Grover Furr strikes again

The best username I've ever seen online was "Grover Baby Furr." Anyways that's all I've got

The accusation that Furr isn't "a real historian" is laughable. I majored in history and most of my professors weren't even reading the footnotes of the authors they were criticising/praising. Furr actually takes his time to sit down and artistically checks every footnote of Kotkin, flies to Russia and actually digs through the archives (he speaks Russian) - this is sometimes more effort than most "credible" historians do. It's quite clear that Kotkin tried to gish-gallop the reader with thousands of footnotes.

Every attack I've seen on Furr is against his person - that he "isn't peer-reviewed", that he "isn't an historian" etc. but never against the content.

This reminds me when I visited economics subreddit (don't remember exactly which one) and they had a discussion about Marxist economics. The top post had a critique of LTV, in which he discredited it by saying that moving a pile of rocks from one place to other doesn't increase the value of them.

How do you deal with 'subjective value' bullcrap? I see that all the time and these people just choose to ignore both socialist and capitalist planning, at all.
It's like they think the entire world is just a magical supermarket and nothing before that or after that ever existed.

I don't even know how to argue for subjective value. Neither the customer nor the salesman sell products at what they personally value them, the customer makes a cost/benefit analysis and the salesman tries to sell his product for the highest price possible without hurting his sales output. This debunks any notion of subjectivity even if you don't believe the LTV is true. The only time subjectivity plays a role is when payment is optional or a donation, like community theatre events or whatever.

Yeah, even those who majored in economics are often painfully ignorant about Marxian economics (because it's optional in the curriculum if being there at all). I encourage anybody who has a solid grasp at Marxism to walk into economic subeddits without fear. Don't get caught up into arguing for Keynesianism - neoclassical economists will often change the subject when talking about Marx and want to talk about tax rates or whatever to trick you into defending Keynesian economics by making provoking neoliberal statements. But to BTFO even the most economic-savy academics is really is when Marxism is talked about.

I know, but people think enterpreneurs are some sort of wizard class and that
is just decided from market forces, which they deny to specify while totally ignoring things like input-output tables or the massive amount of planning going on in capitalist economies.
Should I just wait until their wages before we have the same conversation?
sage for offtopic

I think if you want to go on reddit to talk about Marxism stay away from economics subreddits. Not because of fear but rather because most of people who go there are neoliberals, which pretty much means they are well off and rich. I think subreddit such as /r/explainlikeimfive and similar are the best since they get visited by actual people and not alien overlords from outer space who want to exploit everyone who can breathe. Seriously, go over at /r/neoliberal and tell me if you think real living people are behind these posts. I certainly would feel more comfortable sitting next to a conservative boomer that a neolib.

From everything I've heard from Furr, it seems like he's actually pretty well measured and doesn't exonerate Stalin for X,Y,Z explicitly, he just says that of all the accusations that he's researched evidence for, it's been found false or inconclusive. And he really does have countless examples of this stuff. This doesn't mean that Stalin dindu nuffin but that's what it ends up getting twisted into. What's more telling about Furr is the things he doesn't choose to cover, which usually contains more general critiques of Stalin and the USSR in that time period, which in some part still hold. I think it's basically just a particular kind of rabid ML you're talking about here that tends to project this onto Furr, and since regardless of whether he's being taken seriously by others, he's actually just never given an opportunity to actually engage with more reputable or unbiased contingents. Some of the bad rep he gets basically is guilt by association is what I'm saying, and in part that's because of his lack of visibility outside of those circles, which, in no uncertain terms, is definitely poltically useful in the same way that conspiracy theorists are discredited purposefully by certain actors.

Grover Furr Tankies piss me off because I can’t tell if they are being strategically dishonest or just retarded.