Eh, I disagree. The kids didn’t deserve it but it was necessary as they would have served the counterrevolution for the rest of their life’s and would have been a rallying call by the reactionaries
There are still Stuart and Bonapartist pretenders, the presence or absence of heirs isn’t what determines if you have an armed Royalist insurrection against you, as evidenced by the fact the civil war continued long past the murder of the royal family.
Having royal family members can provide some legitimacy to the insurrections. They didn’t know what was going to happen, only that the kids being gone may prevent an issue in the future and I would have agreed with them. The Bolsheviks were right on this instance
That arguments even worse, it takes it from “killing the kids solves a current problem” to “killing the kids may solve possible future problems”, and if that’s the standard, then it’s never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
Say what you will about the CPC but at least they correctly realized that Pu-Yi didn’t need to eat a bullet to head off any issues, and that was even after he collaborated with the Japanese.
Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country. I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality. What happened was during a revolution and they were the children and heirs to the position of the sunpreme enemy
Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country.
Right it was some great great cousin of the Tsar that opened the Soviet Union up to the west leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and not some hereditary nobody.
I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality.
I mean, they fail even a basic “ends justify the means” test given that Russia is currently a hyper-capitalistic dystopia so yeah, I don’t think my critique of the path they set down is in fact ill-posed.
Capital, in all it’s algorithimic and anti-humanistic glory is the supreme enemy, not some guy wearing a funny hat in a bunch of medals . The french killed their funny hat guy and 10 years later they had an Italian in an even funnier hat running things, so this notion that we can just kill our way into socialism by executing certain lineages seems a bit daft.
Saying that I am promoting “killing our way to socialism” is patently dishonest. I am stating that the Bolsheviks took out an easy path to anti-revolutionary activity and stopped the flower of evil from flowering. I don’t wish to have a conversation if you are going to misrepresent what I said by claiming that I want to “kill our way to socialism”
That arguments even worse, it takes it from “killing the kids solves a current problem” to “killing the kids may solve possible future problems”, and if that’s the standard, then it’s never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
That argument is completely absurd. Just because you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues doesn’t mean it’s likely.
I don’t want to pull the “I’m a statistics professor card”, but I’m literally a statistics professor so unless I see an integral over a sample space in the denominator I don’t want to hear about likelihood, and especially not when someone’s half-baked narrative of possible possibilities gets treated as meaningfully bearing on that likelihood.
Like are we just throwing that word around or is their some objective method that apparently everyone else knows about for now to compute these probabilities and arrive at these conclusions.
There’s no way to objectively calculate the worth of an innocent person’s life anyway, so you can’t really put it into a formal equation. Sometimes you just have to make decisions based on incomplete information, I don’t see what the problem is. It’s not like I want to kill kids, but if I evaluated that there’s a high enough chance that it could save a high enough number of lives, I’d pull the lever on that trolley problem 100%. What am I, a Kantian?
If seems to me that if we’re willing to acknowledge that our subjective estimation of probabilities aren’t necessarily any good at predicting actual outcomes we could not only save ourselves a ton of trouble handwringing over what level of perceived benefit justifies turning on the orphan mulcher, it would also go a long way to ensuring we don’t accidentally make common cause with the people who do enjoy mulching orphans.
You can pretty easily draw a thoughline from the slapdash deployment of political violence to the elevation of ghouls like Beria to the head of the organs of state.
Having royal family members can provide some legitimacy to the insurrections.
Are we idealists with a great man view of history now? Do we think these symbols actually hold real power to sway a insurrection’s success one way or the other?
I’m just making sure we’re all on the same page about not machine gunning children.
I’m honestly shocked that this even has to be said here, let alone that apparently so many really aren’t on the same page that machine-gunning children is both wrong and unjustifiable.
Eh, I know it’s a minority position on the left but that’s why it’s a drum I beat every time it comes up. Unironically forced me back into religion when I realized that leftist politics without axiomatic moral grounding results in disaster.
Now I go to leftist meetings to avoid being useless and Quaker meeting to avoid being terrible.
I don’t know, if the marxists or anarchists I work with irl ever said that kind of shit, I wouldn’t work with them anymore (and we have discussed the topic). Simple as a that. Personally, I’m an atheist and haven’t come up against any contradictions between my leftism and my morality or humanism. But if religion is what it takes for people to recognize that killing kids because of some hypothetical future scenario is wrong and will never be justified, then I say keep the churches full.
How are we supposed to convince people of our vision of a better world if we can’t even get the easy stuff like “don’t murder children” down? Christ even the liberals have the sense to pretend to feel bad about drones strikes on weddings when pressed.
I also think murdering children is bad. I think the specific situation with royal family of a monarchy is significantly different. Reducing my opinion to “machinegun kids lol” strikes me as very bad faith.
Either way I don’t really think what you and I think of the murder of a royal family more than 100 years ago matters enough to get into an argument that can only sour relations. Seems unproductive. I apologise for making the mistake of stoking this argument.
I’m not looking to sour relations and am not going to take your position on the matter personally, and it’s not that you stoked this argument, it’s that I’m actively evangilizing a humanism first leftism. I think as soon as machine gunning kids enters into the political toolkit, regardless of what problems it resolves, we’ve lost the plot. Whatever nuance you want to inject into the scenario is fine, but at the end of the day it does boil down to you thinking that under certain circumstances it’s acceptable, so I don’t think I’m unfairly characterizing your position at all.
It doesn’t seem to me like you’re evangelizing a human first leftism. It seems to me like you’re reducing a complex argument to “you’re celebrating the killing of kids, and you think kids should be killed” you’ve compared it to the dropping of atomic bombs on two cities.
Again I’d sincerely urge you to read Robespierres arguments against king Louis. It is not a question of punishing an individual, but eradicating a system. Those children existed as parts of that system, and would in most circumstances always exist as that. Pretending like the fear of counter-revolution being fomented once again decades later around the figure of a royal heir as some statistical unlikelyhood, is absurd when we can see exactly that having happened throughout history. As you said yourself there are still bonapartists, orleanists and the like. There’s no romanovists. While the orleanists are ridiculous now, they did previously and successfully lead a counter revolution. The bonarparists did as well.
In this sense the fear of the children becoming some later legitimising fixpoint for reaction is not some person “peering into the future”, it is us peering into the past. Those children did nothing wrong, but by virtue of the system they were at the top of, they would forever be threats to the USSR. In this way those children were as much a victim of the system as anyone else dying senselessly.
Just because people stomp up and down about ‘political necessity’ doesn’t actually conjure that ideological abstraction up into material reality. China didn’t machine gun Pu Yi and incidentally, their communist party is still running the show. I don’t know how difficult it is not to machine gun a 13 year old, and no amount of “you made me do this” are going to change the fact that we’re the ones making the (erroneous) decision to machine gun 13 year olds.
The notion that anyone can peer into the future and see all the possible outcomes to a sufficient degree of certainty to claim that the only possible outcome is to kill the kid is also very silly and Madeline Albrightesque.
We can be absolutely certain that the possibility of reinstating the monarchy would be very bad for lots of Jewish children. It’s terrible, but Tsar Nicholas shouldn’t have created a situation where he made the existence of his family so dangerous for everyone else.
We can be absolutely certain that the possibility of reinstating the monarchy would be very bad for lots of Jewish children.
Shooting a specific Royal lineage doesn’t change anything about the possibility of reinstating the Monarchy. The white’s didn’t evaporate after the executions in the same way that the coalitions didn’t evaporate as soon as soon as Louis XVI got the chop, and the House of Windsor doesn’t quake at the thought of the current Jacobite pretenders. . The notion that the fate of the revolution hangs in the balance of Alexei’s life is some grade A great man theory nonsense.
The only possible outcome? No, it wasn’t the only possible outcome but still a quite probable one. Maybe it wouldn’t have been needed but it was still justified as they could have posed a threat to the rwvolution
No, it wasn’t the only possible outcome but still a quite probable one.
Somehow I don’t think they made this decision after siting down with a slide rule and a bunch of actuarial tables, so I don’t know how they arrived at that balance of probabilities.
In reality it’s more like cops defending their use of deadly force in any circumstances. They reckoned it had to be done, and their judgement is all that’s needed to justify it, and now everyone else has to object to or rationalize their decision.
Gestures broadly at the Russian Civil War that happened anyway.
Here’s a rule for those of you at home, don’t machine gun kids.
I’m not ecstatic about it, but in the words of Brace Belden, ya gotta do what ya gotta do
Look at Mussolini’s granddaughter now. They didn’t finish the job.
If she’s presents anything more than an annoyance on Twitter I’m sure the Italians will flip her right-side up.
Eh, I disagree. The kids didn’t deserve it but it was necessary as they would have served the counterrevolution for the rest of their life’s and would have been a rallying call by the reactionaries
There are still Stuart and Bonapartist pretenders, the presence or absence of heirs isn’t what determines if you have an armed Royalist insurrection against you, as evidenced by the fact the civil war continued long past the murder of the royal family.
Having royal family members can provide some legitimacy to the insurrections. They didn’t know what was going to happen, only that the kids being gone may prevent an issue in the future and I would have agreed with them. The Bolsheviks were right on this instance
That arguments even worse, it takes it from “killing the kids solves a current problem” to “killing the kids may solve possible future problems”, and if that’s the standard, then it’s never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
Say what you will about the CPC but at least they correctly realized that Pu-Yi didn’t need to eat a bullet to head off any issues, and that was even after he collaborated with the Japanese.
the kids were an issue that could have been mitigated
the rest of them got what they fucking deserved
Badumptiss
Metaphysical pablum.
i have no fucking idea what any of that means
Calling the kids an issue is a pretty good pun.
Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country. I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality. What happened was during a revolution and they were the children and heirs to the position of the sunpreme enemy
Right it was some great great cousin of the Tsar that opened the Soviet Union up to the west leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and not some hereditary nobody.
I mean, they fail even a basic “ends justify the means” test given that Russia is currently a hyper-capitalistic dystopia so yeah, I don’t think my critique of the path they set down is in fact ill-posed.
Capital, in all it’s algorithimic and anti-humanistic glory is the supreme enemy, not some guy wearing a funny hat in a bunch of medals . The french killed their funny hat guy and 10 years later they had an Italian in an even funnier hat running things, so this notion that we can just kill our way into socialism by executing certain lineages seems a bit daft.
Saying that I am promoting “killing our way to socialism” is patently dishonest. I am stating that the Bolsheviks took out an easy path to anti-revolutionary activity and stopped the flower of evil from flowering. I don’t wish to have a conversation if you are going to misrepresent what I said by claiming that I want to “kill our way to socialism”
Well let’s strip out the euphemistic cover to the following.
What specifically did that involve? A smidge of killing possibly?
That argument is completely absurd. Just because you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues doesn’t mean it’s likely.
I don’t want to pull the “I’m a statistics professor card”, but I’m literally a statistics professor so unless I see an integral over a sample space in the denominator I don’t want to hear about likelihood, and especially not when someone’s half-baked narrative of possible possibilities gets treated as meaningfully bearing on that likelihood.
Like are we just throwing that word around or is their some objective method that apparently everyone else knows about for now to compute these probabilities and arrive at these conclusions.
Yeah it’s called guesstimating
There’s no way to objectively calculate the worth of an innocent person’s life anyway, so you can’t really put it into a formal equation. Sometimes you just have to make decisions based on incomplete information, I don’t see what the problem is. It’s not like I want to kill kids, but if I evaluated that there’s a high enough chance that it could save a high enough number of lives, I’d pull the lever on that trolley problem 100%. What am I, a Kantian?
If seems to me that if we’re willing to acknowledge that our subjective estimation of probabilities aren’t necessarily any good at predicting actual outcomes we could not only save ourselves a ton of trouble handwringing over what level of perceived benefit justifies turning on the orphan mulcher, it would also go a long way to ensuring we don’t accidentally make common cause with the people who do enjoy mulching orphans.
You can pretty easily draw a thoughline from the slapdash deployment of political violence to the elevation of ghouls like Beria to the head of the organs of state.
Are we idealists with a great man view of history now? Do we think these symbols actually hold real power to sway a insurrection’s success one way or the other?
Eh, I think it was necessary. I think the argument Robespierre made against Louis was also cogent for the Romanovs
The notion that printed symbols on a paper can change whether or not you should machine gun kids is silly, please refer back to the previous rule.
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I’m not asking you to feel bad that it happened, I’m just making sure we’re all on the same page about not machine gunning children.
I’m honestly shocked that this even has to be said here, let alone that apparently so many really aren’t on the same page that machine-gunning children is both wrong and unjustifiable.
Eh, I know it’s a minority position on the left but that’s why it’s a drum I beat every time it comes up. Unironically forced me back into religion when I realized that leftist politics without axiomatic moral grounding results in disaster.
Now I go to leftist meetings to avoid being useless and Quaker meeting to avoid being terrible.
I don’t know, if the marxists or anarchists I work with irl ever said that kind of shit, I wouldn’t work with them anymore (and we have discussed the topic). Simple as a that. Personally, I’m an atheist and haven’t come up against any contradictions between my leftism and my morality or humanism. But if religion is what it takes for people to recognize that killing kids because of some hypothetical future scenario is wrong and will never be justified, then I say keep the churches full.
Agree ti disagree then
How are we supposed to convince people of our vision of a better world if we can’t even get the easy stuff like “don’t murder children” down? Christ even the liberals have the sense to pretend to feel bad about drones strikes on weddings when pressed.
I also think murdering children is bad. I think the specific situation with royal family of a monarchy is significantly different. Reducing my opinion to “machinegun kids lol” strikes me as very bad faith.
Either way I don’t really think what you and I think of the murder of a royal family more than 100 years ago matters enough to get into an argument that can only sour relations. Seems unproductive. I apologise for making the mistake of stoking this argument.
I’m not looking to sour relations and am not going to take your position on the matter personally, and it’s not that you stoked this argument, it’s that I’m actively evangilizing a humanism first leftism. I think as soon as machine gunning kids enters into the political toolkit, regardless of what problems it resolves, we’ve lost the plot. Whatever nuance you want to inject into the scenario is fine, but at the end of the day it does boil down to you thinking that under certain circumstances it’s acceptable, so I don’t think I’m unfairly characterizing your position at all.
It doesn’t seem to me like you’re evangelizing a human first leftism. It seems to me like you’re reducing a complex argument to “you’re celebrating the killing of kids, and you think kids should be killed” you’ve compared it to the dropping of atomic bombs on two cities.
Again I’d sincerely urge you to read Robespierres arguments against king Louis. It is not a question of punishing an individual, but eradicating a system. Those children existed as parts of that system, and would in most circumstances always exist as that. Pretending like the fear of counter-revolution being fomented once again decades later around the figure of a royal heir as some statistical unlikelyhood, is absurd when we can see exactly that having happened throughout history. As you said yourself there are still bonapartists, orleanists and the like. There’s no romanovists. While the orleanists are ridiculous now, they did previously and successfully lead a counter revolution. The bonarparists did as well.
In this sense the fear of the children becoming some later legitimising fixpoint for reaction is not some person “peering into the future”, it is us peering into the past. Those children did nothing wrong, but by virtue of the system they were at the top of, they would forever be threats to the USSR. In this way those children were as much a victim of the system as anyone else dying senselessly.
literal infanticide becomes a political necessity as a product of MONARCHY
If they wanted their children to be safe, then they should not have forced them to be the sole inheritors of a brutal dictatorship
Just because people stomp up and down about ‘political necessity’ doesn’t actually conjure that ideological abstraction up into material reality. China didn’t machine gun Pu Yi and incidentally, their communist party is still running the show. I don’t know how difficult it is not to machine gun a 13 year old, and no amount of “you made me do this” are going to change the fact that we’re the ones making the (erroneous) decision to machine gun 13 year olds.
Kind to people, ruthless to systems, folks.
It could both be bad and be necessary
The notion that anyone can peer into the future and see all the possible outcomes to a sufficient degree of certainty to claim that the only possible outcome is to kill the kid is also very silly and Madeline Albrightesque.
We can be absolutely certain that the possibility of reinstating the monarchy would be very bad for lots of Jewish children. It’s terrible, but Tsar Nicholas shouldn’t have created a situation where he made the existence of his family so dangerous for everyone else.
Shooting a specific Royal lineage doesn’t change anything about the possibility of reinstating the Monarchy. The white’s didn’t evaporate after the executions in the same way that the coalitions didn’t evaporate as soon as soon as Louis XVI got the chop, and the House of Windsor doesn’t quake at the thought of the current Jacobite pretenders. . The notion that the fate of the revolution hangs in the balance of Alexei’s life is some grade A great man theory nonsense.
The only possible outcome? No, it wasn’t the only possible outcome but still a quite probable one. Maybe it wouldn’t have been needed but it was still justified as they could have posed a threat to the rwvolution
Somehow I don’t think they made this decision after siting down with a slide rule and a bunch of actuarial tables, so I don’t know how they arrived at that balance of probabilities.
In reality it’s more like cops defending their use of deadly force in any circumstances. They reckoned it had to be done, and their judgement is all that’s needed to justify it, and now everyone else has to object to or rationalize their decision.