• Yllych [any]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    “my professor made me learn about my own country’s barbarism!”

    “He was anti American during the class about the time we tried to exterminate the brutes in Vietnam!”

    " He said we could read Hansel and Gretel and have warm milk and cookies but tricked us and forced us to read Heart of Darkness!"

    these are deeply unserious people and I wish the bottom left one in particular a very join the Marines and drown in the red sea

    Edit :just saw that one was in 2007 but my sentiments still stand.

  • dannoffs [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    There are genuine academic critiques to be made of some of Furr’s work. “He made me learn America bad” and “he made me learn about pirates and communism” aren’t them.

    • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Yes. J Arch Getty - a legit Soviet historian who is a lib but is still very fair to Stalin IMO and generally very USSR-friendly - once said that Furr understands the material in the archives, but he just comes to really weird conclusions.

      I think Furr is fine as long as you know you’re getting an apologist more than a historian. There’s a place for that. Furr himself admittedly (on the Proles pod) he thinks Stalin did nothing wrong. If you approach history from that angle you’re going to have blind spots. IMO skip Furr and go to Losurdo.

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    He actually does go off topic quite a bit. But it’s 100% worth going down whatever rabbithole he goes on an adventure on.

    10/10, if you get a chance to talk with him and pick his brain on random early soviet history topics, you should.

    • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      I had an Anatomy and Physiology teacher for a night class many years ago. He’d go off on tangents talking about demonic possesion, his homophobic tendencies, and adrenochrome, It made his lectures like reading through Pale Fire on drugs. He was one of the the best teachers I ever had, his shaky manic rants basically ensuring that I was transfixed and able to write down every single (relevant) word despite my severe unmedicated ADHD and chronic sleep deprivation.

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        He sounds certainly like a real character one would find interesting to listen to. Sadly Furr’s a bit more on the pedantic side in his speaking since he’s spent quite literally years putting up with anti-communist a-historical ‘historian’ bullshit, so if you’re not exactly a stick-in-the-mud you may end up bored and tallying up how many times he says “Anti-Stalin paradigm” during one of his lectures.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    When I made /r/groverfurr the reddit admins banned it in under 24 hours with the excuse that it was a copy of a banned subreddit (chapotraphouse) intended for subreddit ban evasion.

    • cosecantphi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      It kind of looks like reddit has permanently marked all accounts and variously fingerprinted users that once posted often in r/cth and now they just ban any new subreddit where they start to congregate regardless of whether it’s an actual attempt to revive the sub or not. It’s like a soft shadow ban where we can still comment on most posts in most subreddits, but if we start talking politics with like minded people, it alerts the admins.

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Anything left of liberal is a breeding ground for critical thinking, and that opens the door for reds.

        If you have just 1 single red in a space that people are listening to, more reds are made, because we are correct. Give it long enough and things get spicey.

        This is why no matter how many times they exterminate us. No matter how many times they commit unspeakable crimes to set back the left, it will always come back, until it eventually wins.

        You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

  • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    Furr’s Natopedia page is wild. The very first line:

    Grover Carr Furr III (born April 3, 1944) is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is best known for his revisionist views regarding the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin.

    And the edit history is a war zone. The 2 most recent changes are someone rewording a sentence to make it less biased:

    before after
    Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Holodomor, the 1932–33 government-created famine in Soviet Ukraine, was not deliberate, describing it as a fiction created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Holodomor, the 1932–33 famine in Soviet Ukraine, was not deliberate, describing the story of it being deliberate as a fiction created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists

    with edit summary Word correction - could have previously be interpreted as famine denial, made the language less biased.. Within 4 minutes, it was undone, with edit summary Previous version appeared more neutral.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      I do these edits all the time all over socialist articles. I just write in “does not conform to wikipedia NPOV rules, biased language removed”.

      I use the abbreviation to sound all official wikipedian legalese and make people think twice about reverting lmao

    • edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Of course fucking Mzajac/Michael Z is on that page. He defends pro-Western narratives about Ukraine all over Wikipedia.

      • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Mzajac is such a fucking asshole to every editor he interacts with. He’s been pulled into ANI so many times, and people are like “why is he still an admin”. I do think that the war in Ukraine broke his brain tho, since he’s been so much more unhinged and aggressive since then.

    • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      I had a class with what was the stereotype of a college professor chuds complain about.

      Was some gen Ed credit like “culture language and hummanity” that was basically him being a reddit atheist lib about every current topic.

      We were supposed to “keep a journal” for the whole course for our final grade.

      Finals week I went through all his power points and paraphrased them as my “journal”

      He had me come I to his office to congratulate me and tell me I had thenoutlinenof a book lol.

      Libs love hearing their own thoughts quoted back at them.

    • raven [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      I had a history prof go on a class long tangent about how communists were evil because Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. I, being a cringe atheist at the time thought “damn that’s cool af, this Marx guy is spitting” and I think that was the general consensus of the class.

      Geography professor however started day one with a lecture on why Mercator, and most other map projections are racist, and told us that he wasn’t listening to any complaints about saying that from anyone white.

  • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    Gonna cry? Gonna shit your pants?

    I guess they should have put “WARNING: NO SAFE SPACES FOR IMPERIALISTS AND GENOCIDE APOLOGISTS” in red on the course catalog.

    • kot [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      If his field was political theory he would be a massive neoliberal. From my own experience, the way anglo-american academia seems to work is that if your field is related to that, it’s very hard to get a job in academia without reproducing US empire propaganda. For instance, their philosophers don’t read Marx, and a lot of the political philosophy they study exists to basically justify liberal democracy as the most ethical system that exists.
      If you come from a different field though, like English literature, there is more leeway to study Marx and critical theory. Grover Furr is also a massive ML and hobbyist historian of Soviet history, and it probably bleeds into his classes quite a lot.