On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

[flagged]

"General Pfühl attributes every loss to the failure to carry out his orders to the letter, and since such precision is never possible in battle, he can always argue that, just as he predicted". I think this is a great insight that can benefit both the left and the right wings. From the left we've heard many times how actual communism was never achieved and each failure (such as Mao China or Soviet Russia) proved the point that the theory WOULD work if done differently. But another implementation brought different contingencies again ending in casualties, but the theory WOULD work etc. etc. Sadly, we hear a lot of the same about free market, Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics argued that neo-liberal economics tend to "naturalize" the theory using the scientific discourse, so if, for example, the banks fail it's because there's still too much government control, if liberated from the welfare state mentality the supply and demand and the competitive market would come to a balance. Milton Friedman, probably one of the gurus of the free market based a lot on mathematical formulas, but it's an open question if physics or mathematics can be applied to criticize social structures and predict development?

Please resist the temptation of the hyperbolic title (which we've changed above). Comments on the shallowest thing in an article only lead to shallow discussion.

The article contains many subtleties and interesting observations. Comments on those, or ones of your own, will make for a much better thread.

> Russians do get a bit too much press for their novels

Russians get a bit too much press for most everything, from nukes to unstoppable social progress to foreign election meddling.

Curiously, but possibly related, not for https://www.google.com/search?q=largest+country+on+earth