Wed. Open Thread: Armies, 4chan, and the USSR

Holy [expletive,] my baby brother just joined the military. I don’t have any other details yet, but I wasn’t expecting this. I hope he does admirably and doesn’t get killed.

In blog news, I’ve added a section where I can list books/articles/documentaries etc the readers recommend. Note that I haven’t had a chance to read/watch them all myself.

In hilarious news that you probably already heard about, 4chan claims to have trolled the CIA:

In a story that is getting more surreal by the minute, a post on 4Chan now claims that the infamous “golden showers” scene in the unverified 35-page dossier, allegedly compiled by a British intelligence officer, was a hoax and fabricated by a member of the chatboard as “fanfiction”, then sent to Rick Wilson, who proceeded to send it to the CIA, which then put it in their official classified intelligence report on the election.

If true, this is not just amusing–and a show of how easily our “intelligence” agencies can be duped–it also shows the development of informal citizen-based organizations actually running [what is the correct word? disinformation campaigns?] against their own government’s organs.

Or, you know, some guy on 4 chan is lying.

Comments of the Week are going to BaruchK, who knows much more than I do about the rise of communism:

I don’t think so. Marxism took off towards the end of the Victorian era, when starvation, misery and unemployment were at historic lows.

Further, Marxism/socialism were not spontaneous phenomena. Rather, they were purposely developed, sponsored, propagated and lobbied for by small, elite groups, funded by the super-rich (Carnegie, JP Morgan, etc.) working over decades.

Sutton talks about how socialism allows the transformation of target societies into captive markets. Russia and China were not a threat to the Western elites as long as they were socialist. It also allows the one-way transformation of wealth into power. In the absence of socialism, wealth can come and go. Today’s industrial titan can have his wealth destroyed through crashes, innovation, etc. However, by using his wealth to coopt a government, he can create regulations which will stifle competitors (eg Sarbanes-Oxley,) have the government bail him out during crashes (recent examples abound,) ideally even create fiat currency (effectively sucking up wealth from the rest of the economy.)

Also:

The interesting thing about the USSR was its utter economic reliance on aid from the US and Europe throughout its entire existence. …

It is interesting to ponder why the USSR collapsed when it did. I suspect that it just got so sclerotic that it was not even able to manage its own assets and the resources it got from the West, both as payment for oil and as aid. By the end, nobody knew where anything was, how much of it there was, or how to get anything done. Terror was out, the population was no longer the fanatic communists or terrified peasants and workers of the earlier days, but rather demoralized petit-bourgeoisie (private cars and motorcycles, shitty as they were, had become attainable for normal people in the 60s, for instance.) The nervous system of the USSR, which had more or less worked for decades, had just broken down and no longer sent more or less accurate signals to and from its organs.

And With the Thoughts You’d be Thinkin’ for this communist tale (see sidebar for relevant links):

Here’s a fun(?) bit of history, the Soviet central planning in Central Asia didn’t just cause massive diversions of water to plant cotton causing the drying up of the Aral sea it caused the Uzbek communist party to have thousands of members and all but one of its members purged in the 1980s, Brezhnev’s son-in-law was also implicated. Basically the Uzbekistan communist party inflated its cotton production figures stealling billions (USDs) and was only caught by the use of spy satelites.

So what have you guys been up to this week?