Otto Kretschmer

The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s was a result of a perfect combination of several factors, namely government overspending in the US (related to the Vietnam War and the Great Society) without raising taxes, decoupling of the US dollar from gold and the 1973 oil crisis. Without these the post war Keynesian consensus could have lasted decades longer, possibly until today, blunting ideological radicalism.

US situation is the outcome of decades of both rising inequality and propaganda (from the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and other similar NGOs).

Is the situation so bad that folks are seriously discussing a civil war in the US?

Nikolai Vavilov (a world class botanist and agronomist) would not be executed for sure.

A curious fact - dialecical materialism had its dark sides too, the most famous one being Lysenkoism which banned genetics, even rejecting chromosomes as "bourgeois constructs". Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics only narrowly avoided getting banned under Stalin because Igor Kurchatov told Beria that if the USSR bans them, it may forget about building the atomic bomb. Stalin told Beria "leave them (i.e. the physicists) alone, we can shot them later".

Ok, you won. I cannot pronoune that weird sound.

Easy. Not a challenge at all.

Yes, except "t" and "s" aren't separate consonants but a single one, like ts in English "cats" pronounced very fast as a single sound.

She should try this:

The dominant form of Marxism in early 1900s was Orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky, this tendency became discredited in 1914 when socialist parties subscribing to it supported the entry of their countries into ww1, this included the Mensheviks whom Lenin later portrayed as traitors to the working class. It supported parliamentary democracy and believed that societies must first go through capitalism in order to be ready for socialism, among other things.

This is better:

My native language is Polish, I might sometimes make mistakes in English - which I did here by writing "shitton" instead of "shit ton".

My apologies then.

Telling.

There are really two separate parts of Marxism: The economic part which is the analysis of capitalism in Das Kapital, based on a shitton of empirial data The philosophical part. Marx took Hegel's dialectics (which Hegel had invented mostly on the basis of Plato and Kant) and replaced God and the Spirit with materialism and class struggle.

Is A brief history of time a good pop sci book in your opinion? It was written in 1988 if I recall correctly, understanding of some things in physics might have changed since then.

So what's your opinion about Hawking's book mentioned by me?

The subject matter seems quite different though.

Is A brief history of time by Stephen Hawking still a good book? It's from late 1980s, I bought a Polish version in 2018 but never read it, I plan to read it after finishing three books on Soviet history.

I don't doubt that, I was fascinated by Marxism for about six months but I drifted away and stuck on being a generic, non sectarian leftist.

IMHO the most successful politics is pragmatic and done with ideology as a broad guiding principle and not absolute truth.

But with Marxism the number of similarities with Christianiy is just astonishing - in Marxism Leninism and Marxism Leninism Maoism there was a thing called "criticism and self criticism sessions" during which people would confess their own doctrinal errors in public, so basically a religious confession.

I mostly wanted my new username to align with one from another forum where I am currently active (it is: "Emperor Taizong of Tang") but it seems that the admin of SFN is very rarely online and moderators cannot change someone's surname.

Do I really need to explain this? In 2021 I was registering on an alt history forum (as a history fan) and couldn't figure out what surname to choose, I choose this one since I had read about him on a list of top scoring submarine aces of all time. I actually wanted to change it a few days ago and wrote to @swansont about that but he was unable to change it (only an admin can change username)

This is not 100% limited to Marxism IMHO - Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" was an expression of similar mentality (and one of the greatest pieces of ideological hubris in history on top of that)