Communism, everyone is exactly the same!" comes from? I was always confused about that, given a simple quote for Communism would be from the Smurfs: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

[Kaelik]

Hardcore right wing crazies have a fundamental mental defect understanding that sentence.

They can't understand the second part of it, because they think they need everything. When they have more money than they can spend, and sit on increasingly larger piles of it, they think they need bigger piles.

So when it comes to the "to each" part they just assume that since everyone needs everything, that whatever finite resources exist will be divided equally.

Because after all it's impossible to not need infinity of everything.

[Koumei]

Ah, so the problem is that I expected them to be sane. You'd think I'd know better.

(Note: one has told me "Hey, you're a bondage queen who loves communism. That can't work! You don't have subs and doms in communism because everyone is equal!" I had to laugh.)

[tussock]

So, I was wondering, and it seems a reasonable idea from what I know, are the Scandinavian places basically sorted for everyone because they all believe in science? To the point of doing what science says works, no matter what.

Where my own dearest government prefers re-writing the facts until they agree with doctrine, and thus can always find a way to pour public money into their donor's pockets, because if you squint hard enough, and ignore all the opportunity costs, it's "for the good of the economy".

[DSMatticus]

To the point of doing what science says works, no matter what.

That seems like a good point to be, really. Why would you do anything else? Principle? What possible nobility is there in doing things that won't accomplish what they're intended to? What principle is that? The principle of deliberate self-sabotage? (Not arguing with you, mind. I'm not saying you suggested it was a bad thing.)

But anyway... In reality, it's far more appropriate to say that Scandinavians are expressing the moderate competency expected of humans in a vacuum, and the rest of the world just fucking sucks. Take the U.S. for example: we toyed with fascist (no, that's not a buzzword, yes, it's appropriate here) propaganda in order to keep people going through the Cold War, and our politics simply never recovered from indulging in the creation of an irrational, fear-based propaganda machine designed from the start to make us hate foreigners and domestic citizens who were sufficiently different alike. We have a lot of ideological baggage that has been routinely manipulated by our political system to keep us from giving two shits about empirical truths and more about how American something feels.

Then you look at, say, Sweden, and how they've felt about every power struggle for the past hundred years and it's "who gives a shit? Neutral." I'm sure Scandinavian politics is full of stupidities and fallacies and what not, because Scandinavians are still human and humans are kind of shitty at these things. But Scandinavia doesn't have a propaganda machine with the weight of the Cold War behind it being used to crush science because it's anti-Christian or regulation because it's communist.

[Korgan0]

To the point of doing what science says works, no matter what.

That seems like a good point to be, really. Why would you do anything else? Principle? What possible nobility is there in doing things that won't accomplish what they're intended to? What principle is that? The principle of deliberate self-sabotage? (Not arguing with you, mind. I'm not saying you suggested it was a bad thing.)

But anyway... In reality, it's far more appropriate to say that Scandinavians are expressing the moderate competency expected of humans in a vacuum, and the rest of the world just fucking sucks. Take the U.S. for example: we toyed with fascist (no, that's not a buzzword, yes, it's appropriate here) propaganda in order to keep people going through the Cold War, and our politics simply never recovered from indulging in the creation of an irrational, fear-based propaganda machine designed from the start to make us hate foreigners and domestic citizens who were sufficiently different alike. We have a lot of ideological baggage that has been routinely manipulated by our political system to keep us from giving two shits about empirical truths and more about how American something feels.

Then you look at, say, Sweden, and how they've felt about every power struggle for the past hundred years and it's "who gives a shit? Neutral." I'm sure Scandinavian politics is full of stupidities and fallacies and what not, because Scandinavians are still human and humans are kind of shitty at these things. But Scandinavia doesn't have a propaganda machine with the weight of the Cold War behind it being used to crush science because it's anti-Christian or regulation because it's communist.

For what it's worth, Sweden does have a quite popular anti-immigrant, racist, xenophobic political party, the Sweden Democrats.

[Koumei]

Well, all of Europe currently has an anti-immigrant/anti-foreigner/anti-Muslim thing going. Actually I say Europe, pretty much the whole world does. It's more a matter of how much support they have: in America it's oneboth of the major parties (one more than the other, but still), in Australia it's exactly the same, in France it's the party that just lost their last election (but a certain amount of it is running through the whole thing), in Sweden it's... "a popular party". They have a bunch of those. Do they get more votes than the Pirate Party? How about Kalle Anka?

[DSMatticus]

Even beyond support they have (support for "fuck people who aren't us" will always be nonzero), it's a matter of the rhetoric they have available. Any attempt for goal-oriented discussion in the U.S. can be shut down by convincing people it doesn't feel American to talk about it. And we can do that because America Fuck Yeah is basically how we made it through the Cold War without questioning a path (or hating/ignoring the people who did question that path) that came perilously close to destroying the vast majority of (our) civilization on more than one documented occasion.

We built a culture of U.S. ideological superiority, and in that environment appealing to those (perceived) ideals is just as effective as offering tangible solutions. That's not a uniquely American thing, of course, but I think it'd be fair to say that we're one of the only countries who is this bad about it where you also can't get shot for saying bad things loudly about the people in charge. Usually. I'm not going to go strike up conversations about Reagan with anyone around where I live.

[Korgan0]

Well, all of Europe currently has an anti-immigrant/anti-foreigner/anti-Muslim thing going. Actually I say Europe, pretty much the whole world does. It's more a matter of how much support they have: in America it's oneboth of the major parties (one more than the other, but still), in Australia it's exactly the same, in France it's the party that just lost their last election (but a certain amount of it is running through the whole thing), in Sweden it's... "a popular party". They have a bunch of those. Do they get more votes than the Pirate Party? How about Kalle Anka?

I know pretty much nothing about Swedish politics, but the SD way outpolled the Pirate Party, and I've heard of them despite paying no attention to scandinavian politics, and I can't say the same for similar movements in the other scandinavian countries.

[Username17]

The Sweden Democrats have 19 seats out of 349. The Social Democrats are currently in opposition and have 112. The real issue though is that the Sweden Democrats have no chance of ever accomplishing anything because the government right now is the Swedish right wingers and they refused to allow the Sweden Democrats into their coalition.

If the far right group can't get into coalition with an actual right wing government, they can't ever be more than the five percent crank protest vote they are now.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Why is it that people who snap and go on shooting rampages are usually upper-middle-class white dudes with college degrees and reliable safety nets while poor people who struggle to pay the bills and are under generally under far more stress with far less to loose pretty much never do?

[sabs]

because poor people who struggle to pay the bills are too busy dodging bullets from the various criminal elements that rule their neighborhoods?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Then you look at, say, Sweden, and how they've felt about every power struggle for the past hundred years and it's "who gives a shit? Neutral." I'm sure Scandinavian politics is full of stupidities and fallacies and what not, because Scandinavians are still human and humans are kind of shitty at these things. But Scandinavia doesn't have a propaganda machine with the weight of the Cold War behind it being used to crush science because it's anti-Christian or regulation because it's communist.

That's an interesting yet plausible assertion. Are you telling me that the Scandinavian nations were able to leapfrog the rest of Europe in social development because they weren't involved in wars and the propaganda that supports it?

I can buy that... and yet still some counterexamples come to mind. Such as Finland or Denmark. Or Japan.

[violence in the media]

Why is it that people who snap and go on shooting rampages are usually upper-middle-class white dudes with college degrees and reliable safety nets while poor people who struggle to pay the bills and are under generally under far more stress with far less to loose pretty much never do?

Entitlement? Feeling like they're not getting what they're somehow "owed" or that it's being taken by others?

[/speculation]

[Taishan]

Why is it that people who snap and go on shooting rampages are usually upper-middle-class white dudes with college degrees and reliable safety nets while poor people who struggle to pay the bills and are under generally under far more stress with far less to loose pretty much never do?

Poor people are lazy underachievers in the mass murder category?

[K]

Why is it that people who snap and go on shooting rampages are usually upper-middle-class white dudes with college degrees and reliable safety nets while poor people who struggle to pay the bills and are under generally under far more stress with far less to loose pretty much never do?

Poor people are lazy underachievers in the mass murder category?

The truth is that no one cares what poor people and minorities do. The dominant narrative and myth is that they are already morally corrupt because they are poor and/or minorities, so it's no surprise when they go off the rails and shoot some people. It's not even considered newsworthy.

Now, that's dumb and racist, but that doesn't make it less true. People attribute good morals, intelligence, and other positive values to the wealthy group and the dominant ethnic group.

"Irony" is one of the pillars that reporters considered when determining whether a story is newsworthy, and people find it ironic when people who they expect to be very good (rich whites) act like people they think act very bad (poor minorities). This is why a shootout in a hip hop club will only get a few lines in a local newspaper and a middle-class white guy shooting something up will get national coverage.