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There isn't a middle ground when you're talking about "guilty" vs "not guilty". In this case talking about a middle ground is usually finding an excuse to punish the man. You can bite one bullet and say that "when a man and a woman have an awkward encounter that went wrong, no rape occurred". Or you can bite another and say "when a man and a woman have an awkward encounter that went wrong, he raped her". If you talk about a middle ground and put out a lot of words but ultimately conclude the man should be punished, you've decided it's rape, and if you put out all those words but ultimately conclude he should not, you've decided it's not rape.
I see it as the revolution entering its authoritarian phase. In the early Soviet union the farmers were going to be free and run themselves without any oppression. The result was mass starvation. When cannibalism becomes a major concern in cities, getting farmers to produce becomes a legitimate concern. Shooting lazy farmers for being tsarist spies and having soldiers patrol farms while enforcing strict counting and documentation of production was awful for the people who lived through it. Yet millions of people weren't starving to death in the 1950s. We are experiencing something similar on the dating market. Free love became freedom to act selfishly. This has caused wide spread and genuine hurt among women. Some of them are now demanding the state clear up the sea of bad behaviour using the legal system. Total sexual freedom didn't work, instead tradition will be replaced by commissars.
We can't have a society in which men more or less use 16-year-old girls to get off. Having large numbers of women have deeply uncomfortable experiences and having genuinely psychopathic men take advantage of the freedom of the sexual revolution is a travesty.
With that said it obviously won't work. The NKVD can't be everywhere, and people cheat all the time. Show trials designed to maximize convictions don't create functioning societies.
Commissars rather famously didn't work; the USSR was supported by US grain exports in the 1970s and 1980s, and was dissolved in late 1991.
Of course it didn't work, but it worked better than it did at the most zealous, most extreme, most euphoric and most radical phase of the revolution. The Cultural Revolution was shitty even by the standards of Chinese communism. The sexual revolution was a catastrophic disaster for a huge number of people (I'd argue both men and women) to the benefit of a small minority of men. Reining it in is going to involve punishing those men disproportionately, it is what it is.
Agree, but the punishment is only the first half of the re-calibration. You can point to something and say "That's bad, don't do that," but people will naturally respond, "Well, fine, what's good?"
And then society, culture, and all of the relevant institutions are going to have to start really getting behind the idea of stable nuclear families, courtship rituals that are defined (heavily) by gender roles, and explicit pro-natalism. Personally, I think of these are stellar ideas. But there are some absolutely bananas divergences in opinios on that. This is why, I think, the trashfire that is contemporary dating endures - there isn't a well articulated alternative and even vague attempts to develop one are only at the margins and oriented around fine-tuning and optimization. The recent article-and-comments on "Date Me" docs over at Scott's Blog is case in point.
Then again, what's old is new. People really like to fuck. Like, a lot a lot. Society has been dealing with this with great difficulty forever. At the societal, pro-social level,packing away women in burlap bags probably isn't a good move, but neither is broadcasting luxury strip clubs as empowering art. I'm not going to weasel out and say "it's a balancing act." No, the assertion that ought to be made is "sex is one of the most basic social contracts you engage in. Yes, it's personal and fun, but it isn't something to be taken lightly." Then, taking the next step up in the responsibility chain, "you should have sex in an already stable pair bonded relationship with an eye towards longevity." No, don't criminalize one-night stands and don't jail the town harlot or village lothario - but hold them up as examples of what not to do.
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What are you talking about? The Soviet Union was exporting grain to support the growth of it's heavy industry in the early 1920s which led the USA to withdraw it's massive famine relief efforts. In the early 1930s famine was caused by collectivization and wasn't required to feed the cities. It isn't like collectivization helped productivity in the long run. That they eventually stopped being so insanely oppressive that starving their citizens was a step to far is more due to politics than anything.
Are you deliberately choosing bad examples to make a point?
Soviet Union had reintroduced free market economy in early 20s, because of a total carnage of the actual communism as practiced in the early years during of the Russian Civil War and after it. Before that, the commies would seize the food from peasants, who as a result stopped bothering to grow much. The shortage of food in early 20s was extremely severe.
By the end of NEP in 1928, the agricultural production has recovered to pre WWI levels, though the Soviet Union food exports throughout its history have never been even close to the Imperial Russia exports in 1913.
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