Do you think the end of the Cold War increased narcissism?

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I use history as a pseudo-hindsight to project into the future

combine this with noticing things like "spectres of rome" within american culture, and the knowledge that others probably saw this too I thought to myself a collapse would come but it wouldn't be total because europe wouldn't allow it - this was about the 2002-3 area too, chris hedges noticed this too but he was using contemporary events across the world with lots of personal experience

and what do we have now?

I also thought that people would invariably try to look at every little thing on the internet for various reasons, nobody likes to be kept in the dark and everyone thinks that they'd never be in the wrong...

everyone forgets these self critical details in the height of triumph typically, I personally am prone to "victory rushes" "the thrill of victory" so I know what it is through experience

"this culture is strong and just" combined with whatever mental aspect that gives people pride because a group of sports players from their geographical region won... leads to a very narcissistic community, because they feed off eachother, overwhelming the inhibitory mechanisms in both society and individual


the ring of gyges, numenor, plato's story of atlantis in the critias, the ring of power, and carl jung's stuff on death... all play into this idea, note that some of those are just tolkien copying plato's stuff in a different manner

but there's a good reason people read into the shire being country england and so on, political allegory was hidden to a degree, lord of the flies for instance could easily be read as just another robinson crusoe gone mad

I certainly won't. I have many other things to do. The fact that he has a Nobel prize does not come into it.

Remember: You have to convince me. I shouldn't have to lift a finger to be convinced. It's your job.


I agree. But what are his arguments? What does he say? Surely you can write five sentences on it.



You didn't. You just mentioned that someone (apparently a brilliant economist) disagrees with me. I don't know why yet.


You misunderstood me. I didn't ask for even more references. This is an Internet debate, not a scientific journal article. We want arguments.

And I understand your point about Able Archer. It was more of a recommendation for the future.


That is not a very good attitude in social interactions.

For the record, I did not say anything that was blatantly untrue. My interpretation of the facts only varies from yours. Mine doesn't have, say, a renown anthropologist, sociologist or other random social scientist (i.e., that is not a historian of international relationships) to back it, of course, but on such subjects, there is no one accepted version, no single truth to be unwrapped, only differing, more or less popular intepretations. Maybe I am wrong, but your saying that I "obvious know nothing" about the topic or referring to my posts "BS" is unjustified and offensive.

Last edited by enrico_dandolo on 22 Oct 2012, 7:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.

"I am rarely wrong" is a logical/verbal/intellectual version of physical/bodily "threat display"

it means "I'm trying to scare you into not posting things I don't like by saying that you will inevitably look bad"

if it's just a case of being lazy why post in the first place? no, it's probably that you at some level detect the inconsistency in your own arguments

I haven't read anything here particularly yet other than some banterbanterbanter, but that phrase felt like it shot right into my eyeball

"QED: MY AUTISM SUPERPATTERNPOWERS ARE STRONGER THAN URS"

let's not forget that obama and tiger woods get prizes and they play golf and make speeches so let's not get too ahead of ourselves on official dogma and how important it is

if one wants to argue the points then one should argue the points, not use vague fallacy of authority stuff

keep to the conceptual, leave the authoritative out

LIES

Narcissism may not be the correct term. But it did increase national chauvinism and paved the way for the United States of America to be able to run around the world bullying... Uh I mean "saving" and "bringing democracy" to various countries in this world.

I partially agree, 4 out of 5 germans killed were at the hands of the soviets, the battles that broke the Germans was largely fought and won by the soviets, from bagration, kursk stalingrad, moscow, berlin, and leningrad. But that doesn't make up for the fact that Stalin and his lunacy made almost as many absurd strategic blunders as hitler, they are both equal in their arrogance. Stalin trusted no one except for Hitler, of course it was a one way relationship but to then invade Finland, if he had not wiped out so much of the red army core purges, if he had not been so greedy following acquisition of poland, shooting deserters mercilessly at barbarossa, and had he not allowed eventual withdrawals from barbarossa, had he not killed off 3.3 million ukranians, the blunders are endless.

The siege of leningrad lost stalin 1.2 million men, so powerful was the Nazi march that Stalin was even prepping to catch a train out and leave town, and the Nazi's came within 40 miles of the subway system. This was entirely stalin's fault. His own spies even gave him the day of the invasion, and out of his trust for hitler, he doubted them listing Winston Churchill the source of these lies meant to draw russia into the war. 40% of the soviet bomber force was destroyed on the ground, they were not prepared for the assault, and so he bares the full majority of responsibility to the loses of the soviets. Full. Even if the Germans did present a huge challenge, he let Germany through the door with that stupid soviet-nazi pact, and playing with time by letting the capitalists bleed themselves out instead of preparing for war, surring up the lines, and taking the fight to the Nazi's.

We both agree on the German War machines ability to give their opponents a brutal beating, with the only aid of the Allies being America's manufacturing ability and soviet blood. Americans produced twice as much air weaponry as the rest of the world combined, we were unmatched in our manufacturing prowess, and this is the same country who entered WWII with the 17th largest army in the world. But even this wasn't enough to put a noticeable dent in the nazi machine, our efforts fall short of soviet achievements.

And as I've said before, we make mistakes, huge blunders that come back and harms us later, but even if free peoples want communism, it is their undemocratic, anti liberal economic ways that causes all of the misery and problems of the world, and there is no instance where that isn't true. The deaths that occurred when we left would have still occurred had we never entered, so it is moral to have attempted to remove that blight of a system from Korea, and then Vietnam. Vietnam was moral.

People seem to forget that the Soviets were allies with the Nazis and the German-Russian invasion of Poland was what started the whole damn war in the first place.

The Soviets were worse than the Nazis anyway. The British Empire wasn't any better either. I would have preferred the US never got involved in the war at all, and just let all sides destroy each other.

You can talk about the US overstating their role in the war or whatever, but the bottom line is that a bunch of other countries started a war, and the US finished it.

The US finished the war in the pacific, but the soviets finished off Hitler. Normandy was a big offensive, but nothing compared to any of the major offensives between the soviets and the nazi's.

They were no better then the Germans, yes, I agree in full, and they used their struggle to justify 40 year occupation/molestation of Eastern Europe. They were rotten scum, and I do not doubt that.

They needed Poland-Ukrain region for food production and a nice place for Germans to settle. Hitler didn't want to take orders for Moscow and half of the Jews of Europe lived between Poland and the USSR, so the invasion of the area, unfortunately, was also extremely ideological. Even the beating that the nazi's took from the cold was due in large part to Hitler's belief in the superiority of aryan genetics to that of the Jew infested USSR, losing hundreds of thousands of genitals, ears, fingers, noses, and eyelids to the frost.

I think we completely agree, but stress different aspects.


What is so horrible in communism? The improved/free education system? Access to land and jobs? Extensive social security?

We may dislike the lack of democracy, but there was no democracy before: French Indochina wasn't a exactly a free society. As a matter of fact, the regime in South Vietnam was at least as undemocratic politically as that of the North. It just so happen that it was anti-communist. The Americans fought against communism, not for democracy.


The Soviet Union wanted to ally with the British and French. They didn't. Actually, Poland didn't want either. The only remaining potential ally was Germany.

Well, *never* wrong seems excessive, and somewhat uncalled for (I believe ruveyn handed it to me on physics in the Pyramids thread)... I am a modest person, and I acknowledge my fallibility, so I will not make so adamant claims...

As I've been repeatedly told in multiple threads by now, and to which there was a thread dedicated quite recently; "The punishment for any ideology should be having to live under it". So those who proclaim the virtues of the Soviet Union are more than welcome to head over to North Korea, because that's more or less Stalinism under a different name.

Complete with famines, gulags, torture, imprisonment without trial or jury, including your whole family for 3 generations, medical experimentation and the whole 9 yards.

BS. Having read all your posts (yawn) you haven't provided a single reference to a scientific work, and yet you criticize *my* judgement... If you had actually paid attention (for instance by reading some of the numerous posts where I refer to peer-reviewed evidence), you would know that I wasn't being arrogant... I really *am* rarely wrong. And trying to psychoanalyse people through an Internet medium ("threat display"... seriously?) is just silly... So you don't need me to end up inevitably looking bad.

Anyone who has even a remote interest in the Cold War and doesn't want to read The Strategy of Conflict... doesn't have a remote interest in the Cold War... I suppose I could launch a tirade with concepts like "Credible Commitment", "First Strike Capability" and "Second Strike Capability", but I am sick and tired of people who assume that I have no idea about what I am talking about. Learn to read.

Oh, and will you please go easy on the ALLCAPS?

Can't you undestand it? Internet forum. References to scientific works are NOT expected. I shall even say that they should be avoided. Make your point, say what you have to say. If you need to use someone else's argument, summarize it, don't just say that the argument exists somewhere and that people should look it up.

This is supposed to be interactive. We poor folk are not here to watch while, lo and behold! you argue your point with panache and rigour. If someone is wrong, say why. If you know what you are talking about, then tell us what you know. At the moment, I have no idea if what you say makes any sense, because you just bully whomever argues against you and throw away references to random works without saying what's in them.

I think the end of the Cold War made a lot of people complacent, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. Capitaliism won, the Washington consensus was worldwide, and trade and prosperity boomed. A lot of people could have what they wanted when they wanted it. Meanwhile, the threat of nuclear war vanished. Sure, we have vague threats of terrorism, but there's no real existential threat to the human race. We have become children.

No on the war we agree. Where I think I sill differ from your position is in the Soviet's industrial capacity as 1.) the key to its winning the war, and 2.) what then allowed it to compete with the US.

I only say this because it won the war by blood and ideology, not by machinery, the NKVD (which would later become the KGB) shot the equivalent of two battalions, soviets in the thousands shot because they were deserting what was really a hopeless scene. Blood, or the loss of it, was no consequence, Stalin easily shot or had shot commanders, geographers, scientists, etc. whose reports did not please him, in the thousands, human life was expandable.

That said, the soviet production capacity was not very good following the war, they were still an undeveloped country.

Military spending would end up gobbling up most of their budget in the coming years, and this was immoral. The US on the other hand had not only the best capacity in the world, their military spending as a % of GDP never came close to that of the Soviets, we could go on living life and did not have to sacrifice any social safety nets. The soviets on the other hand went on with their military spending even as social problem arose, and people starved while the military kept pumping out weapons to help out communist fronts in Asia and sure up its borders. You can say they feel threatened, you can say a number of things, but it was a system (as it was practiced) that was immoral, and its military buildup to defend it was just as immoral.





The culture of suspicion that it created was one I can only imagine in a hollywood movie. They had people who would literally stand at the entryways of government housing buildings and keep track of everyone who came and left, and reported suspicious activities to the secret police. In many places, 1 out of every 6 individuals was spying on each other, from mothers to fathers to aunts to uncles to fiancee's, it was a culture of paranoia, one that distrusted man, and this was as true in East Berlin as it was in Vietnam.

Perhaps the precept that all Evil is constructed by the system naively misplaces the great battle in life... instead of being preoccupied with battling ones nature, one is overwhelmingly preoccupied with battling external forces. The human being is good, it is misinformation and malintentions of the system that leads to racism, sexism, bigotry, and inequality.

You are right about us fighting against Communism, that was FAR more important then fighting for the promotion of Democracy, Communism claimed millions even where we were not present so the imperative to defeat it was of far greater concern then setting up democracy.

It is pointless the education you get in a communist state if the material you have access is to only what the state approves or deems appropriate.




Yes, but he didn't have to trust Hitler the way he did. Stalin trusted no one... EXCEPT for Adolf Hitler. Even when he was given information months out of Germany's ambitions for Eastern Europe and Russia, and even weeks, and days away from the final invasion of barbarossa, that trust was eerily unwaivering. Maybe monsters only understand/trust other monsters.

Well, I recognize your right to post in whatever manner you choose (this is PPR, after all). I only request that you recognize a similar right on my behalf.

... If you can post a sweeping one-liner conclusion like this about 44 years of human history: "There would never have been such a war, because everyone agreed that it was not beneficial to either party."

... Then why can't I reply with a one-liner suggestion that you should read up on the subject?