From the book "Stalin" the seminal work of Historian Domenico Losurdo
That "We come across railway lines that aren't on the maps" really reads like someone who has just realized that he will die there. Just pure horror. Sucks to be him I guess!
Hitler having a Skinner moment:
"Could I be wrong and making a gigantic mistake?"
"No, it's reality that's wrong"
With respect to Russia, it is incontestable that Stalin raised the standard of living. The Russian people don't go hungry.
Wow I can't believe Hitler was a red fash tankie
Semi-related but her husband is gonna be running for the president of Poland and I already hate it. He's gonna do about as well as the Democratic party in the US.
Nice quote, I also loved that audio of Hitler being astonished by the number of tanks produced by the Soviet Union
Lol do you have a link to that one? I never tire of Hitler getting dunked on by the Soviets
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=oET1WaG5sFk
It's basically the only (secret) recording of Hitler with a normal voice, and he talks about how they underestimated the Soviets lol
weird how if you set up a plan to do a thing, arrange the materials ahead of time for this thing, and get dedicated motivated people on board looking forward to a better future
the thing just gets accomplished. people feel good when they make a lasting mark on the world
truly baffling, inscrutable alien stuff huh
didn't even have to have twenty middlemen siphoning away resources and cut-throat competition and risk of starvation and homelessness to motivate people
Yes I've posted this three times in three years and I'll post it again next year too!
"they've discovered how to not put strategically vital infrastructure on a map!!!"
Haha I read it as "they are building railroads so fast that the mapmakers can't keep up"
i just find the idea that hitler having these subliminal almost-breakthrus about his own vision of the world being confounded at something like, [reading it again] a war enemy not showing its hand when it knows its people are desperate and that the enemy can have ears anywhere, maybe that rail line doesn't need to be known about. Maybe it's not reasonable to assume your newest map reflects a full picture of reality. Almost conceding maybe his idea of the value of these people is based on bad assumptions, but between the insane coctail of drugs he was on, and being powered by purely irrational things, he never got all the way there long enough for it to manifest as anything but brief confusion in private.
it's the allegory of the cave but it's an idiot doing genocide and fighting a two front war and just assuming that reality is wholly reflected by the information brought to him and the worldview within his mind.
there's probably an element of the "mapmakers can't keep up" too, because we know how intense soviet industrial action was at this time, but I am seeing a man who assumes he is culling a herd of swine, because he did think like that, and being challenged but not having his ontological priors at all broken by the challenge lol
