Instead of the Everyday wrote:Uh, I know that. If you didn't notice, I also alluded to Idi Amin in Uganda in the same sentence, and that was the seventies.
And also, while we're on the topic, Russia stopped being Stalinist when Stalin died in the '50s. His eventual successor, Krushchev (some came before, but they are blips on the radar) reversed MANY of Stalin's programs and policies.
So, what now?
I also fail to recognize how some of the recent posts (that are on topic) represent "the nuts". As far as I'm concerned, Gildy, Rincewind, myself, and others have replied with better content and quality than you, my friend.
Really. Seriously. The nuts. You don't know what that refers to? Which ever bozo it was who started throwing in conspiracy theorist drivel, that's who the nuts are. Because they are insane. Doesn't mean they can't put forward eloquent arguments or anything. I was not labelling Rincewind or Gildermershia as such nuts because they didn't make nutty contributions. I don't think you did either actually. There's a difference between a crazy post and a shit post, which is what you can argue mine was.
And OK, if you really want to argue semantics, yes THE SOVIET UNION (Russia only being one part of that, since we're debating semantics) stopped adhering to the cult of personality built up around Stalin after Kruschev came to power and his famous speech to the CPSU Party Conference, so I was incorrect in my assertion that Russia was a Stalinist until the Soviet Union finally fell. It was me using it as a catch-all term because I didn't really want to use either socialism or communism for varying reason. I should have fallen back to the classic Marxist-Leninism.
I should also point out that I've gone back and read your original post. I don't even know why I got so enraged, I can't see anything particularly wrong with it. So actually when I said my post was arguably shit, I think it's fair to say it's without any doubt shit in that light. Hmmmm. Wonder what crawled up my arsehole that day.
As for point about what I could contribute to the thread, I do think I added something waaaay back in the last post of Page 2. The problem is that I don't have much to say on the 11/9 thing really. It was massively shocking, hugely tragic and very sad. It further reinforced my loathing of religion. But as far as the topic goes, which was originally "What do you think we should do?" I really don't care. I mean I just think there's much bigger things to be concerned with. Like the the things that caused the 11/9 attacks to occur in the first place. Like the rather shambolic and clumsily dealt with aftermath. I can talk about those. I just can't talk about "should people still be mourning about it", because that's an entirely personal decision. I personally didn't mourn when that attack happened, nor the Bali bombing, the London bombings or any other terror attacks, I felt shocked and surprised, tried to empathised with others pain but I certainly didn't mourn. But I'd not deny that to other people if they felt they needed to still mourn. I'd only ask them not to allow their grief to get caught up in cheap jingoism.