Objection

If he hadn't been, would the USSR survived? That focus on technology, factories, and efficiency, no matter the cost, seems like the right approach when there's Nazis at your doorstep, conquering all of Europe and conducting mass exterminations.

i’ll freely admit i’m not reading books on the subject

Let me first clarify a few points then.

Marx and Lenin were also "authoritarian." You should read Engles' On Authority, it's not long and explains his position on the matter, which was consistent with Marx.

"Stalinism" isn't really a thing, nobody calls themselves that, it's just a pejorative for Marxism-Leninism, which was Stalin's stated ideology (in fact, he's the person who coined the term). Marxism-Leninism ("Stalinism") is the most prevalent ideology among self-described communists globally, particularly in the global south.

If Sanders just wanted an authoritarian figure to compare Trump to, there are no shortage of right-wing ones who have much more in common with him. The choice of Stalin seems to be intentional, to distance himself and his own brand of socialism from Stalin and other M-Ls.

I believe this is a flawed strategy, in the same way it would be to accuse a witch-hunter of being a witch. The problem is that you're accepting the premise that witches are real and need to be hunted, and at that point it becomes a question of who can better make the case that they're not a witch - which is going to be the witch-hunter, because that's their job, they know how to play the game, they made the rules. In the same way, right wingers are always going to be more convincing anti-communists than someone who calls himself a socialist, they made the rules of the red scare and they know how to play it. The real way to defeat the witch hunt is to have enough people who aren't afraid of being called witches, and the way to defeat red scare stuff is not to accept the framing and punch left, but to say, "So what if I am a Red?"

I take drive by downvotes as a compliment, the meaning I get from them is, "I don't like this because it challenged my beliefs in a way I can't answer." Great! That's what I was going for.

Of course, there are more recent things that we can look at to understand modern American christofascism. However, I would argue that twisting around Jesus' words to justify bad things has a very long history, and that you can point to the time of Constantine and the ways in which Christianity came to support Roman imperialism as a starting point. It may not be a direct line, but it's part of the same tradition. By the same token, you could point to how Christianity was used to support colonialism much later. At some point, people should stop being surprised when this happens because it's been happening for 1700 years.

I’m just not interested in condemning the Romans of 1700 years ago

But you praised Constantine for preserving the empire. If you're going to apply that moral framework then I get to apply my own too.

you’re demonizing the Roman Empire as if we’re in any way special in its slaving and conquering in the ancient world.

I said nothing of the sort. All I'm saying is that there were early Christians who opposed some of these things, and that movement was co-opted and started supporting them.

That said, historically speaking, it’s not at all obvious that you can ascribe to Constantine the idea of an orthodox Christianity

As I said, however much responsibility you want to ascribe to him, it remains true that this sort of thing goes back to his time.

In any case, theologically speaking, this idea of a pure original Christian message of Jesus that needs to be rescued by later impurities is a fundamentally protestant one, i.e., it’s a very particular way of understanding Christianity that doesn’t have any essential claim to be the only legitimate way of understanding Christianity. Not coming from a protestant (or a Counter-Reformation) background myself I don’t even particularly feel the need to refute it, I find the very question basically irrelevant.

I also find it irrelevant, which is why I never said anything like that. I don't believe there was a "pure" Christian message that needs to be "rescued." No, early Christians were weird cranks with many wrong ideas about many things, which is part of how they were able to be co-opted. Nevertheless, they were weird cranks that said and did some ok things some times, especially relative to the empire.

You're trying to create this false dichotomy where either early Christians were the pure, divinely inspired carriers of God's teachings, or else everyone at the time was equally bad, and the only measure of goodness is stability and survival. This is reductive nonsense. Early Christianity was a relatively progressive, flawed movement within the empire, and it was able to be subverted and co-opted by the empire into supporting many of it's worst practices. This is not a "fundamentally protestant" perspective, nor does it treat the Roman Empire as "special" in regards to other states in the ancient world, both of those claims are baseless strawmen.

Regardless of how much responsibility we assign to him, it's true that this shit does in fact go all the way back to his time.

If you ask me, the Roman empire was built on conquest and slavery and extending it 1000 years isn't really something to brag about. He co-opted a movement that had originally opposed many of the empire's harmful practices and turned it into a bastardized form that supported the state so long as it payed lip service to Christian icons. Nowadays, Christians do similar things, and they're drawing on a very long tradition to do so. That tradition doesn't absolve them of personal responsibility, but it does provide some insight in terms of understanding how Christianity turned into basically the exact opposite of Jesus' teachings.

We’ll have to agree to disagree.

I'm not going to "agree to disagree" on this any more than I'd "agree to disagree" on any other well-known facts. Here's the APA:

The APA defines traditional masculinity as “a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” The guidelines, which were highlighted in the January issue of the APA's Monitor on Psychology magazine, say the pressure boys and men feel to conform to certain aspects of traditional masculinity can lead to poor health outcomes, including higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, violence and early death.

In all seriousness, could you provide an anecdote, even a made up one, where someone gets called a “Karen” yet their behaviour doesn’t involve frustration / anger / verbal harassment?

You've moved the goalposts. You were claiming that women are more prone to outbursts of anger specifically, because of being less used to testosterone. Now you're adding "frustration" and "verbal abuse," which aren't inherently linked to testosterone. Let's stick to anger, shall we?

With that in mind, here is one of the prime examples that I remember being used for an example of a "Karen." She's not expressing anger, she is expressing distress (played up on the phone), but it's primarily about exercising her privilege against a minority, weaponizing the police to win an argument. That's 100% Karen behavior.

You do realize if I’m wrong about that, it would be ALL men who commit acts of violence right?

That's completely idiotic, no. Your claim is that exposure to testosterone makes men less prone to angry outbursts generally speaking compared to women. For that to be wrong would not require every single man to be prone to angry outbursts, let alone acts of violence. It would only require them to be more prone to those things relative to women, which they are, objectively.

The higher frequency of violence in men is actually more proof I’m right.

How fascinating. It seems that no matter what evidence actually exists out in the world, you're able to twist it around to support your conclusions. There should be a word for ideas like yours that are so obviously true, may I suggest the word, "unfalsifiable?"

To be clear, running from or bottling emotions is not the same as experiencing them. And it’s certainly not the same as experiencing them frequently.

You've played a very interesting trick of language in this section. Your argument rests on the fact that testosterone makes men more prone to feelings of anger, that is, to make them "experience" anger, but then you say that those who bottle up anger or react to it in unhealthy ways are not actually "experiencing" anger. This would imply that you think that testoterone doesn't merely cause the physiological symptoms that make people more prone to anger, but also inherently, biologically, causes men to respond to those symptoms in psychologically healthy ways. This of course contradicts your whole argument that it's necessary to learn through practice how to handle those emotions.

If "experiencing" anger means not only experiencing the symptoms, but also handling them in a healthy way and not bottling them up, then testosterone doesn't make people "experience" anger (only because you've redefined the word "experience" in a nonsensical way). If "experiencing" anger means feeling the symptoms of anger, regardless of whether it's handled in a healthy or unhealthy way, then what you're saying in this section is all nonsense. You can choose whatever definition you prefer, but you can't switch back and forth.

This form of emotional adaptation is also scientifically proven:

The paper you linked is very tangentially related to your point. Yes, people adapt emotionally to their environments. That has very little with your bizzare claim that men are less prone to angry outbursts or acts of violence than women because of biology.

Just over half of U.S. adults (52%) say they favor allowing public school teachers to lead their classes in prayers that refer to Jesus

Nationwide, a slightly larger share of Americans say they favor allowing teacher-led prayers referencing God (57%)

It's right there in OP.

I grew up in one of those states and it's part of why I'm a certified America Hater today. I genuinely don't think people who haven't been exposed to it, even within the country, but especially outside of it, really have a grasp on how prominent and powerful religion is in the US. Hell, I didn't fully understand it myself until I lived outside of the country for a time and saw what normal is like. This country is a madhouse.

(Assuming these males are aging in a healthy environment).

That's a pretty big assumption, isn't it? Maybe in a Star Trek utopia, what you're saying would be accurate, but in the present day I think most men are growing up in an unhealthy environment.

Imo, this is why we have the term “Karen” with no male equivalent.

The term "Karen" is a product of modern day socioeconomic conditions, it's not an innate biological quality. The term was coined to refer specifically to middle-class white women treating service workers badly. This is a learned behavior that comes from privilege and a general lack of empathy, or seeing the target as human, which exists in more subtle ways even when they haven't lost control of their temper. I don't think "being a Karen" necessarily means losing one's temper, it's more about acting in an entitled way.

For your overall point that exposure to an emotion makes it easier to control, I don't think it holds up. Statistically, men are much more likely to commit acts of violence, whereas your theory would seem to suggest that older women are more likely to. I think it's just as likely that a high degree of exposure to a particular emotion will be buried or suppressed in an unhealthy way, leading to outbursts.

I think there's a big difference between conscious perception of one's emotions and one's actual emotional state. How emotions are processed, expressed, and understood are very culturally influenced. But idk that you can socialize people to feel or not feel particular emotions. Like, if emotions were cultural, and men are socialized against sadness or fear, then does that mean that men don't feel those things? Or is it that they do feel those emotions, but are either consciously unaware of them, or try to suppress them or express them in a culturally acceptable way?

For example, judges are more likely to pass harsh sentences just before lunch, when they're most hungry. I don't think that's learned behavior, and I would expect the trend to cut across culture, in many times and places.