#JulianLapostat

[revolutionaryjackelving]

THANK YOU FOR THE DAYS: Steven Attewell, In Memoriam.

My tribute to @racefortheironthrone, aka Steven Attewell. Thank you for the days.

[warsofasoiaf]

What are your thoughts on J. Arch Getty?

I know @julianlapostat likes him, but I have problems with him. Not as much as Sheila Fitzpatrick, whose arguments can become downright disgusting, but I still have problems with him.

For context, J. Arch Getty arose to challenge the prevailing totalitarian idea of the Soviet Union, and in Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938, he argues that the Soviet Union's decentralized nature, weak institutions, and bureaucratic incompetence prevent it from being seen as a totalitarian. In a way, Getty's research was useful in correcting earlier histories of the Soviet Union which took pains to paint the Soviet Union under Stalin as a ruthless dictatorship bent on the extermination of the West, such as with Robert Conquest. So in that sense, the revisionist school of Soviet history was necessary.

However, I think he focuses overmuch on the ideas of the state using hard power to enforce total compliance of the citizen's lives and the limitations of Stalin's power to refute the theory without examining it - in essence, his overriding commitment to disproving the totalitarian thesis leads him to ignore inconvenient history or split hairs. He neglects the role of ideology in totalitarianism because it works against his thesis, ignoring that in many of the primary sources, ideology was used as a justification for action, similar in ways to Imperial Japan's practice of gekokujō.

For example, Getty famously argues using a document that Stalin articulated that quotas were "not to be exceeded," and that the decentralized nature of the Soviet Union widened the scope. He uses this as proof that Stalin's purges were not simply driven from above and thus could not be considered totalitarian. However, in many cases, Stalin approved of the larger executions and failed to punish those who disobeyed him, which stressed his power as a dictator over organized and predictable systems of law, a hallmark of totalitarianism. He also minimizes that Stalin *did* use his purges to systematically remove potential rival groups, so the Great Purge was, in some ways, driven from the top. It is entirely possible for it to be both, but Getty refuses to consider this, because it goes against his core thesis.

Similarly, much of the Soviet Union's bureaucratic incompetence was due to monopolization of state power within a single party, negative selection to promote loyalists over potential rivals, habitual misreporting of data, and corruption. In many ways, political functionaries were given their own private fiefdoms to manage, which Getty argues is not totalitarian. Yet all of these were elements that were also present to a large degree in Nazi Germany, a system that Getty agrees was totalitarian. There's a lack of consistency in Getty's methodology that leads me to think that he's attempting to work backward from his thesis to find data to prove it, rather than evaluating the totality of the data.

Getty (when he isn't engaging in both-siderism in regards to the Ukrainian famines by blaming Ukrainian farmers for not turning over their grain and livestock and presenting themselves to Soviet authorities for summary execution) also argues that Stalin's actions in Ukraine were not intentional, rather motivated by a sincere belief that the famines were caused by kulak sabotage. However, many of Stalin's actions that caused the famine were caused by dekulakization, including the disastrous collectivization of agriculture, and relief efforts were abortive or limited because he feared that the kulaks would survive, so can we really say there's no intentionality?

Similarly, his work on post-Stalin Soviet history is rather weak. He argues that Khrushchev helped fight Stalinist terror but glosses over Khrushchev's own use of medical science to repress dissent because it supports the totalitarian argument. Khrushchev was less repressive and brutal than Stalin, but he still sent the tanks into Hungary in 1956, and tried his best to consolidate power under himself and his own loyal class via closing ministries and establishing the sovnarkhoz, replicating Lenin's and Stalin's actions of purges and appointments to create a loyal class of people who owed him their livelihoods and thus could reliably be used for popular support.

I have other problems, such as his use of Soviet figures despite the institutionally widespread doctoring of figures and poor recordkeeping in rural areas. In fairness, there's no other real source documents to use, but still, more skepticism would serve him better.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[julianlapostat]

A Tvtropes Confession.

I used to be JulianLapostat on tvtropes. This is a confession about my time there:

[thisismenow3]

Some people get so caught up in taking down a “bad guy” they don’t realize what they’re actually doing in a broader sense. Anglo-Saxon slaving and the trans continental slavery committed by the Vikingers can both be bad. Calling out one doesn’t exonerate the other. This inability for nuance kind of mirrors people who recognize the neo-colonialism/empire shit of many US foreign policy acts but then go on to say “therefore Russia in whatever form is the protagonist and good guy, case closed.” You can’t use whataboutism to get out of an accusation of whataboutism as well. “Well actually I was saying what about these two factors of the other guys who are the attacked in the vikinger pillaging…” bru, @julianlapostat just take a beat and think on what has been said to you

So The Last Kingdom is a good representation of historical vikings?

It’s more that, as a show from the perspective of the Anglo-Saxons trying to fight off Vikinger conquest, it’s something of an opposing view to “Vikingers are awesome badasses” media (which often take an odd angle on the topic of colonization - see Brett Devereaux’s essay on AC Valhalla.) So it balances things out a bit.

[revolutionaryjackelving]

SUBSTACK POST: TVDOPES

One of my more personal posts. Not autobiographical but basically an origin story for "Revolutionary_Jack" and "Jack Elving" and from whence he came. This post is driven by self-examination and self-criticism. I was an active poster on tvtropes for years under multiple identities, where I evaded bans. I was always hoping to get back in, but now I realize I'd rather tell the story instead. This post has me admitting to stuff I'd otherwise not admit but I feel it's important that I get this out there. While I do nothing criminal or morally disgraceful, ethically it's more than a little sketchy. So here it is.

[warsofasoiaf]

All this talk of battles, and yet there's one form of rhetorical warfare no one's asked you about. What do you consider the greatest rap diss record of all time?

All time? The Lokasenna. Loki was brutal.

But if we are sticking to rap battles, I’ve got to go with Biggie’s “Kick in the Door.” It was a truly intense sound. 

EDIT: @julianlapostat also mentioned Nas with “Ether” and that is a dynamite track.

Thanks for the question, TBH.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[racefortheironthrone]

Oh for crying out loud, I’m allowed to have a beef with modernism without being called out for being sub rosa reactionary - if nothing else, I’m Jewish so I don’t think my problems with Joyce are the Jewish themes in Ulysses.

As for modernism in general, I think  John Carey’s The Intellectuals And the Masses speaks to the essential reactionary nature of modernist authors from across the English canon. These people didn’t think working-class people should enjoy poetry and literature, @julianlapostat​! They said so in black and white. That’s pretty damning in my eyes. 

There's an issue of X-Men where James Joyce is debated by a couple of supervillains. Stonewall defends his "ultimate precision of language," while Pyro declares, "It's gibberish, mate!" Who's right?

I’ve certainly been exposed to English professors who’ve guided me through Joyce in a very revelatory way, but my objection to his modernist advant-garde style is that if most readers can’t have that revelation without an expert guide, you’ve actually failed as a creator in the act of communicating your ideas to the public.

But in general, I’m biased against modernist writers because of their class prejudice.

[racefortheironthrone]

No, I’m sorry, it’s the definition of whataboutism - people are calling out the Vikings for having committed acts that are immoral, and you’re saying whatabout this other group they did bad things so the aggressor and the victim are actually morally indistinguishable. It’s the same kind of shitty rhetorical move that white supremacist defenders of European chattel slavery make when they bring up Arab slavers in East Africa. 

There may well have been slave markets in London, but they weren’t the biggest in the damn world, @julianlapostat. They weren’t part of an empire that stretched from Dublin to Constantinople. 

Being pagan is not a defense for slaving. It’s not a defense to colonization. It’s not a defense to murder and robbery. You need to seriously re-examine why you’re trying to die on this hill, because “sticking it to the Christians” is not an adequate rationale. 

So The Last Kingdom is a good representation of historical vikings?

It’s more that, as a show from the perspective of the Anglo-Saxons trying to fight off Vikinger conquest, it’s something of an opposing view to “Vikingers are awesome badasses” media (which often take an odd angle on the topic of colonization - see Brett Devereaux’s essay on AC Valhalla.) So it balances things out a bit.