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Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

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Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#41

Post by bennysonething »

poweronselftest wrote: post #4
throwawaysea wrote: post #2

The Gulag Archipelago is one of those pieces I wish everyone would read. These days the lessons of socialism and communism are lost on a younger generation that seems blind to what Marxism led to, and how much suffering and death it caused. The ideologies behind these government systems require authoritarianism, from the state and the mob. It requires a single ideology to win with everything else stamped out, and thi…

I read a big chunk of the Gulag Archipelago in Russian last year and it was, to my surprise, one of the most beautiful things I'd ever read. It reads like poetry, especially the beginning. Now I am thinking: maybe he recited and memorized all those passages to himself and used the verse-like structure to aid memorization. In the Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn cites something that has really stuck with me: > Martin La…

The whole woke my movement is this type of thinking all over again. What you are, where you are from, what group you identify with gives your argument weight. Not your actual thoughts. The scary thing is I'm experiencing this being accepted as normal in the work place. To challenge this type of thinking is to become a heretic. Or worse a racist. I keep my views to myself.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#42

Post by darawk »

mushbino wrote: post #39
darawk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment was a littany of attempts at character assassination largely unrelated to the work in question. The idea that Russian gulags were "just a prison" is a ridiculous characterization that no historian would agree with. They were prisons for political prisoners , who were there warehoused there to keep them from speaking out against the regime, and they were put there without due process of law. The idea that…

A relatively small percentage were political prisoners, but when you compare the number of people who have received very lengthy sentences for minor drug possession, in some cases life, how is that any better? Not to mention Jim Crow in the US at the time. We have the largest prison population in the world by a considerable margin. Most of the people in our jails and prisons are there for drug offenses and crimes of…

Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#43

Post by TimTheTinker »

WaxProlix wrote: post #16
throwawaysea wrote: post #2

The Gulag Archipelago is one of those pieces I wish everyone would read. These days the lessons of socialism and communism are lost on a younger generation that seems blind to what Marxism led to, and how much suffering and death it caused. The ideologies behind these government systems require authoritarianism, from the state and the mob. It requires a single ideology to win with everything else stamped out, and thi…

It's an interesting book and (I think) well written, but we should take care not to take it as factual. Gulags were real and very awful places, but Solzhenitsyn wasn't writing a history or a scientifically investigated piece. He was writing material for future novels, and much of the book is fabrication. His wife's autobiography (and other places) confirm what's a fairly widespread view outside of the OECD world. She…

Your comment reads like propaganda, trying to hand-wave away one of the greatest works of journalism in the 20th century. Of course it reads like a novel and not an exposé - he had to memorize a huge portion of it. But it's an accurate indictment nonetheless.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#44

Post by [deleted] »

ljlolel wrote: post #35
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very interesting insight here -- now that I think about it, I see it. But I'm not sure I agree that it is for a good reason. Intuitive understanding of math is better than rote memorization. But that does not mean that rote memorization is bad, only lesser. I'm also not convinced that many people can grasp something intuitively, bypassing rote memorization.

It’s also been noted that basically all great mathematicians are excellent at basic maths (memorized timetables) and can remember many numbers and can calculate in head quickly —— even though technically shouldn’t be necessary for proofs

[deleted]

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#45

Post by mushbino »

darawk wrote: post #42
mushbino wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A relatively small percentage were political prisoners, but when you compare the number of people who have received very lengthy sentences for minor drug possession, in some cases life, how is that any better? Not to mention Jim Crow in the US at the time. We have the largest prison population in the world by a considerable margin. Most of the people in our jails and prisons are there for drug offenses and crimes of…

Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.

The height of the US prison population was in 2008 when about 1,000 in 100,000 U.S. adults were behind bars.

In the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalin purges is was about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents.

From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#46

Post by jeofken »

evv555 wrote: post #17
mushbino wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're commenting as if Capitalism and Imperialism are squeaky clean, which is incredibly far from the truth. Just to give a little more context, Solzhenitsyn was a Fascist who supported the Germans during WWII and openly supported Franco in Spain. He was also a notorious anti-semite even at a time when anti-semitism was punishable by death in Soviet Russia. I've read Gulag Archipelago and he's a pretty good writer,…

[flagged]

Ragarding the Holocaust - if anyone has a reference to someone debunking the common arguments for denying its size I’d appreciate a link. Arguments such as all death camps being in the soviet controlled part of Germany (after the war), the wooden doors in gas chambers idea, that holes for putting gas in gas chambers were made after the war, and that gas and collection of shoes (I remember the mountain of them when visiting) were used for delousing. It’s easy to find claims online that these things point to the event being a communist propaganda fabrication, but surely the well read HN community can help me debunk such claims.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#47

Post by ncmncm »

throwawaysea wrote: post #11
UncleOxidant wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I purchased his book off Amazon a few weeks ago, thinking it wouldn't be long until they started delisting books. Now all this nonsense with Dr. Seuss. Except it was the copyright holder of the Dr. Seuss books that decided to withdraw these books. Not the government or sellers like Amazon. It's more of an argument for reducing the length of copyright in the US rather than some sort of ominous supression of free spe…

Personally I don't think the fact that it was a copyright holder makes this outcome much better. These publishers are also subject to the mob pressure that comes from the long march through the institutions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins... ). A few activist employees can force internal decision making, because everyone else might be afraid to speak against due to the threat of cancel…

There is no such thing as an antifa cell. An antifa cell would imply an antifa organization.

But antifa is an activity, not an organization. Anyone can do antifa simply by opposing local fascist activity. It may be as simple as covering up fascist graffiti, or punching Richard Spencer. Some people do it with their friends, others alone. Every little bit helps, but more helps more. Try not to endanger yourself or non-fascists.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#48

Post by WaxProlix »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #43
WaxProlix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting book and (I think) well written, but we should take care not to take it as factual. Gulags were real and very awful places, but Solzhenitsyn wasn't writing a history or a scientifically investigated piece. He was writing material for future novels, and much of the book is fabrication. His wife's autobiography (and other places) confirm what's a fairly widespread view outside of the OECD world. She…

Your comment reads like propaganda, trying to hand-wave away one of the greatest works of journalism in the 20th century. Of course it reads like a novel and not an exposé - he had to memorize a huge portion of it. But it's an accurate indictment nonetheless.

I think that you seeing this work of fiction as one of the greatest works of journalism of the 20th century is exactly why I posted. I agree that the gulag system sucks? So don't think I'm in favor of the USSR or something, because I'm not. But the book's content isn't real, it's largely fabrication, and you can say something like "I think he speaks to the truth of the situation despite not accurately representing facts and statistics" if you want to. But I don't think it's right to act like The Gulag Archipelago is anything but a novel, albeit one that maybe expounds truths beyond its content, especially in an arena like this which claims to value factuality.

I also think you missed the part where the author acknowledges that it's a work of fiction and informed by real experiences but not meant to relate to reality per se. So while I value your input (of course!) I can't help but wonder if a re-read of previous comments might be in order.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#49

Post by lsb »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #25
lsb wrote: post #3

In ancient Greece papyrus was roughly worth its weight in silver. For a long time writing was so onerous that people just didn't do it. The shared civilization behind ancient Greece and ancient Northern India and ancient Britain had a system of oral-formulaic poetry, wherein descriptions are full of stock phrases like "wine-dark sea" or "rosy-fingered Dawn", like in today's "My name is X and I'm here to say" in more…

I’ve heard speculation that such poetic formulas act as a sort of data integrity system. It’s a form of error correction because what comes next in the poem has to fit certain rules. It’s not just useful for memorization, it actively helps structure the information so it gets passed with fewer errors.

The data integrity operates on the level of story line and major themes. Formulae are at the word and phrase level. If the written is subordinate to the orally extemporaneous, like jazz, maybe you memorize a few star solos, but memorization isn't how you play a solo as a jazz musician. It's like asking "Did Hansel and Gretel see Rapunzel along the way?", and the answer depends on whether a book or a culture creates the stories their use.

If you have no writing, all of your community's texts are fan fiction with limit on headcanon. People brought tape recorders to Bosnia in the 1930s, to try to see how oral folk music worked, and to see how much it changed day to day and year to year, and they found that they couldn't glue the same story together from day to day.

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