User talk:RedParabola

User boxes and user groups (tendencies, etc.)

Appreciate your contribs so far. Since you made a User page I thought I would let you know about userbox templates and user groups in case you were interested. Cheers --Harrystein (talk) 19:37, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll be sure to check those out. RedParabola (talk) 20:09, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Very nice Leninism template

I have nothing to add to Template:Leninism sidebar other than the link target changes I just made. I am curious what you think of my old idea for an "Imperialism" template? The actual sections are very bare but the real point is whether or not such a template should exist at all. My view is that "Imperialism" is one of the most contentious topics on the left (all the way to anarchists, who may even call the Soviet Union imperialist)[1][2] and therefore should only be discussed as an area of research rather than as something which is objectively true and requires no argument. The question of modern Russia and imperialism, for instance, is one that should be allowed debate on this site, and therefore such a template should not be given as fact. Harrystein (talk) 18:24, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. There are things that I could improve on the Leninism template (most importantly add a part which lists books from Lenin, Stalin, etc.), but I think it's overall in a usable state.

Addressing your imperialism template, I agree with you that's it's rather bare-bones. The first thing I would do is add some sort of picture (at least one like this) and change the color to reflect its horrible character (which I think you did a very good job of with your anti-communist sidebar).

But otherwise I would argue that imperialism is so expansive a subject that it would be hard to actually put all of the important information into a single template, considering the politics of the entire late 19th, 20th, and 21st (so far) centuries have been totally dominated by it. Not to mention the internal leftist disagreements about it. If nothing else, we could have templates about the undisputed imperialism of particular countries, like the United States, although even that would be massive. RedParabola (talk) 18:48, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, the point is that it's titled "Theories of Imperialism", to hopefully centralize discussion on such an important topic. An actual sidebar of imperialism in general would of course either be generalizing or overly long, and even a template on US imperialism would be fine but also very broad. I just think this is something where leftists seem to be talking past each other and never come to an agreement over whether, for example, the core-periphery model or "Global South" theory or unequal exchange or classical Leninist theory or Maoist-Third Worldism or some theory on someone's blog is the best explanation for how capitalists (or as the case may be, "labor aristocrats", or "white people", or "firsties", or "colonizers"...) dominate the world.

Perhaps the best way to make my point clear is the question of an image. The cartoon of Rhodes would be interesting, but my first choice would be a diagram or map of a modern theory of imperialism, such as that of Wallerstein. In fact, my inspiration was Template:Imperialism Studies sidebar at Wikipedia. Harrystein (talk) 18:59, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

I agree, a template similar to Wikipedia's would be better, or at least the image it has. RedParabola (talk) 19:21, 23 March 2024 (UTC)