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> revolution Revolutions almost always result in prolonged mass violence. Most often of the horrific, needless, and soul shattering kind. A sampling of recent

> revolution Revolutions almost always result in prolonged mass violence. Most often of the horrific, needless, and soul shattering kind. A sampling of recent revolutions: the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution, Cambodian civil war/Khmer Rouge takeover, Nazi takeover of Germany, Chinese Communist Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, etc etc. I propose a new heuristic for my fellow HN'ers: if someone pines for revolution, its a very good signal that they are poorly acquainted with history or that they are a sociopath.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Should I do a :D and /s? I obviously don't want more pandemics and bloody revolution --- I am sure I will be the one getting guillotined, for one. The best case --- if it works --- is "non-reformist reform" as the European social democracies were planning. Some Marxists think it was doomed to fail because you can't avoid the antagonisms. I think they were merely prudish about printing money (especially Germans), and if drank more Post-Keynsian kool-aid (and let in more immigrants not as an underclass like in America), we would all be Socialist already.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Immigrants are much more of an underclass in Europe than they are in America.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Immigrants mainly just don't exist in Europe to the same degree. They are culturally more shat on there, but materially better off as they get more safety net, and aren't the backbone of the shitty service industry like here. Letting in immigrants while you are trying to reduce working hours is a good idea because a) moral b) you are trying to show off you have the best society, let people vote with their feat c) you still need to make investments so being able to have total working hours go up while per-capita working hours goes down is good. Especially if there is a tech/productivity lag where you don't get fully automated dank shit for a few years after you make labor scarce Letting in immigrants as beneath-the-table workers while trying to lower working hours means you get apartheid not utopia, so yeah, it's bad. The thing that makes America less bad is at least the elite likes to overwork itself for cultural reasons so the rat race is just as stupid but less unfair than it would otherwise be.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      Well, is it better to be let in and provided with services (what the US does) or kept out and in an impoverished country?
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        I don't know! :) The best-of-both-worlds is what I want. The first decently country to let in immigrants while reducing working hours is going to crush everyone else with a strong, more technologically- and culturally-advanced society. I am excited to see it happen. (incidentally a very vague materialist take on why the soviet union sucked is it began too underdeveloped, and in the rush to do more work they ended up too military-industrial. A lot of people say "not enough consumption" but you ought to connect it being able to let demand "pull" investment rather than centrally "push" investment. More consumer goods or less working hours are somewhat equivalent once you are (post-)industrialized.)
      - Jensson 5y ago
        Germany alone has taken in more refugees than the entirety of USA. USA is not immigration friendly at all for those who really need it. https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/ https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/ Edit: Btw, I think the poster above meant the millions of undocumented immigrants living in USA without full rights.
        whimsicalism 5y ago
        Refugee is not synonymous with immigrant. The US has admitted more than 1.2 million refugees (I believe the number is closer to 3 million), this chart only counts refugees under UNHCR mandate.
        Ericson2314 5y ago
        Yes good thing Merkel did that. But they also are crazy austrians and crazy anti-nuclears. "Syrians good, Greeks bad, let's breed Neo-Nazis with austerity so Syrians bad soon too. Oh and more coal." Is that really net good?!
whimsicalism 5y ago
No comment on the GP, but many of the revolutions you are listing marked the end of feudalism and monarchic rule. I think it is difficult to say now that those were necessarily horrific and needless, without considering the horrors experienced daily under feudal/serf systems. Moreover, the selection of revolutions you have put together seems one-sided. It was revolution that gave people in Britain the vote, it was (at least partially) revolution that ended apartheid in South Africa and white minority rule in much of Africa writ large, etc. etc.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  The black plague eventually broke feudalism, and if Manchin doesn't completely cuck us Covid-19 might eventually break neoliberalism.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    not in eastern europe it didn't :) feudalism was ongoing when the february revolution occurred.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      Yes that was not suspicious material. We'll see if there is a revolution in the freed up land of the next world war's peripheral looser, whether they are more appropriately developed.
- xibalba 5y ago
  > difficult to say now that those were necessarily horrific and needless The Khmer Rouge killed 1.5 to 2 million (or 25%!!!!) of all Cambodians. Pretty tough to argue that the deaths of 25% of any population is anything but needless and horrific, particularly when you learn about Pol Pot's insane and homicidal policies. Imagine if every 4th person you know were dead in the next 5 years because a guy had a plan to... make our lives better by ruining them indefinitely for some distant vision of Utopia. The Nazis are truly astronomical in terms of both death count and evil. They successfully created an actual hell on Earth. Stalin's regime is estimated to have killed 20 MILLION of his own people. I wonder if the murdered would say, "Yeah, but its worth it in the end because no more monarchy!" Mao's derangements are estimated to have resulted in 45 MILLION dead Chinese. That's 45,000,000. Again, I wonder if their surviving loved ones felt better off? Mom was beaten to death for being "a capitalist", but at least we don't have to worry about that darned monarchy anymore! How would you feel if your Mom was beaten to death? How would you feel if your brother or sister were summarily executed based on an accusation? What if you saw your child needlessly starve to death? These aren't just numbers. These are real human lives extinguished for political ends. Etc. Etc. Etc. Your logic is truly deranged. Revolutions are really, really, really bad for everyone, and the vulnerable, weak, and poor are not exempt. Most of them can usually just count on good old fashioned starvation in their near futures as the revolutionaries lurch from one disastrous or insane policy to the next. If they don't starve, there's a good chance the revolution will at some point purify them anyway. So, I'll point you back to my suggested heuristic.
whakim 5y ago
There are plenty of examples of economic revolution that were totally bloodless. For example, over a period of 10 years in the early 1900s, Sweden transformed itself from one of the most explicitly censitarian regimes that history has known (people who owned more property literally had their vote counted more times) into one of the most social-democratic regimes in Europe.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Yugoslavia deserves an honorable mention on your list.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Tito is pretty dope though as these regimes go though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Yugoslavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i... is also neat.

Ericson2314 5y ago

Should I do a :D and /s? I obviously don't want more pandemics and bloody revolution --- I am sure I will be the one getting guillotined, for one. The best case --- if it works --- is "non-reformist reform" as the European social democracies were planning. Some Marxists think it was doomed to fail because you can't avoid the antagonisms. I think they were merely prudish about printing money (especially Germans), and if drank more Post-Keynsian kool-aid (and let in more immigrants not as an underclass like in America), we would all be Socialist already.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Immigrants are much more of an underclass in Europe than they are in America.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Immigrants mainly just don't exist in Europe to the same degree. They are culturally more shat on there, but materially better off as they get more safety net, and aren't the backbone of the shitty service industry like here. Letting in immigrants while you are trying to reduce working hours is a good idea because a) moral b) you are trying to show off you have the best society, let people vote with their feat c) you still need to make investments so being able to have total working hours go up while per-capita working hours goes down is good. Especially if there is a tech/productivity lag where you don't get fully automated dank shit for a few years after you make labor scarce Letting in immigrants as beneath-the-table workers while trying to lower working hours means you get apartheid not utopia, so yeah, it's bad. The thing that makes America less bad is at least the elite likes to overwork itself for cultural reasons so the rat race is just as stupid but less unfair than it would otherwise be.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Well, is it better to be let in and provided with services (what the US does) or kept out and in an impoverished country?
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      I don't know! :) The best-of-both-worlds is what I want. The first decently country to let in immigrants while reducing working hours is going to crush everyone else with a strong, more technologically- and culturally-advanced society. I am excited to see it happen. (incidentally a very vague materialist take on why the soviet union sucked is it began too underdeveloped, and in the rush to do more work they ended up too military-industrial. A lot of people say "not enough consumption" but you ought to connect it being able to let demand "pull" investment rather than centrally "push" investment. More consumer goods or less working hours are somewhat equivalent once you are (post-)industrialized.)
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Germany alone has taken in more refugees than the entirety of USA. USA is not immigration friendly at all for those who really need it. https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/ https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/ Edit: Btw, I think the poster above meant the millions of undocumented immigrants living in USA without full rights.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        Refugee is not synonymous with immigrant. The US has admitted more than 1.2 million refugees (I believe the number is closer to 3 million), this chart only counts refugees under UNHCR mandate.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        Yes good thing Merkel did that. But they also are crazy austrians and crazy anti-nuclears. "Syrians good, Greeks bad, let's breed Neo-Nazis with austerity so Syrians bad soon too. Oh and more coal." Is that really net good?!

whimsicalism 5y ago

No comment on the GP, but many of the revolutions you are listing marked the end of feudalism and monarchic rule. I think it is difficult to say now that those were necessarily horrific and needless, without considering the horrors experienced daily under feudal/serf systems. Moreover, the selection of revolutions you have put together seems one-sided. It was revolution that gave people in Britain the vote, it was (at least partially) revolution that ended apartheid in South Africa and white minority rule in much of Africa writ large, etc. etc.

Ericson2314 5y ago
The black plague eventually broke feudalism, and if Manchin doesn't completely cuck us Covid-19 might eventually break neoliberalism.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  not in eastern europe it didn't :) feudalism was ongoing when the february revolution occurred.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Yes that was not suspicious material. We'll see if there is a revolution in the freed up land of the next world war's peripheral looser, whether they are more appropriately developed.
xibalba 5y ago
> difficult to say now that those were necessarily horrific and needless The Khmer Rouge killed 1.5 to 2 million (or 25%!!!!) of all Cambodians. Pretty tough to argue that the deaths of 25% of any population is anything but needless and horrific, particularly when you learn about Pol Pot's insane and homicidal policies. Imagine if every 4th person you know were dead in the next 5 years because a guy had a plan to... make our lives better by ruining them indefinitely for some distant vision of Utopia. The Nazis are truly astronomical in terms of both death count and evil. They successfully created an actual hell on Earth. Stalin's regime is estimated to have killed 20 MILLION of his own people. I wonder if the murdered would say, "Yeah, but its worth it in the end because no more monarchy!" Mao's derangements are estimated to have resulted in 45 MILLION dead Chinese. That's 45,000,000. Again, I wonder if their surviving loved ones felt better off? Mom was beaten to death for being "a capitalist", but at least we don't have to worry about that darned monarchy anymore! How would you feel if your Mom was beaten to death? How would you feel if your brother or sister were summarily executed based on an accusation? What if you saw your child needlessly starve to death? These aren't just numbers. These are real human lives extinguished for political ends. Etc. Etc. Etc. Your logic is truly deranged. Revolutions are really, really, really bad for everyone, and the vulnerable, weak, and poor are not exempt. Most of them can usually just count on good old fashioned starvation in their near futures as the revolutionaries lurch from one disastrous or insane policy to the next. If they don't starve, there's a good chance the revolution will at some point purify them anyway. So, I'll point you back to my suggested heuristic.

whakim 5y ago

There are plenty of examples of economic revolution that were totally bloodless. For example, over a period of 10 years in the early 1900s, Sweden transformed itself from one of the most explicitly censitarian regimes that history has known (people who owned more property literally had their vote counted more times) into one of the most social-democratic regimes in Europe.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Yugoslavia deserves an honorable mention on your list.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Tito is pretty dope though as these regimes go though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Yugoslavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i... is also neat.