The Efficient Communist Coup and Other Good Ones I’ve Heard Lately

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt
Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay

I don’t understand whence comes the myth of the very efficient communist regime.

[Before I go on, let me get definitions out of the way: Communist, socialist, progressive, social democrat… It’s a continuum, but really at some level it’s like that Far Side cartoon with the two bathroom doors and a penguin picture on each and the caption “only they know the difference.”  And yeah, to the concern trolls who’ll come by to give me the idiotrivia about it. Thank you. I know. Thanks to your comrades in the 70s in Portugal I studied Marx in all my courses in middle school (BTW that was a bad idea. As a well-read 12 year old, who could do math, I saw the holes in logic, economics and psychology.) The point is that yeah, we can also tell which sex a penguin is by looking closely. The point here is that no one outside your group cares. Same sh*t, different name for the smell.]

Now that this is out of the way: there is a myth out there that the statists are incredibly efficient and smart.  They believe it, of course. I mean, it has been an article of faith with them, ever since I’ve been cognizant, that people on the right are stupid uneducated hicks.

[And for the sake of definitions, again, let’s make this clear: “on the right” to the left means anyone not of the body. they lump into one group the European “blood and soil” right, the national socialists (because not internationalists, therefore not of the body), the libertarians, the American “leave us the heck alone” right, religious conservatives, in fact any religious person, and basically anyone who doesn’t think Lenin had some great ideas. Hell, for a while there they tried to shove Maoists in here with us.]

This is the result of our education system having been largely taken over by the Lenin-fans.  They equate smart with “has the right answer on the test” and “has the right credentials” both of which really are the same thing. And when the curriculum calls for parroting Marx, praising Lenin and hating the free market the only ones getting good grades are idiots, mobis and submarines.  (I wonder if the left has any idea how many submarines there are.  I have a feeling they’re about to find out.  Let’s face it, even I, who am glass fronted, hid successfully for over a decade.)

So they think of themselves as super smart.  And their politico-religious beliefs requires they believe in central control, and that it can work and be efficient.

But…. excuse me? Why do the rest of you believe it?

I was reading a facebook post by Brad Torgersen about the feet-on-fire Portland guy, (Oh, you haven’t seen it?  Well…. let’s say burning man wasn’t completely cancelled this year.  More at the link, but get an oggle of this:)

Anyway, Brad linked this and someone in the comments said these are the Kopstone Komissars.  Which is when it hit me:
THEY ALL ARE.

The really committed communists, the ones who said “come the revolution” always were, and their murderous baby thugs are worse.

No, I am absolutely dead sure on this. Remember I’ve had a vast number of encounters with leftists my entire life — some day over drinks remind me to tell you in detail about the “demonstration guard thugs” who surrounded me, all pointing AK 47s at me and thought I would be scared. No, seriously. They were a for-real circular firing squad.  If I hadn’t pointed it out they might have let go, too. Okay, I told them, because I was afraid they might accidentally hit me. But having been on the receiving end of their expertise, having them try to shoot me meant I was probably the safest there. —  and none of them was playing with a full deck.

About the closest you get to sane and competent are soft American left, and all of us have friends — and relatives — in that pool, so you know without my telling you that these otherwise sane people are ignoring all the contradictions and impossibilities in the bullshit they support. They have to be. Because otherwise they’d have a psychotic break.

From there on, the insanity just piles on.

I’m not going to say that these people are naturally stupid. Hell, I’m related to some of them. I’m saying the ones who are smart, or even competent in other things have…. cracks. Okay, we all have, but their cracks allowed this idiotifying (totally a word) cult-like “explanation for everything” to invade their brain, and that thing eats your ability to function and your common sense.  (Might be a thing of totalitarian ideology.  I have vague memories of people talking about naziism doing the same in the early 20th century.)

But the truth is when they’re running fully under the power of Leninist-love, they have lost most of their marbles, their competence is doubtful, and they couldn’t find reality if it bit them in the fleshy part of the butt.

Occasional-Cortex is about normal level of competence, and when people ask why left-wing mayors are destroying their own cities, I think it’s because they don’t think they’re destroying them. They are, instead, giving an opportunity for the downtrodden to take over them, or whatever. They are of course completely insane, but their cult requires them to believe this.

Obama didn’t mean to destroy world economy, for instance. He thought if he impoverished the US, the rest of the world would become richer, because insano Marxist economics requires that to be true, so it must be true. And he couldn’t process reality that went against the doctrine.

It’s like this all the way down with the left.

But then, you say, Sarah, how did they manage to have these plots, these illusions, to take control of academia, the media and entertainment?

Oh, that was because they had full control of them, starting with a lot of sympathizers in place before they got frisky.

They really can’t function with anything less than FULL control. They’re not competent. They can just project an ILLUSION of competence. BUT they need full control.

Remember in the USSR they had to install a ban on TYPEWRITERS and were finally taken down by that revolutionary tech, the copier.

And they think they can take control of the US and KEEP IT.

So, the series of prattfalls we’ve been watching this year? That’s the left when not in full control of the narrative. They’re always like that. the number of stupid moves they made in any country they got control of? Is almost all of them.

Yeah, they did this desperate covidiocy thing to regain their captive audience, but even that is breaking down.

We’re Americans, and you block us on one side, we go the other way. And as for means of communication?  Oh, brother!

The left trying to take over America are like a dog chasing a car.  If it catches it, then it will know what real trouble is.

Be not afraid.  In the end we win, they lose. If we manage to not die laughing.

298 thoughts on “The Efficient Communist Coup and Other Good Ones I’ve Heard Lately”

  1. Ignoring the very spechul level of incompetence of the communists and only focusing on the general “Statism is Efficient” idea.

    It is broken window fallacy all the way down. The flip side of that is “Pyramid Building”: seeing a wonderful construction or other huge project, but not seeing the costs that the state imposed to build it.

    Sometimes the pyramid provides some sort of compensatory value. Often it doesn’t.

    1. This is the fundamental flaw of Keynesian economics, government spending is not a replacement for private sector spending and in fact masks the signalling necessary for the market to efficiently reallocate resources.

      1. I’m going to have to give a minor defense of Keynes here. He did make some important contributions to the science of economics (which exists, albeit usually masked by folk using economic babel to justify their political desires). He was wrong on some things, of course–as was/is anybody. But the big thing that people often don’t realize is that what many people claim as “Keynesian economics” is not what Keynes actually advocated. What Keynes proposed was, in times of economic recession increase government spending (allowing deficit spending) to stimulate the economy, then, in times of a growing economy, reduce government spending to pay back the debt accumulated during recessionary times. The idea is to be a “flywheel”, smoothing out the “bumps” in the economy. And while private spending/investing is better than government spending/investing, the latter is being used when the former isn’t happening with the idea that _some_ spending/investing is better than none.

        This has never actually been done. People took the “deficit spending” part and left out the “pay it back” part. It’s like a surgeon doing the “cutting” part but not bothering with the “sew it up again” part, with the results being equally disastrous.

        Now, not going to make a full defense of Keynes here because I think he came at it from the wrong side. Using government as a kind of money reservoir to smooth out economic bumps may make sense–that level analysis is above my skill level in the field (I’m really just a dilettante in economics), but if so, better, I think, instead of increasing spending during recessionary times, to reduce taxes instead. Have a “tax holiday”. Then, in better times, recoup any deficits stemming from the stimulus tax holiday (which would have to be done if you did what I also advocate and keep normal taxes as low as possible to fund the minimum essential functions of government). Instead of having government do the spending, leave more money in people’s hands and let them do the spending.

        1. I’m going to agree with you about Keynes. Most of what he’s blamed for is actually down to Samuelson and the other Harvard clowns. That said, like so many of his class, and he was a bounder not a gentleman, he was a genuine fascist and filled with envy of the rentier. This showed up all through his work.

          As for Keynes on deficit spending. I’m pretty sure that the entire General Theory was just a piece of rhetoric to get Baldwin to open up public spending to relieve the immediate effects of the depression. The analysis is too detailed for a blog post comment but I would point the interested parties toward Keynes response to Hayek when he said, of Hayek, you at least should see what I’m doing. Hayek had criticized Keynes for ignoring all of Keynes’s previous work. Given Keynes also said that his opinions changed when his facts did, his comments about deficit spending made toward the end of the war, and that he was a bounder, I’m pretty sure that he would have repudiated the General Theory had he lived.

          I also agree that there is a core of truth in economics. Scarcity exists, and despite all utopian thinkers, will always exist. Even in Star Trek, time is scarce. Hence, choices are required. Economics is the study of how those decisions are made.

          Samuelson and the Harvard crowd believed that Daddy was best at making decisions, and they were Daddy,, because otherwise you might make the wrong one. That is, as you say, politics not economics. Harvard has a bad case of believing they know what’s good for the rest of us. Sunstein is just the most recent example

          1. If I were made ruling despot and was to use government as a “flywheel” to help level out the bumps in the economy, the way I’d do it is first, limit government spending to absolute essentials (look at Article One of the US Constitution for a reasonable description of what that might be), taxes would normally be set just a bit higher than enough to fund that so that normally we’d be running at a slight surplus building up a cash reserve so that, in times of serious recession we could declare a tax holiday, leaving the money in the hands of the people so they can stimulate the economy and then, once recession was over, go back to normal taxes.

            Boom. Done. No deficit spending. No extra taxes to cover said deficits. It’s all figured into the base tax rate.

            This, however, would require long term thinking which is a very rare commodity among politicians (probably because, frankly, it doesn’t generally appeal to the masses).

              1. Often with good reason, sadly.

                I recall being told of incontrovertible evidence of Negro* voters in my West Virginia hometown accepting $5 to vote for JFK in the 1960 primary. My first reaction was shock, but after a moment’s thought I realized that to a Black resident of that ghetto five dollars was damned good money and, really, what difference did it make which rich white man was president?

                Long term thinking is a luxury available only to those who expect to be here in the long term. Ironically, those who plan for the long term are indeed more likely to be around in the long term.
                –

                1. Well, that’s how the Romans did it, at least for a while. One candidate would offer cash, another would promise (privately paid for) public works, another would just send in the beer wagons for a block party.

                  It was more honest than taking peoples’ money by force, then using it to bribe them into voting…

            2. “This, however, would require long term thinking which is a very rare commodity among politicians (probably because, frankly, it doesn’t generally appeal to the masses).”

              Where’s the political* benefit to long-term thinking?

              *much less any financial benefit
              –

            3. > limit government spending to absolute essentials

              Then all government spending would be declared “essential.” Look what happened with the commerce clause… it’s the magic “we can regulate everything” now.

              1. In my fantasies I imagine a world where the commerce clause tells states “sure, you can regulate how the things in your state are made, but you can’t regulate how things in other states are made, so you can’t ban the sale of goods made in other states that don’t meet your standards.”

                Looking at you, California eggs.

            4. It will also require private companies to form to provide the goods and services (mainly charities and retirement funds) formerly provided the by the government.

              1. What, like union pensions?

                Might want to rephrase that, perhaps including language making pension administrators personally liable …
                –

                1. No pensions. Defined contribution plans all the way down. I’d rather have $100 dollars today than the promise of $1 million 20 years from now, because the odds that the other guy will be able to pay me $1 million in 20 years aren’t great. Promises with that long of a time delay should be considered prima facie fraud.

        2. Keynes’ case reminds me of comedian Lenny Bruce’s complaint that he was being tried for a policeman’s imitation of his routine. It would be one thing, Bruce argued, to convict him for his act, but when a non-professional comedian takes the stand and reads from notes, “Then Mr. Bruce said, quote, ‘To is a preposition, come is a verb.’ and played a drum.” it is not a proper expression of his act.

          Keynes’ main sin is profound, but it is failure to correct politicians abuse his theories; the theories may be flawed but we will never know. As has been said about Christianity, it “has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
          –

      2. In fairness to Keynes, no political has actually engaged in Keynes economics: they never run surpluses in good times. It is deficits all the way down. In its most basic version, Keynes economics is “save when times are good and use savings when times are bad”. Every government supplement to the economy should be removed when there is economic growth, be it restoring tax rates or eliminating government give aways.

        I’m not saying it would work all that great. You are right about it masking market signals, slowing the reallocation, especially of labor via retraining/career changes. While you can make an argument about moderating the rate of change to trade lesser creation for less dislocation you run dead into the information problem.

        That said, the inability to even do it according to Keynes just reinforces Sarah’s point about how the left is incompetent. No leftist worshiper of Keynes ever advocated for cutting government spending in good times.

        1. Of course not! Times are good, the money is rolling in, so they can create whole new permanent government bureaucracies to spend it all! When the good times end, they have to raise taxes to support all that added government bloat.

      3. That was kind of the point. “The market” is often more tied to (volatile and irrational) emotional states than to efficient use of limited means.
        Keynes’economic theories were largely about mitigating the former, while trying not to muck with the latter too much.
        .
        To cherry pick a few examples:
        Bank runs are the market at work, but they are not an efficient reallocation of resources.
        Tulip bulbs are very nice things, but The Greater Fool theory driving the price to several hundred dollars a bulb is neither rational, nor efficient.
        Ponzi schemes distort the market in ways inefficient, irrational, and unsustainable.
        Inflation undermines not only the market, but also society.
        .
        The Invisible Hand is a great thing, but it can be co-opted

        1. The problem with that analysis is that the people who decide when the invisible hand is malfunctioning have less and worse information than the market. They only way they get the right answer is by accident.

          Bank runs can be mitigated by deposit insurance, which doesn’t have to be provided by the government.
          Government hasn’t freed us from bubbles. Personally, I think they have more to do with novel financial instruments than any particular market failure.
          Ponzi schemes are simply fraud.
          Inflation isn’t a real problem as long as it’s low (so money doesn’t significantly change value between when it’s earned and when it’s payed) and reasonably constant (so long term investors can reliably determine real rates of return). It also has some advantages in keeping money moving rather than sitting under a mattress.

          1. If deposit insurance is provided by the same people who print the money (the government), then they can guarantee the deposits with 100% security, because if they have to pay off on those guarantees, they can do so by printing money. This, of course, deflates the currency, so it’s essentially saying “We’ll pay you $10,000 by stealing a penny from a million people and giving it to you,” but there’s a 100% guarantee that it can happen.

            If deposit insurance is provided by a non-government party, say a company with $10 billion in liquid assets they can shell out, then in theory, the insurance would be less than a 100% guarantee. Because if there is such a run on the banks that $15 billion in deposit insurance needs to be paid out right now, everyone who is trying to withdraw their deposits is only going to get two-thirds of their money back.

            In practice, though, I don’t see this happening. The reason there would be a run on the bank is if people started to think that the bank wouldn’t be able to pay out. But if it was backed by deposit insurance from a company with $X available, where the value of X is far more than the average depositor’s account holds, then each individual depositor would feel safe and the $15 billion run on the bank wouldn’t get started. So in practice, yes, deposit insurance doesn’t have to come from the government. It does, however, have to come from a source the average account holder feels utterly confident about, or it won’t have its desired effect.

        1. Well, c4c = 4c^2, so wouldn’t c4c^2 just be 4c^3? Or did you mean (c4c)^2, which I guess would be 16c^4 if I’m remembering the power rules correctly?

          I’d say we’re overthinking the hell out of this, but I suppose that’s about normal for this community.

  3. …anyone that thinks that a Socialist/Communist economy is efficicent at anything but putting money into the pockets of the oligarchs, should find out what was left in the Soviet Union and right now in China. The West was able to enforce enviromental requirements on themselves (I admit, sometimes by importing things to other places)…and still being able to outproduce the Soviet Union. China only gets away with what it does because they are willing to accept a product failure rate (and dumping of the failed products) that no Western company would accept.

    But, if you wanted to fulfill all of your OCD/feudal fantasies on a supine populace, Socialism and Communism and Fascism are great for doing that.

    1. Don’t know how efficient Sweden’s economy is, but seems one common factor in all the communal derivations is they publicly claim, “a social philosophy advocating the removal of economic inequalities among people”. The whole, rob from the evil rich to give to the deserving poor ethic. Never mind if the rich worked their hands to the bone to earn it and save it. And as always, those doing the redistribution make sure they get taken care of before anyone else.

      2. Sweden has spent the last 10+ years backing off from their social welfare state. They’ve moved away from a number of their entitlement programs because they finally realized how badly their economy was slowed down. Not to say they are not still far too big of a social welfare state for a healthy economy, but they’re better than they were.

        1. In what I consider as Sowell’s introductory economics trilogy (Basic Economics, Applied Economics, and Economic Facts & Fallacies) India is one of his “go to” examples for planned/controlled/government-interventionist economy and how pulling back on government and letting the market and trade work their magic.

        2. Yes. the Nordic countries are not socialist. Sweden is the closest but even there is not socialist. What you do have In Sweden is a system where those who were rich 75 years ago are still rich today and those who were poor 75 Years ago are still poor today. Public facilities are nice but private dwellings are small and often shabby and the waiting list for apartments in a desirable part of Stockholm in 23 years and over 10 years in outer suburbs. Over 500M people are on the waiting list, which for a country of 10MM is a lot.

          It is funny that Sweden is cutting back on the social welfare now that they have a large pool of people who are not close relations. Not a lot of genetic diversity up there until recently.

            1. The wife and I always get a kick out of the shock people (supposedly) have on some of the “House Hunter” type shows, when they’re moving from the US to just about anywhere in Europe.

              “What do you mean our $3000/mo budget will only get us a 400sqft apartment near where we want to be, with a kitchen with no stove and one bedroom???”

              Almost as amusing as the midwesterners moving to California and realizing they’re not getting a 2000sqft house on a nice lot for their $500k budget…

              1. I’ve heard tales of Americans in Germany discovering that present landlords effectively have a veto power over their ability to move; absent an endorsement from the current landlord no new lease is available. That means that tenants need to be good but not too good.
                –

            1. It’s a Europeanism. ‘M’ is a thousand, ‘MM’ is a million. Here in the U.S. ‘K’ is a thousand and ‘M’ is a million. Not to mention the different definitions of a billion…

    2. I talked with otherwise intelligent people who were horrified at how the Soviet economy ‘crashed’ after Communism. It simply didn’t occur to them that the economy had ALWAYS been that bad, but the USSR (and all the Communism fans, and all the government functionaries whose job depended on the Soviets being a threat) flat out lied about it.

      1. I wonder if it was pure luck that the people of the soviet union were so used to getting by on virtually nothing that then their government fell, it really didn’t make things that much worse.

      2. The Soviet Union was very, very good at lying to itself (which is a very Russian/oligarch thing), and pawning off bad things when they sold the “export” versions of weapons and such to their “allies.” One of the most common rumors, if I heard right, was that you had to change the oil and transmission fluid of of any Soviet-era tank after fifty to one hundred hours when you first ran it, because you would find at least a pound’s worth of metal in the bottom of the sump because of poorly-machined gears.

        The Communist Chinese government tried to get around this, and the local governors got around this by making sure to have their people near the offices you’d report problems at to…remonstrate with anyone that might be so foolish as to discuss this with higher authorities.

        I think that it was when Gorbachev tried to figure out how much was going on, he realized that nobody really knew and when they did…it was BAD.

        1. US vs Russian attack helicopters per my exposure to them during the ’91 Gulf War: For aiming the chin gun turret; Apache – very sophisticated electronic sights, MI-24 Hind – mirrors.

          2. I would be cautious comparing the export stuff that the Iraqis had versus the equipment that the US was using.

            Having said that, my vague recollection from when I happened to look up the data several years ago was that during the Iran-Iraq War, the US-made helicopters that were in use by the Iranian military generally came off on top when they went head to head with the Soviet stuff that the Iraqis were using.

            1. the non-export hind had a tv camera. A really poor quality one. None of this “look in a direction and the turret follows your look’ stuff.

        2. The Soviets spent the entire cold war over stating their capabilities, and we believed them. The US spent the entire cold war under stating our capabilities, and they believed us.

          1. We also had the difference between a “closed” society and an “open” one. A lot of our capabilities could be figured out by reading the reports we had to give to Congress. And, we’re really bad at lying for prolonged periods of time.

            The Soviets? Unless we got the actual hardware, we had to rely upon their propaganda material and anything our spies could get. And, they’re so used to lying to each other that it’s easy to lie to everyone else.

              1. The reports given to Congress are, as a rule, an order of magnitude (minimum) more real and meaningful than any similar reports given to the governing bodies of either the USSR or the PRC.

                1. Well, I was more talking about it from the perspective of Soviet block intelligence. Given how they known their public reports are massaged, why would they expect that the US public reports would have any grains of truth?

                  I ended up reading a number of books by Soviet bloc defectors over the years, and they were universally surprised by the US and how much of what they thought was just Potempkin villages turned out to be true.

                  1. There were two stories that really clicked with me on life in Russia.

                    One was them was the commissars showing “The Grapes of Wrath” as an indictment of American capitalism. The protagonist and people watch it were impressed with the sheer wealth of even the American poor. They had working cars! They could move to a different place to find a job! They were complaining about not having the food they wanted!

                    The second was from a defector that spent a month “evading his captors” and checking out supermarkets. He had to look to find a supermarket that wasn’t well stocked…so, either they were VERY good at making things look good, or they were really good here.

                    Hell, even Moscow On The Hudson, when Robin William’s character realized that he could actually get real toilet paper. As much of it as he wanted!

            2. Yeah i remember when Mitchell Gant had to sneak in and steal that MiG-31

              oh wait that was a movie.

          2. On the other hand, we built a REALLY COOL fighter after one particular incident of Soviet overstating. In fact, said fighter was so cool that the Soviets produced their single best fighter by copying our fighter’s external appearance, except smaller.

    3. Hell, it isn’t even efficient at putting money in the pockets of oligarchs. The dachas of the Party Elite in the heyday of the Soviet Union wouldn’t do as summer cabins for a well to do plumber in the US.

      1. Yes, the OUT House might have worked for the Plumber but his WIFE would have screamed bloody murder.

      2. Ah, but for most oligarchs, they are much superior than the people they rule, thus they are in a better place.

        And, yes-I’ve seen some of the party elite dacha pictures and their lifestyle-minus the servants-was probably middle to upper-middle class at best.

        1. “… their lifestyle-minus the servants-was probably middle to upper-middle class at best.”

          For too many people it is not the absolute quality that matters, it is the relative quality. The difference between Soviet ordinary citizen and Soviet “middle to upper-middle class” was probably greater than that between Western middle to upper-middle class and Western wealthy.

          There are always those who would rather rule in hell than serve in Heaven.
          –

          1. I’ve seen photos of the “relative quality” of the different levels in Soviet society. Not having to share a single room with five other people is a luxury all it’s own…

    4. You’re overlooking a whole class of folks.
      There are a lot of people who are a bit amoral, a bit ambitious, and smarter than the average bear. They’ll cheerfully agree that leftists are incompetent boobs, but like for them to have some degree of power.
      Because any system made by man, can be gamed.
      And Leftists in particular create systems ripe for exploitation.

      1. …which makes sense. Look, if you take a long, hard look at Marx and Engels, the two most successful “creators” of socialism, what do you see at the end of the day?

        Grifters. Con-men. Selling a product they know doesn’t exist and can’t exist.

      2. Which is all the explanation needed for the wealthy who endorse the Fascist Left. As an example; Bill Gates did not get rich by producing a superior product. He got rich by observing that the corporate suits who wanted to use spreadsheets to look busy didn’t want to but a computer nammed “Apple”. They wanted a machine that had a good, upstanding, Business name like IBM, and to hell with whether it was any goddamned good. Then he bought somebody else’s work, rooked IMB, and had an huge installed base that he has ruthlessly exploited ever since. He wants the Left in charge because he’s pretty sure he can twist them like a pretzel.

  4. The point here is that no one outside your group cares.

    All of those, along with Fascism and Naziism, are just differences in the color of the curtains in houses built on a foundation of collectivism and a structure of totalitarianism. They’re trivial, downright inconsequential, “differences” in comparison to the overwhelming similarities.

    1. I’ve come to the opinion that Marxism is just the Divine Right of Kings with a Science! repaint.

      Just look at how they function: Divine Right asserted that the King knows best because God said so. Marxism and its various derivatives assert that the State knows best because Science! says so.

        2. Err, no. Actual feudalism had obligations running in both directions. Communism/socialism etc. the elite have no obligations to the proles.

          1. ^^This^^

            It’s kind of like when China shows off their new super-jet that looks exactly like the cutting edge American ones…but it can’t fly.

            Feudalism’s main thing going for it is that it was better than what it replaced, which is quite damning enough.

            Communism guts the engine and wonders why the car won’t run.

            I wonder… is the cargo-cult approach to stuff (you know, “middle class people own houses, if we give everyone houses they’ll be middle class”) because humans have that thought pattern naturally, or is it because the communist theories are currently popular?

            The idea of paying next Tuesday for the hamburger you get today is always popular, and that’s what the others-have-obligations-I-have-entitlement theories boil down to.

            1. I seem to recall at least of of the old Greek philosophers coming to the conclusion that it was not possible to develop a moral framework from pure reason, largely because a sufficiently good debated could argue themselves into any position they wanted to.

              You basically have to decide what matters and devote your self to it.

            2. I think you may have put your finger on why Wimpy was never a popular character in the animated Popeyes; he’s so obviously a mooch and a work-shy bum…and he gives away too much about the Lefty Elite.

            3. It’s worse than feudalism because Marxist ideology is not only inherently authoritarian, as feudal societies are, but totalitarian, by which the regime seeks to control and direct every aspect of every bit of people’s lives. Medieval feudal monarchs and barons did not strive to do so.

  5. A perfect example of how entertainment is utterly controlled by the Marxists is DC Comics latest:

    https://pjmedia.com/culture/tyler-o-neil/2020/09/08/dc-comics-celebrates-wonder-women-of-history-aoc-elizabeth-warren-china-bat-lady-n906056

    Yes, they are celebrating among others, radical leftists who openly disparages and hates Jews.

    The Democrats, enabled by an establishment controlled by the left, is aiming to turn the USA into 1930s/1940s Germany and USSR.

    1. What they get will look a lot more like East Germany, but with Buchenwald still in business.

      1. Buchenwald is already in business in China, in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and all sorts of places, and Mongolia is next on the list.

        You heard about the end credits of Mulan? Disney thanks all the worst secret police agencies in China for helping them film in Xinjiang.

        1. If the starlet’s firm, long and loud support of Winnie the Pooh against the Hong Kong protests didn’t already do so, the “Special Slobbering Thanks to the Turpan Bureau of Public Security! XOXO!! The concentration camp smell wasn’t nearly as bad as we expected on set!!!” end credit has put me right off ever sitting through that thing.

          But the starlet they picked is perfect! It’s like totes believable that all these dudes would not figure out he’s a she:

          https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB18PH87.img

          1. It was an — uneven flick in animated form.

            But it really speaks to creative bankruptcy that they can’t try a new fairy tale.

            1. Disney’s been busy turning all of their animated stuff into live-action movies. The results have been uneven.

              I’ve been looking forward to this one. But I’m not shelling out $30 for a streamed rental so that I can watch it by myself on my own television.

              1. I wouldn’t say the results have been uneven; they’ve been uniformly disappointing, with one exception (Maleficent and sequel).

                I confess, I wonder if there isn’t some connection to copyright. Are they doing these new films to extend their protection of the originals?

                But it’s probably simply greed.

                That said, they ARE doing new fairytales. Frozen and Tangled were damn good. Oh, they don’t stand up to analysis, but Fairytales don’t. Hell, most movies don’t. Picking apart the classics is a mug’s game.

                1. Tangled may have been a new project, but Disney first started working on Frozen (or rather, an adaptation of The Snow Queen) back in 1936. Of course, the version they eventually released is nothing like the project they started in the 1930’s, but a project almost eighty years in the making isn’t what I would call a “new” project. 🙂

                  Moana was quite good too. Don’t know enough about the tale(s) it was based on to know how much of it was original writing vs how much of the plot they borrowed. I do know that a lot of Maui’s stories that he references (whether verbally or the ones tattooed on his skin) are real legends: he shows up in tales from the Maori, the Tongans, the Hawaiians, and many other cultures from that part of the world.

                  1. A lot of the Disney/Pixar animation films are pretty good. A little lefty, but it IS Hollywood. It’s the live films that suck donkey balls.

                    And, on a tangent, can we get an injunction to stop Disney (or anyone else, for that matter) making any more films ostensibly based on THE JUNGLE BOOKS? Please? I can tolerate the ALICE IN WONDERLAND films, and the animated TARZAN was actually an improvement on ERB (GREAT storyteller, miserable writer), but the Disney Pooh and Jungle Books films are crimes against Art.

          2. What Disney/ABC and the NBA are doing is the equivalent of filing movies and promoting sports events near Buchenwald and praising the SS for their assistance.

      1. I enjoyed reading Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes. I need to read her works though. Clearly an accomplished woman, I can’t tell from the children’s books if she and her husband were really figuring things out, or in love with the fad for statistics. One of those things I’ll “do someday” is figure out which one it is, but currently don’t have enough data. Her kids seemed fairly sane, from the book depictions, which does say something.

        2. The Gilbreths did serious work in the foundation of Industrial Engineering. Not so much in love with statistics, but “if you don’t measure it, you can’t really understand it”.

          1. Which makes them the antithesis of the modern Fascist Left. Any analysis involving actual math is kryptonite to them. All their favorite solutions are revealed to be piles of suppurating drek.

          2. My favorite teacher had a similar saying, “Without measurement, there’s no control.” In consequence, he scrupulously graded tests and homework and had us track time spent on homework. Sometimes students weren’t studying nearly as much as it “felt” like they were which showed in the grades.

            1. Which is why you should always lie to pollsters, never voluntarily respond to government surveys, and limit you answers to the minimum legally allowed When you have to. Measurement is about control.

      2. My favorite three scenes in Cheaper by the Dozen were —

        1) the Planned-Parenthood Woman (this was well before Roe, when eugenics and birth-control were their main gig) Mme Sanger (unnamed) is chatting up Mother, who is All About Family Planning, in fact! Papa gets in on it, and just as they’ve strung the guest well and neatly along, Papa calls the kids downstairs. All twelve of them.

        2) the riddles Papa leaves in Morse-code around the house, especially the one that worked out to Two Maggots Were Fighting in Dead Earnest,

        3) the oldest sister’s beau, whose car was named “Four Wheels, No Brakes.”

          1. Just to be clear, we are discussing the Gilbreth children’s books, not the Clifton Webb/Myrna Loy movie?

            I think Webb was physically miscast in the role (although I understand the casting for personality) but will eschew contemplating contemporary actors who would have been better.

            The Steve Martin movie, having nothing to do with the Gilbreth family, does not merit discussion.
            –

            1. I’m talking about the book. I haven’t watched the first movie. Steve Martin’s, while it has merits (positively portraying a large and loving family), has no relationship to the book, and does not begin to approach the heights of comedy achieved by the books, which left me gasping with laughter while attempting to read the really best parts to another person. That might be just me though.

              1. Myrna Loy is perfectly cast, but Webb was very popular at the time and so the role of Frank Gilbreth was tailored to him.

                To be fair, they only needed to take in the suit a few pounds, he’s got the characterization mostly right.
                –

        2. Pick three favorite scenes? You must be joking. I really like these stories too…

          The brothers teaching their youngest sister how to be popular… Including how to kiss (It’s actually how to not be kissed when she doesn’t want to be, but they get a rise out of Mother with the lead in)

          The buckets of sand and fire drills because Billy really liked fire

          And the whole whistle call for fun/treats/treasure hunt.

          Honorable mention goes to Mother’s envy of the department store clerk’s hearing aid…That he could turn it off!

    4. I was a collector of Wonder Woman from the late 70s. The only book I collected as long was whatever the current Legion of Superheroes book was.

      DC killed their last Legion book a few years ago. The Legion was never number one, but it was always top five with a loyal fan base.

      This year Wonder Woman became outright unreadable. I say that as someone who actually liked her reboot/storyline in the New 52 (where she was another scion of Zeus fooling around, this time with the Queen of the Amazons). But when we get the line “The lasso only stops lying, not mainsplaining” I tapped out.

      With it I tapped out of comics. I’d been off Marvel for years. DC had one new character I was really into, The Silencer, but her book didn’t last. The run on Batgirl I really enjoyed came to an end and I figured more woke stuff would take over. Only the Terrifics was left at DC.

      That’s at $4-$5 bucks a pop.

      Alterna and the current Boom Mighty Morphing Power Rangers books (which are really good. I never watched the show, way beyond its age when it hit, but I bought the books on a Yellow Flash review and enjoyed them) was not enough to keep me in the hobby.

      I don’t need to spend $30 for less than 200 pages of story with a high risk of being preached to about how I’m evil for being male, white, straight, cis, employed, etc.

      If I can find Alterna out of the comic shop I might pick them up…more pages and < $2 a book.

  6. Followed a depressing link over at Instapundit yesterday. Apparently Brigham Young University – which is closely linked to the LDS church – has gone far enough that students have a petition going to get the leftie stuff out of the classrooms.

    Also depressing were the comments at Instapundit, which largely ignored this cause for concern in favor of attacking fhe LDS faith.

    2. Insty has always had a lot of trolls, but about the time he went all-in on masks are wonderful, all gonna die of kung flu if we don’t sacrifice magic, it seems like a lot more showed up.

      Before there were…five, six of the crazy “everything is related to Israel/the Jews” guys, a couple of barely coherent scientism guys. Now I hardly go over there anymore and still end up with the progtard-but-saying-theoretically-rightish-stuff guys.

      1. The Right, the Left, and the Crazies seem to be united on the ‘hate the Jews’ bandwagon. With every other group officially protected, I guess they’re the only ones left who are safe to hate on, but the demented ravings of those who have apparently mainlined the Protocols of the Elders of Zion gets really old.

        It’s really fun when I encounter one who is a Trekkie, though…

        1. The theoretically-right that I’ve run into who actually hate either Israel or the Jews all seem to be European sort of right.
          Know one American conservative who thought that there was a conspiracy that involved high-level Jews, but his was almost sane. (Short version, you know how the Founders did some of their conspiring in Mason lodges because that’s where it could be secret? Like that. I’m just surprised he didn’t latch on to Catholic instead. )

          1. I was thinking of the Klan and the totally-not-Klan-but-smells-identical types, plus the “New Right” weirdos who seem to hate everything, including other “New Right” weirdos who aren’t as ideologically pure as they are.

            1. *shrugs* Every Klan type I’ve met is old-school Democrat.

              It’s not a long list, sure, especially if we don’t count the antifa sorts.

              Maybe it’s the Oregon sample that screws it up?

              1. But black and fascist can be synonyms in English. Obviously, Anti-Fa is an outright self described white supremacist terrorist organization.

                1. Irish Fascists, and Spanish ones for that matter, wore the exact shade of blue the TSA wears. Same color, same methods, same aim, same thing.

          2. Robert Bledsoe II seems to be pro Trump.

            His issue seems to be that he is of a flavor of Protestant that doesn’t see modern Israel as serving an important role in Christian religion. So he looks to modern US foreign policy, and concludes Jewish conspiracy instead of Evangelical consensus.

            Of course, Robert Conley is being a little extreme in reacting to Bledsoe II that way, if he does not apply the same principles to Tlaib, Omar, etc.

              1. Older story in OSR DnD, months? before the official stuff with the Orcs. Robert Bledsoe the second had inherited control of the Judge’s Guild IP from Robert Bledsoe the first (who passed a decade or two back). Robert Conley had been doing business with the younger Bledsoes regarding a product. Conley eventually ceased that business relationship, citing the volume and kind of statements from Bledsoe II and Bledsoe III on Facebook.

                Anyway, was litigated on blog comments, and I view the whole thing as a missed opportunity for trolling. My intuition was telling me that with a little attention to Federal house districts, some arguments could be made that the commentators would have otherwise overlooked.

                1. Thank you.

                  K, now I can find some screen-shots. Which are hard to read, and would be dead simple to fake in part or in whole… and also don’t quite match the captions put on them… and what the hell are they doing hanging out on facebook for business… my Suspicious Mind sense is tingling.

                  Looks like a business deal gone ugly with character assassination thrown in, kind of like when those guys that didn’t get hired to promote a gaming platform on their video streams were told their services weren’t wanted and one of them tried to declare the non-customer didn’t like geeks.

                  What a bunch of junior high girls.

      2. I still go over, but I’m in the comments less.

        I think a lot of the trolls are paid Dem/Dem adjacent operatives creating “proof” the right is istaphobic.

    3. More historically religious universities should be doing the same thing. Can you hear the screaming on twitter if a modern university reversed course and required a religious pledge for new employees. Requiring an oath to diversity is not an issue however.

      1. I almost applied to work at a college that did that. They were Wisconsin Synod Lutheran, and you had to include a pledge to stick with church doctrine, and have a letter from your minister and an elder vouching for your church membership and service as part of your CV.

        1. When I graduated high school I was still in the LDS church. I applied to Brigham Young University (and, because I was young and stupid–but I repeat myself–only to BYU). Part of the application process was an interview with my Branch President (Cambridge Ohio had too small an LDS population to support a Ward at the time, that changed a few years later). It included things like whether my hair was kept to the standards required at BYU, pledges of being “morally clean”, and so forth.

          The one “gotcha” was that I did not, in fact, at that time have my hair as short as required by BYU’s grooming standards. Part of the reason for that was that haircuts cost money and my family was beyond poor. Another reason was, well, in the dictionary under “Absent minded professor” they don’t have my picture, but they could. I did, however, vow that if admitted I would follow their grooming standards. The Branch President (who I have other reasons to be more than a little annoyed with) seemed to accept that but when it came down to it my application was rejected, explicitly because of said Branch President’s recommendation. When I asked him about it, he said “your hair”. I reminded him that I’d promised, and meant it, that I would keep to school and he came back with a vague “Well, I just didn’t think you should go there.”

          I was livid.

          My hair. Talk about straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.

          As a result, I ended up joining the Air Force not long after, which lead to much unpleasantness that was to follow (but also lead to the greatest joy of my life, so there is that).

          1. In the school library of my high school was a book that took as its premise that among the bitterest intergenerational disputes, hairstyle had ranked high for centuries. I don’t remember all that much of it, but among other conflicts it went into the bitter fight over abandoning powdered wigs.

            I honk I’ll see if I can find the title, which escapes me at the moment.

            1. Hairstyle and clothes are means of communication whereby you tell people things about you from their very first impression. Naturally they are contentious.

          2. “Thank you for revealing the abysmally low content of your characters. You’re right. I shouldn’t go there. I should associate with better behaved people of higher morals.” (Yeah, I know, WAY too late now.)

        2. It is a shame that ostensibly Catholic institutions, such as Notre Dame and Georgetown, cannot require similar pledges.
          –

          1. One of the reasons that, despite his Liberal Democrat politics, I find Andrew Greeley readable is his penchant for doing things like calling the Notre Dame team “The Fighting Black Baptist’s”.

          2. They can… if they let go of the Federal money teat. But they traded their independence for money and tax advantages.

    4. Universities have to hire professors and lecturers from somewhere. It’s not a good idea to just hire your own graduates, and most of the rest of academia is thoroughly infested, so it’s inevitable that some of it’s going to show up at BYU.

        1. Far better to promote alternatives to universities. We don’t need them for teaching. They may still have value as research organizations, but I have my doubts.

          2. There are alternatives to universities. And I’ll be the first to agree that too much emphasis has been placed on a college education.

            However, universities are overall a good thing. There are traits and skills that are most easily taught and developed at a good university. Flat out getting rid of universities is something to be mourned.

            1. Today’s column from the James G. Martin Center For Academic Renewal:

              It’s Time to Start a New University
              Two viruses—one biological, the other ideological—have delivered a mortal blow to American higher education.

              Hundreds, maybe thousands, of colleges and universities will soon be wiped out by an unprecedented combination of financial exigency and revolutionary ideology. Professors at collapsing institutions are desperate to leave, and slews of senior faculty, including some very distinguished ones, have taken early retirement.

              Empty campuses will flood the market, amid extreme softening in the commercial real estate sector more generally. Eager buyers might consider the leafy 60-acre campus of MacMurray College, an Illinois liberal arts school that closed its doors in May after 174 years in business. The campuses of Oregon’s Concordia University-Portland and Ohio’s Urbana University also became available this spring.

              Shrewd investors buy when there’s blood in the streets. For academia, that time is now.

              Many Americans cherish liberal education because it has immeasurably enriched their lives, and because it disposes citizens against every sort of tyranny. Some of these people have the means to help found a new university—one dedicated to free and open inquiry into all areas of human experience, in whole and part, and to sheltering the guttering flames of memory, tradition, and language from the blustering winds of justice, equality, and job training.

              But would such an endeavor be financially viable? Could any school of liberal learning that does not already have strong roots hope to survive in the wasteland of higher education? Could it hope to seed new growths that might help to reclaim liberal education for future generations of Americans?

              I believe the answer to all these questions is yes, and I’m not alone in this view. In his book The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, the distinguished historian Warren Treadgold presents a practical plan for how to get a new institution up and running. A thought experiment may help to make the case. …
              –

      2. The problem isn’t that *some* of it is showing up at BYU. Some of it’s been there for quite some time. The problem is that – from the sound of things – it’s starting to rapidly expand throughout at least some of the departments. It’s one thing to have some instructors whose beliefs aren’t in-line with the religion that sponsers and administers the school. It’s another when you have a large number of them who are openly contemptuous of that religion’s strictures and doctrines (and it’s starting to sound as if that might be the case).

        1. Think how bad West Point got, and how many superiors and instructors signed off on Spenser Rapone before he pulled his little “Communism Will Win” stunt.

          As far as I know, West Point is still a dysfunctional socialist stronghold, and West Point grads are still on my ‘do not hire’ list. Which, if it gets any larger, will eventually become “any college degree after 1980,” plus a list of “not ever.”

          1. Sorry TRX, but my college degrees are all post-1980. All a college degree is is a sheet of paper saying you had the ability to stick with the program from beginning to end over a 2 to 4 year period (or 5 or 6 in some cases.) Whether you acquired the skills and knowledge desired should be evaluated before hiring because, yes, you may get someone who is a happy little socialist drone that can regurgitate all the answers the professors wanted, yet still doesn’t know beans.

            1. It turns into a risk issue. The odds of getting a little socialist agitator go up with the more recent the degree and higher the degree. Even though the odds might be low even for a non-studies degree from 2012, the cost of one of the little sh!ts is high, meaning the risk (odds * cost) is high.

              1980 seems a bit early, but I can see it for non-STEM after about 2016.

              And studies degrees resumes aren’t even round file material…they are kindling.

              1. I would put 2010 as my dividing line. It’s certainly where it was at my alma mater. A few years ago we had a graduation speaker cancelled due to some offense against the woke, I no longer remember what, and you could almost perfectly guess which side of the debate anyone was going to fall on based on whether they graduated before or after 2010.

                1. It would probably be possible to construct an algorithm (We don’t discriminate! Selection of candidates is done by an algorithm!) combining such factors as “cancelled” persons (professors, students, speakers), speakers who ought have been cancelled (any institute inviting Mumia Abu-Jamal, for example), administrative bloat, preponderance of Departments of Grievance Studies, denial of student rights (such as fair trial, right to confront accusers, etc.) and such other factors as seem relevant.

                  Sufficient quantities within any given window would disqualify applicants carrying degrees of such faux academic quality.
                  –

                  1. Had I a degree, I would wish to talk privately with a number here about such tests, whether the degree passed such criteria, and whether or not, assessed independently of schooling, I am too woke to employ.

                    I don’t have a GED, so I guess that saves time. 🙂

        2. Honestly, I would not be surprised to hear of a large-scale firing coming soon at BYU, were that the case. The Church does it’s best to allow for a lot of freedom of thought/opinion/expression thereof, and they try (with varying degrees of success) to stay mostly politically neutral, but open contempt for and challenging of the Church’s authority is likely to result in being asked to find employment elsewhere.

        3. Look at the Catholic universities to see what’s coming. At one point they were considering suspending Catholic University as a Catholic University. Catholic University is the pontifical university of America. Notre Dame is still nominally Catholic, but the Jesuit universities aren’t really especially now that they’re not Jesuit but in the Jesuit tradition.

          The Jesuits were lost the day they changed from the greater glory of God, to a man for others. it happened in the 60’s but I still find myself writing AMDG (ad majorem Dei Gloriam) on notebooks and such. Give me a boy up to the age of 7 and I’ll give you the man. Well, those men have been trained to put man before God for the past 50 years.

    5. Oh, the humanities department is absolutely infested with left wing nonsense. Part of the problem is that being left wing is a social good for academia and far too many professors seek the praise of men. Some of the students are part of the problem as well, they seem to think that the fact that the church teaches against homosexual behavior is a sign they are being oppressed. Personally I think if you have tithing subsidized tuition and you should either shut up or transfer instead of whining about how you can’t date the same sex.

    1. Yeah, but afaict NK isn’t even a real communist country. It’s pretty much a pure military dictatorship.

      2. I’d call it pure hereditary absolute monarchy, with the Church of Marx as the state religion.

        1. Somewhat classic feudalism with modern twists. You have your noble class, knights and squires, and most definitely peasants. So. Many. Peasants. With near feudal lifespans should they not kowtow properly. No chivarly. Just pure, crushing poverty, hidden not-well-at-all.

          The bastard Kims have much to answer for, but they’ve ever been a Chinese puppet. The ChiComs are the turds floating at the very top of the bowl.

      3. It’s not really even that. North Korea is a traditional Korean monarchy (in all but name) with Marxist trappings, but apparently without the traditional checks on power via other powerful individuals in the country.

  8. In all my life, I knew plenty of people personally who had run away from Communism – in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Eastern Europe … but no one that I knew personally had ever run from the US to communism…
    Funny, that.

    1. Well there’s Bernie Sanders. Of course he’s been as effective at running from the USA as he’s been at anything he’s done which basically is not at all (with the possible exception of stealing from the people of VT). Massive inefficiency, proof that he’s a communist sympathizer (or useful idiot, like the penguin thing who can tell?).

        1. If he were one of my cats I’d call him a lying sack of fur. Although National Socialist has a ring to it somehow, weren’t there folks that referred to themselves as that in the past 🙂 ? He certainly has some brownshirt SA working for him in the form of the self negating Antifa.

            1. Which wasn’t real National Socialism, Bernie or the historical one? If it’s Bernie he’s going to look like the dude with the failed Molotov Cocktail… The historical one is the benchmark the left use for National Socialism (although they conveniently forget the Socialist part…)

    2. Well, there was Lee Harvey Oswald, but we know how he wound up.
      (Amusing side note: I got invited to a Baptist girls’ slumber party as a teen. By the adults, that is; the girls ignored me. Right up to the moment I opened a closed door to discover a circle of girls on the floor, with a candle, trying to raise the spirit of Lee Harvey Oswald. The draft from the door blew the candle out. Let’s say my popularity went from 0 to -10 in a nanosecond…)

        1. Mr. Bellisario of Belisarius Productions served with him as a Marine, and I’m pretty sure he kept praying for his soul. But yeah, not real likely to be among the Blest, and why the heck were they fooling around with the occult? Obviously God was making use of you to keep them out of trouble.

          Sigh. All these idiots. Being a useful idiot for Communists is never a good gig. Even if you’re armed.

          1. If you do believe it’s a real phone, you are placing a call with no knowledge of who might pick up on the other end, and no caller ID.

            And what do you do if it’s not a phone, but a door?

                    1. Best friend from third grade. Started off with numerology, got into seances and other games. Ended up with a black dog that wasn’t depression. When she got clear she said it was as if a black fog had been lifted from her.

                2. Right. Do not call up that which you cannot put down. Even if it’s the normally suppressed voices in your head.

            2. And such are the stories of horror written.

              It was a door in a stone wall in the cellar of the old church. A large door, with great wrought iron hinges set deep into the stone walls, and iron bands holding the hewn wooden boards. The latch and locking mechanism were like-wise large, and of extremely robust construction. The wooden boards appeared to be of some kind of dark oak, nearly black in color such that they drank every bit of light that fell upon them, and so hard that even a knife could barely scratch them. When you stood back from the door and looked at it from the other side of the room, it seemed to disappear. But as you drew closer, while you began to see it more clearly, it appeared oddly-shaped, as if the angles of the corners, the very dimensions of the door, were somehow…wrong. The nearer I drew to the door, the more unease I felt, as if spiders were crawling on my body. And the cold never seemed to abate in that cellar room, not even in the height of the summer’s heat.

              The ancient deacon told me the only key to the door was stored at the diocese at the state capitol. He also made me promise him to never attempt to open the door, under any circumstances. But when I queried him further, he only said that my soul would be in mortal sin should I ever break my promise. And for him, that was the end of the matter and he would say no more.

            3. You need to be very careful on making those kinds of calls, because usually whatever is on the other end has very little conception of the difference between “help me” and “eat me.”

      2. Yeah, you gotta be careful about that kind of thing. You may be calling for a specific party, but on the other end it could be received as ‘To Whom it May Concern’.

      3. Of all the spirits I would think teen girls might try to contact, Oswald would be pretty far down on the list.

        Some recently-OD’d teenage heartthrob, yes. Ed Gein or Ted Bundy, yes. But Oswald would be from their grandparents’ generation. And Kennedy the Sainted doesn’t have the place in the SJW pantheon he used to; Party ideology is *much* different now. Sort of like Martin Luther King no longer holds a position in B-lack ideology. Times have changed, he’s an embarrassment to modern ideas.

    3. There have been a few who moved from The West to the USSR. Mind you, these were generally individuals in the intelligence community who had suddenly noticed a newfound level of interest from their peers and co-workers.

      2. There are a number of Americans who have taken up residency in Cuba. Of course, those are almost uniformly people opting for Cuba’s open-air prison versus the behind-bars type on offer in the USA.
        –

  9. Now, now, communism is perfectly efficient… at ensuring that you have a choice of one. When there’s no decision to be made, you get perfect efficiency!

  10. It seems to me that the communists have abandoned economic efficiency and prosperity as goals. It’s the old progressives who actually believed in progress, while the current Leftist line is “Learn to live with less, you greedy, hate-filled bastards!” Talk of distributing Free Stuff is only there to draw in the Useful Idiots.

    So when Obama destroyed the US economy, it wasn’t even with the stupid looter idea that it would make the rest of the world richer. It was with the idea that making the US poorer was an act of “economic justice” worth doing even if the rest of the world became poorer too.

    They believe in central control. They believe that the only sin is to be “right wing.” So if central control brings poverty and “right wing” free markets bring prosperity, then poverty is virtuous and prosperity is an evil to be stamped out.

    Alternatively, they’re commie-zombies, infected with a Soviet propaganda-warfare virus left over from the Cold War.

    1. Good point. Thus their Gaia worship and obsession with “inequality” — a “problem” they address more by tearing some down than building any up.
      –

          1. Building things also tends to require compromise, compromise with reality (you cannot build a twenty-story tower of straw) and compromise with other interests (contractor, architect, occupants, etc.).

            Compromise is not a strong suit for these protesters.
            –

    3. Obama is a sh-t Midas. Remember that fracking became a thing during his administration. I think fracking is the single most important geo-political and economic event of the century. It, quite literally, changed everything. That’s why the Chinese puppets and other bribe recipients want so much to stop it.

      1. The effect of fracking is woefully under reported; it has strengthened America by ensuring an uninterruptible energy supply while weakening our opposition — Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the other petro-states — and encouraging, among other effects, ending of tensions over Israel in the Middle East. Fracking has enhanced America power more than any three weapons systems.

        These effects are the stuff of doctoral theses but there’s no interest in any such analysis.

        Somewhat related: Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal reported that the recent Navalny poisoning has Germany rethinking selling Russia rope with which to hang Germany the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
        –

        1. As a side benefit, it has kept China afloat. Oil at $80 – $100 per barrel would be more pain than the current Chinese government could bear. China would be far more threatening to its neighbors if it couldn’t afford oil to run its economy.

  11. I’ve gotten into the habit of asking the devoted Communists “if the revolution comes, what do you think will happen to you, specifically?”

    That always stops them. Sure, a few will come back with “this one annoying thing in my life will go away,” but they never seem to consider that a true revolution won’t work out in their favor, _personally_. They also get really upset when I point out that their job in particular probably won’t exist any more, and they’d probably end up working on an assembly line somewhere (or on a farm!) instead of at the noticeably higher-paying and easier job they currently had.

    1. See, the thing that drives most of them is that they deeply believe that because they could answer all the set-up questions they are actually smart, and should be running things. It would break their tiny minds to accept that, since they don’t actually have any useful skills, they are useless freeloaders. OF COURSE they will be rewarded with important posts in the New Order!

      And the fact that every revolutionary State has ended up in the hands of thugs, with the biggest monster at the top, simply won’t penetrate their dense little skulls.

      1. I have a young cousin who went on on an about how things would be different after the revolution, she has a degree in resentment studies from Bard, and went to a progressive school in NYC (think about that for a second). She got very angry when I pointed out that post revolutionary states tend to be run by people like Ted Bundy and administered by people like me.

        She hasn’t talked to me since and just gets into fights on FB with my sister. I have to wonder if she’s out in Portland or if that’s too real. She’s actually a very timid girl and was a lovely child. Too bad.

    2. Actually, cirby, if they were especially good at helping to bring “the revolution” to a successful conclusion , they would be among the first group that got stood up against the wall… protesting all the way they would be.

    3. They tend to think that they will be members of the Nomenklatura…indeed, this in some (many) cases is the reason for their affinity with the ideology.

      Years ago, I was at a company management class at which we had several outside speakers. One of them was a Marxist professor, who proceeded to inform us that our political, philosophical, and religious beliefs were motivated by our Class positions and Class interests. I raised my hand and asked if *his* attraction to Marxism might be based on the idea that people of his sort would have more power, and be better rewarded, under a Communist system.

      He didn’t like that very much.

      1. I see it more as, “Your only talent is mouthing communist propaganda. If the communists take over, they won’t need propaganda any more. You’ll end up busting your ass on a communal farm, IF they don’t just shoot you.”

      2. I’ve done that, it’s great. You get that momentary cognitive dissonance pause.

        I had a professor lecture me about Habermas’s notion that the intellectuals were members of no class, which is what made them pure. I did myself no favors by noting that only intellectuals were a class in a Marxist sense, and there is no other sense because class is a Marxist notion.

        The best part of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia was the section where he made just that point. The academic class are the kids who did well at school and were always praised for doing well at school. The world doesn’t reward doing well at school to the degree the swats believe it should. The B+ students who played ball tended to do better in life. Just listen to them complain about how Trump got in to Penn. That’s what they know so that’s what they value.

        I think the current situation, where the rich are aligned with the rioters, is simply because the tech rich are kids who did well at school.

        NB. I said did well at school not intelligent. Doing well at school is a skill. Of course, I have to say that since the gap between my test scores and my grades might be the largest ever recorded. I went to Europe for university to get away from continuous assessment.

        I apologize for the name dropping. I seem to be doing too much of that today. I sound like an intellectual, which I most certainly am not.

        1. There are two kinds of people who do well in school. ‘Intellectuals’ and scholars, intellectuals are people who build their entire worldview on the notion that doing well in school is vitally important. Scholars are people who enjoy studying something. Sadly, the Intellectuals tend to take over institutions of learning, because scholars want to keep studying what interests them and can’t be bothered to play staff-room politics, which is why, in England in the late 18th Century, most of the important scientific discoveries were made by people who had not come through the educational institutions: the Universities had been taken over by Intellectuals and had instituted orthodoxies (in that instance, Anglican orthodoxy).

        2. “I had a professor lecture me about Habermas’s notion that the intellectuals were members of no class, which is what made them pure.”

          It is difficult, based on considerable acquaintanceship with the intellectuals, to dispute the assertion that they have no class.

          I also agree with their claims of purity, but will refrain from expressing an opinion on what comprises that pureness. Certainly they are untainted by contact with reality as it is commonly known.
          –

    4. You’ve actually met a real communist? Wow. In these sticks I cannot recall anyone who would actually wear that label. It would be like walking around wearing a pointy hat and declaring they were an Exalted Cyclops of the KKK. It simply isn’t done. Despite what members of other sections of the country think, (Yankees) Being a member of that organization rates somewhere far below child molester in the estimation of folks around here. I expect the two of them could probably meet for coffee and swap stories about how disliked they were. If my history serves me I believe that per capita, you could always find more members of the Klan in Portland than in most cities in the South. Jus’ sayin’.

      1. I recall in the late 1980’s or maybe early 1990’s there were cross burnings… in/around Dubuque, IA of all places. Dunno if it was truly Klan or idiot wannabes or what. Just kept well clear.

    5. The True Revolution will somehow leave Apple in business, so they can still have their all-essential idevice, right?

      To quote the bunny, “What a Maroon!”

    6. or point out to the barista with the degree in underwater basket weaving that he\ll just be working at People’s Coffee Collective #234 rather than Starbucks…. the high paying job he/she thinks they are ‘due’ wont magically materialize…

      (or the people with film/animation/whatever degrees with no demo reel at all and no credits list, living in.. well, let’s say central VA who think they are somehow magically going to make it big…)

    7. I like to annoy the after-the-apocalypse preppers that way. “So, after it all falls down, what are your qualifications to be in charge? Stock broker, X-ray tech, electrical engineer, state meat inspector… you have no useful skills; you’ll be stoop labor, pulling weeds by hand in a field somewhere.”

      Out of the knowledge in my head, not dependent on books, I can make gunpowder, and beer, and do basic blacksmithing, and I’m working on doctoring. Which isn’t all that big of a subject once you subtract practically all of the modern pharmacopia, diagnostics, and surgical procedures…

      1. I know of NO Preppers that think THEY will be in charge. The prepper idea is to survive and possibly rebuild. Being in charge is assume that there is something to be in charge of.

  12. On the idea of the leftists wanting full control, the governor of NY State basically just admitted that the reason he won’t allow indoor dining in NY City is that he doesn’t have a big enough hammer with a long enough reach to ensure compliance with whatever rules he wants to impose (just TOO MANY locations to keep Big Brother’s eye on). So the blanket ban remains in effect.

    https://abc7ny.com/health/gov-cuomo-explains-why-indoor-dining-is-still-on-hold-in-nyc/6414004/

    1. Five quatloos says Cuomo is re-elected by a large majority.

      The Republicans will, as is their usual practice, choose as their candidate some loser so odious that New Yorkers will swallow their anger and put Coumo back in office.

  13. All the Democrats want is a permanent monopoly on the government, with total control over every aspect of our lives. In exchange, they promise to eliminate all discord and ‘take care’ of us.

      1. The reason most Leftist women believe that men are irredeemable sexist pigs is because far too many Leftist men are. But of course, they’re the “good guys,” so if they treat women like objects, then surely right-wing men must be worse…

        1. There’s a couplet in the song “Love the on you’re with” that makes me cringe every time I hear it;

          “There’s a girl right next to you,
          and she’s just waiting for something to do.”

          *shudder*

          No wonder Lefty women have a chip on their shoulders.

          And then there’s the case of Ira Einhorn: Dedicated Lefty Environmentalist, admired by all the Good People. Murders his girlfriend and keeps the body in a trunk. And there are STILL people on the left who are outraged that he was extradited, tried, and imprisoned.

          They should have barbecued his ass in national television.

        2. There was a narcissist writer for one of the big establishment presses (WaPo) whose piece on why she considered her own sons potential rapists went viral. She doubled down with a follow up piece on how problematic her teenage sons’ response was. They were, you perceive, hurt and betrayed by her essay. One even expressed suicidal thoughts.

          She complained that she was done with men, since even two boys, raised progressive by a single mom, were unable to embrace feminism enough to put her emotional needs, or even The Cause, first. Not to mention all those men out there who continue to let her down, not give her what she needs, and, let’s face it, be self-absorbed human beans (like human beans do). And these were all gents in full-throated support of Feminism and vigorous denouncers of misogyny.

          No wonder the male–>female trans ratio is something like 40-to-1.

          1. I had the impression that being narcissist was now a requirement for writing at the WaPo … There are a few non-narcissists (Mark Thiessen, Hugh Hewitt) but they only get published on the site, never in the paper.

            Their definition of a “good” conservative is one who attacks actual conservatives (or/and Trump.) Perhaps it isn’t narcissism that motivates Rubin and Boot (to name but two) but rather the same desires as motivated Vidkun Quisling.
            –

          3. And when she’s old and frail and needs to be in assisted living, she’s going to wonder why those boys stuck her in a grotty old folks home and never visit.

    1. Rochester’s entire police command structure resigned today. The mayor was apparently caught flat-footed by it.

      1. It’s a hell of a world where police chiefs are forced to resign in disgrace for doing their jobs.

          1. That is how I interpreted their resignation statements.

            … Rochester Police Chief La’Ron Singletary released a statement Tuesday announcing his retirement and calling criticism of his handling of the investigation an “attempt to destroy my character.”

            “As a man of integrity, I will not sit idly by while outside entities attempt to destroy my character,” the police chief of the city in upstate New York said in a statement.

            “The members of the Rochester Police Department and the Greater Rochester Community know my reputation and know what I stand for,” Singletary continued. “The mischaracterization and the politicization of the actions that I took after being informed of Mr. Prude’s death is not based on facts, and is not what I stand for.”

            An attorney representing the children of Daniel Prude said

            “Clearly, the conduct of the officers in Mr. Prude’s case was inhumane, and the subsequent cover-up was unacceptable,” read a statement from attorney Antonio Romanucci. “We look forward to securing justice for Mr. Prude and to having Rochester leaders do the hard work needed to address issues of systemic racism and training protocols in the police department.”

            The ME who declared Prude’s death a homicide, “citing complications of asphyxia as well as excited delirium and acute PCP intoxication as causes of his death” is one of the peoople who ought resign.
            https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rochester-police-chief-command-staff-announce-retirement-amid-protests-over-death-of-daniel-prude/
            –

          2. Yup. As I noted, the Mayor apparently wasn’t expecting the resignations, and was caught completely off-guard by them. When the media asked her about the resignations, her response was essentially, “Give me time to come up with a statement.” She definitely wasn’t expecting this.

        2. Looks to me like they skittered off ahead of an official investigation and left the rank-and-file patrolmen swinging in the wind.

          Their replacements will be absolutely faithful toadies for City Hall.

    2. The analysis was fun. By siding with the mob, they left themselves wide open for multiple lawsuits from any patrons still around the *next* time they get mobbed. While going broke slowly, they’ve enabled the high speed route, too.

      I really need to get some popcorn…

      1. They have also given both their hazard and liability insurers grounds to deny coverage due to their endorsement of the rioters.

    4. I wonder how many members of the staff at those (soon to be out of business) restaurants are African-American? Considering the collateral damage done Rochester’s police management, the many Black lives lost in the rioting and absence of robust police presence, it seems clear that some Black Lives Matter less than others.
      –

  16. What is amazing to me is that you can tell leftists that their current tactics are driving them over a cliff. That they were already tried in America in ’68 and failed very badly. And none of them notices. Democrats are supposed to be anti-racist and anti-prohibitionist. So who do they run? A long time racist and prohibitionist. .And Democrats flock to him. . They don’t even make excuses. They just ignore the criticism. A cult.

    Napoleon – never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.
    2020 – interfere all you want, they won’t even notice.

    1. They count ’68 as a win because, in conjunction with Tet, it convinced Hanoi they could win and Washington that they couldn’t.

      The US violent revolutionary riot crap in 1968 and the Tet offensive in RVN both failed on the ground but succeeded in the relevant target opinion pools with the able assistance of fellow travelers like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

      1. And the thing is, there’s no similar pivotal opinion driver comparable to Uncle Walter, and there’s no foreign adversary in proxy combat awho is funding the domestic unrest (unless China is meddling – have not seen anything on that). Just like SLS/Orion is LARP Apollo program, the current LARP 1960s radical “This time for sure!” Bullwinkle Riots are but pale Cargo Cultish imitations of some of the forms without understanding the environmental differences.

        1. I’ve seen reports here and there that the now-closed Chicom consulate in Houston was being used as a base for spinning up the radicals. Another story said that they were using some heavy AI to identify possible riot-leaders/agents on anti-social media and were sending targeted messages to such.

          I want to see a *real* Orion spacecraft. I’ll stay out of the blast range, though…

          1. Polywell Fusion would make very good rockets. It needs further research, Research stopped a few years ago. There have been no show stoppers so far. Except for no more research.

            1. There are a number of scientists saying that electrons trying to escape at the cusps, the seams between the magnetic fields, will radiate more energy than fusion can produce.

              Maybe if they made the cusp angles shallower? Instead of a cube, make the containment grid a dodecahedron?

              I do hope there is an answer, and the Farnsworth-Hirsch-Bussard Fusor can become a viable energy source.

              1. We’ve been ten years away from fusion power for the last sixty years… Lockheed managed to spin funding rounds for that schtick *twice*.

        2. The Chinese own chunks of Reddit, Hollywood, and various mass media corporations. And Google and Amazon are doing their best to show the CCP they are compliant with the Party line, trying to get a share of the Chinese market.

          Maybe not “meddling” directly, but a buttload of “opinion shaping” (as Google and Facebook call it) is going on.

          1. The Chinese own an awful lot of politicians, judges, universities, etc., Best thing is they don’t even do it directly. They simply put the politicians kid, or his brother, or his wife on the payroll and presto change, the kid is managing $6.5B in Chinese assets and his dad’s policy toward China is going to be “Trump on Steroids”. Made in America baby is Biden’s new thing. 😜

            I did a lot of work in China back in the day. I’m not ugly and I was younger and fitter then but let’s just say my experience with extremely beautiful women throwing themselves at me Is limited to a short period in China when we were considering moving a function there.

            1. Had you been detailed to investing in operations in Eastern Europe during the Soviet Union’s heyday I am confident you’d have found yourself equally a hot-chick-magnet there.

              It isn’t merely the opportunity to suborn a capitalist, it is also a potential First Class ticket out of the Hellhole.
              –

              1. I had a boss who had this happen to him in Poland. He was a bit of a Tom Cat, so I’m sure that his pictures exist in some old warehouse in Warsaw.

                1. I also have a colleague whose pictures are somewhere in Beijing. He was genuinely surprised and disappointed that the rest of us had had similar offers. Poor sod, he thought his luck had changed

              2. The approach for those looking to get out of the hell hole was usually honestly commercial. I’ve been places and seen things.

            2. And if Democrats win they will own a US President, as Hunter Biden is already on the CCP payroll. Of course the real POTUS would be Harris and she is an adoring advocate of the CCP’s ideology and method of ruling.

        3. Barr said China was meddling more than Russia in this election.

          Adam Schiff vehemently said that this was false. Since degree of foreign meddling is a rather subjective assessment, and China has more money than Russia, Schiff’s intensity of denial is probably itself confirmation.

          2. yeah, playing games in Zuckerbook ads vs. funding the rioter-bail fund or somesuch is, I think, the line. The USSR was actively supporting the anti-war movement in the US, just as later they were actively supporting the anti-nuclear movement worldwide with funding specifically to the anti-cruise-missile idiots in NATO. Actually they were spending money all around the world until they were gone, which can be clearly seen by who immediately collapsed when they went away – lots of quick peace deals and such.

            If only Cuba had gotten a push to collapse and free those poor people, but Bush 41 was not there long enough, and perhaps distracted by Kuwait and German reunification costs, and Billy-Jeff was never going to allow anything against Castro.

      2. The TET offense succeeded well beyond Hanoi’s hopes. Not only did they succeed in the primary mission to destroy the Viet Cong but they won the propaganda war with Walter. The Viet Cong were NEVER an important part of the war after TET, it was the North Vietnamese Army that the US fought.

  17. If this is a duplicate delete it. My log in was wonky.

    What is amazing to me is that you can tell leftists that their current tactics are driving them over a cliff. That they were already tried in America in ’68 and failed very badly. And none of them notices. Democrats are supposed to be anti-racist and anti-prohibitionist. So who do they run? A long time racist and prohibitionist. .And Democrats flock to him. . They don’t even make excuses. They just ignore the criticism. A cult.

    Napoleon – never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.
    2020 – interfere all you want, they won’t even notice.

  18. “Okay, we all have, but their cracks allowed this idiotifying (totally a word) cult-like “explanation for everything” to invade their brain, and that thing eats your ability to function and your common sense.”

    Intellectual brain cancer.

    1. Nah, it’s more like Kuru — the human-to-human version of Mad Cow Disease. Brain rot caused by taking in defective beliefs.

  19. And for the sake of definitions, again, let’s make this clear: “on the right” to the left means anyone not of the body.…therefore not of the body),

    “Return of the Archons,” n’est pas?

  20. It’s the billionaires supporting the left that amaze me. I’ve spent a fair amount of time around leftists (who hasn’t these days). They are every bit as incompetent and stupid as Sarah writes. But Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, and on and on in the ranks of the billionaires. You would think they would have a clue about how the economy works, about employee attitudes and skills, about bureaucracy, about the freedom that has made the USA different than North Korea or Albania or Angola.

    But no! Just more stupid little totalitarians who think 1) they will be the ones running things and 2) they are so smart they can run the USA as a top-down enterprise.

    Ha ha ho ho (rolling on the floor) to 1! You’ve got to #@$%$#g kidding me to 2!

    1. There are still those that profit from the stupid. Or did you imagine that Colin Kneeboy Capernicky would be pulling in million dollar checks for his lackluster, average at best throwing arm? Social capital can be earned by setting the newest woke trend. Actual capital can be earned via venmo, etc from Twatter.

      And foolish companies that push all the wrong buttons can lose even more money when the mob comes for them. Sure, they’d be better off in the long term by sticking to just the business. But for some industries, short term bumps can be got for relatively little effort. Then it keeps going. And one day you find yourself teaching critical race theory in the lab and wonder where all the real scientists went…

    2. Insanely wealthy rulers don’t need a whole economy to live well. They can get by on a quite piss poor ones.

      What they need is a population that cannot interfere with their grand designs.

      And of course, some of them worship an evil god.

        1. More than half of all the guns in the entire world are in the hands of private American citizens. Who own more guns than all the military and police forces in the world, combined.

          “They’re not coming to take our guns. They’re coming to give us theirs.”

          1. I once ran the numbers, gun-owning Americans outnumber all the military and paramilitary forces in the world combined by about three to one. That’s just current gun owners and doesn’t count the “extra” guns they could hand to currently unarmed friends or acquaintances who, at the 11th hour, finally see the light.

            1. And it is not like we have guns and ammo to spare. We need those multiple guns in those multiple calibers in case one breaks. We wouldn’t just hand out guns and ammo to people we trust. We are FAR to greedy for that.
              I really hope it is not too fast. The whole which one do I grab, which one do I grab, is a real problem.
              Damn, I better pick a default, just in case. But which one, I don’t want the others to feel bad.

              1. Anyone I know who I would trust with a gun already has several of their own. Anyone else… they chose poorly, and I’m not bailing them out.

              2. “I don’t want the others to feel bad.”

                It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a neglected gun is apt to go on a killing spree.
                –

    3. I’ve seen it suggested that Zuckerberg got fabulously rich too easily and too young. So he hasn’t had the necessary real-world experience to understand how things work.

      No idea on the others.

      1. Understanding how to sell a network of personal information as a fun social outlet is one thing. Actually understanding how people work and what most people want from life is another thing.

    4. It goes way back. Henry Ford actually donated money to the American Communist Party, and swung a deal with the Soviets to build Ford factories in the USSR.

    5. I suspect it’s their not-very-deep-seated desires to be a king. They have all this money, and they want more power. So supporting the party-of-rebranded-feudalism will, to their way of thinking, make them more likely to net a crown of some kind?

      Of course, they fail to see–just like so many of the useful idiots out there–that there are no guarantees they’ll be the one with the crown in the end.

      (And then there’s Soros. Generally speaking, I don’t wish for/advocate for people’s deaths…but I can’t help but think the world would be a FAR safer place if he and his heirs were to meet their Maker and have to face the eternal.)

  21. I was the agricultural economist on the first World Bank Teams that went to Turkmenistan and Tajikistan after the breakup of the USSR. The Stans were colonies whose job was to supply their rest of the USSR with cotton, wine vegetables. They dammed up the two major river that fed the Aral Sea and diverted it mainly to grow cotton. In the process they destroyed the environment and now the Aral Sea hardly exist. The agricultural communes completely controlled everything and everybody. There was no division between economic, social and economic activities. Fortunately, they did allow the peasants to have their own gardens, which were so efficient that they produced a large proportion of the agricultural production in the former Soviet Union. I visited a tractor repair facility where the tractors were brought in every 7 years and rebuilt. Capital was never replaced. On one commune the leader proudly pointed to one tractor which was from 1935,

    Later, when I went to Albania, where my wife is from, I visited one farmer who said that there was a room underneath the living room where they kept sheep during the time of Enver Hoxa. Enver claimed to have created the only pure communist society that had completely eliminated private property. It was illegal to even own a chicken. The farmer would cut the vocal cords of the sheep and harvested feed at night to feed them. When the regime fell, people on the communes and co-ops destroyed much of the factories, farms and vineyards. The people still remembered where their property lines were and took it back and divided up the livestock. It was anarchy and became somewhat of a warlord country because of the total distrust of government. All the party members lived in the Bloku, and people were forbidden to turn their heads to look at the houses or people living there.

    If you did something that was against the orders of the regime, the whole family was sent to the Camps to perform hard labor in the fields, building railroads or the mines. They were forbidden to to talk to anyone on the outside, even if they worked with them in the fields. One of my wife’s aunt’s was married to some that was sent to he camps. Anyone with a family member in the camp, was considered to have a “bad biography”, which meant you could only get certain jobs. Everyone had a passport and had to get permission to move somewhere else. As a result one did not mention that they knew anyone in the camps.

    Because my wife was very intelligent and her father was a technocrat, she was able to go to the best school that most of the party members went too. She even won the math Olympiad for Albania and was able to study for physics in Hungary. Still, she was sent off to Northern Albania to teach physics in a small town.

    I could go on but you get the picture.

  22. “… when people ask why left-wing mayors are destroying their own cities, I think it’s because they don’t think they’re destroying them.”

    I am reminded of Baltimore’s mayor and “we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.” The Left sees rioting by the “poor & oppressed” (note, the Left assumes they are only poor because they’re oppressed) as legitimate expression of grievance because, well, everything s understood on the Left in the context of grievance. Their moral analysis is a calculus of grievance: whose is legitimate, whose illegitimate and how to rank order the first kind.

    They view riots with the same equanimity as progressive parents view toddler tantrums: a natural response to a oppressive imbalance of power, not an insufficiency of self-control which requires tutoring to overcome.
    –

    1. Until the mob reaches their homes. Then, as with Resistance Jenny of Seattle, it’s time to decry the violence!

      Hilariously, none of them perceive that as the ruling class responsible for the running of police in their city, every bit of police incompetence and corruption is on their heads. One cannot keep replacing police-work training with gender-identity and intersectional theory seminars without getting less capable cops. One cannot keep lowering the standards until most women and semi-literate FOB Somalians can qualify in order to appease a bunch of progressive Karens, without damaging the capabilities of the whole force. They ARE the baddies.

      They hope to play Arab potentate and point the rage at Nazis Those Israelis orTrumo The Great Satan. It’s tough to tell how well it’s working. American Blacks are supposed to be their Palestinians, indoctrinated from cradle to grave with race hatred, but too many (see the Frederick Douglass society, Ward Connery, etc.) may be wise to the scam. Time will tell.

      1. “ American Blacks are supposed to be their Palestinians, indoctrinated from cradle to grave with race hatred, but too many (see the Frederick Douglass society, Ward Connery, etc.) may be wise to the scam.”

        We keep hearing about the Transition Integrity Project war-gaming the coming election, envisioning four possible scenarios: a big Biden win, a narrow Biden win, Trump winning the electoral college but not the popular vote, and an extended period when nobody knows who won.

        One thing they aren’t contemplating is a big Trump win. Face it, if Trump picks up another five to ten percent of the Black vote, somewhat increases his share of the “Don’r call me Latinx” vote, and penetrates suburban women (see what I did there?) we might be looking at a major Trump victory which makes all of their scenarios moot.

        It isn’t that hard to see how he does it, either. The disorder in Democrat-run cities, the collapsing California governance, a Biden “moment” (say if his teleprompter crashes or gets hacked during a debate) and the fact that Kamala Harris is a proven vote-depressor combine to produce a Trump popular vote victory of, say, 5% and 400+ votes in the electoral college and all those disaster scenarios go down the toilet of Progressive dreams.

        Yes, it is a stretch, one that involves failure of the Democrat Make-A-Vote Foundation, but it is not beyond belief. And the lamentations of their women (cis-, trans- and other) will be a balm upon our ears.
        –

        3. The question is: can he beat the margin of fraud? Like in sports betting, it’s not enough for a particular team (particularly a known strong team) to beat a weaker team, it has to beat them with a particular “point spread”, so too, unfortunately, is it in the political arena today. You don’t just have to beat your opponent (if you’re not a dem). You have to do so by enough to also cover the extra “points” given to the Dem team by fraud.

          1. There is also the advantage accorded by MSM bias, which probably significantly exceeds the margin of fraud. Happily, running against that undertow has tended to build stronger candidates on our side.
            –

            1. Add to that the “Lie To All The Pollsters” factor.

              Sarah mentioned submarines – I’ll note the easiest way for subs to impact out of all proportion to their numbers is to not directly attack, but instead to lay minefields, where the first time they know you were once there is when they blow up.

        4. If Trump wins in a landslide they will declare the election invalid and start their Glorious Revolution! They have painted themselves into a corner, and that is their only way out. Everything so far has just been practice. The streets will run blue with screaming idiots, and the Leftoid cities will burn while sane people look on and say ‘WTF, O?’.

          But I have a dream. I want to see MaligNancy LOSE the election and stand catatonic before the cameras, incapable of processing the impossible. I would laugh hard enough to scare the cats.

          1. If they are only destroying stuff in the Big Blue Cities, it may be self correcting. I am sorry but is there ANY reason I or others outside these cities should CARE??? I know, I know but they have been so stupid for so long, I know there are good people in those Cities but to protect THEM, if we could FIND THEM, would cost far to much and take too many lives. You can’t save everyone.

            1. Allowing them to burn and loot the cities encourages them to imagine they can get away with it and so they go after suburbs and eventually rural communities. It is similar in principle to a house in your neighborhood allowing rats to infest.

              I have no love for residents of Blue cities and am inclined to believe they are getting what they voted for — but for my own security I want the damage contained. I do not want someday to find myself saying, “When they came for the inner cities I was not resident and so did nothing …”
              –

        5. They are counting on the rampant fraud that the Democratic Party is planning to commit preventing a Trump landslide and making the election close enough to move forward with their coup attempt.

  23. Communist societies give the illusion of efficiency for several reasons:

    1) they tend to occur in such [pooh]holes that any disentangling of turf battles (and theft of properties) produce apparent improvements in societal efficiency.

    2) redistribution of miseries creates a semblance of improvement in the immediate term, just as eating of seed corn seems to reduce hunger while setting the stage for long-term disaster.

    3) one common element of such societies is control over information & media, enabling establishment of a narrative that society is improving; any student of the Baltic states under Soviet rule understands the utility of re-writing History.

    4) similarly, socialist states are notable for their shining bright light upon the benefits provided while obscuring the costs incurred; free-market economies tend to make costs visible (which helps in their reduction) whiile making benefits widely distributed and thus easily overlooked.

    5) other reasons – this list is not an attempt at a comprehensive listing of failures of communist states; that would require a much bigger blog.
    –

    1. And then Taiwan and South Korea go full-on representative government with real voting and free-market economies, and badly embarass their communist neighbors.

      1. Oh, no, comrade. Taiwan and South Korea are both Potemkin states, created by the USA and propped up with billions of dollars of hidden US funding; living propaganda to distract the faithful from the path to true Communism. Remember when the capitalists tried that with Yugoslavia and Poland, and the USSR had to send in troops to rescue them? At great expense, no less. Those countries narrowly missed becoming American vassal states, yet some people bought into the capitalist lies and actually resented their rescue! Fortunately it was possible to gently educate them with the truth…

        I can see you have failed to grasp the Narrative. [stern look]

        1. Sadly that is exactly what they are teaching in schools from preschool all the way through college.

    2. I’ve commented several times here that it’s all magic to them. The real world is messy and complicated, socialism is clean and perfect, on paper. Daddy runs everything and it’s all comprehensible.

    2. Literally, a checklist of requirements. I remember when we were mocked for saying things like this were coming.

  26. in fact any religious person

    in fact any religious person not of their faith.

    Socialism is a faith. It checks all the boxes for a non-theistic religion. Per Wikipedia:

    Religion is a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements.

    The three things that would be rejected in an attempt to disprove are sanctified places, prophecies, and the relation. All of the first list are not required, although anyone who visits the Trotsky museum in Mexico City will see a socialist sanctified place. I’m sure there are others, but working with the one I know.

    As for prophecies and relation, they talk about the withering away of the state when true equality is reached. True equality is a transcendental state, an immanentize the eschaton as serious as any of the Jewish and Christian movements to create heaven on Earth. That it will come as the nature result of history qualified as prophecy.

    Understand the Marxist/Communist end/variants of the spectrum at least are religious (some of the lighter socialists may not be), as are their national socialist breathern (arguably their strongest congruence and probably the real source of tension, as you see between Christianity and Islam for much of history and for similar reasons) and all of their behavior makes sense.

    Especially their hostility to other faiths.

  28. “But…. excuse me? Why do the rest of you believe it?”

    The myth of the Philosopher King. If you pick the smartest guy who knows the most, and you let him make all the decisions, that will work out WAY better than letting all the stupid peasants decide shit for themselves.

    Thanks, Plato. Also Confucius, and Lao Tsu a bit. Chinese religions are riddled with top-down theories.

    The truth of the matter is that systems of work grow out of the millions of little decisions everybody makes every day. Whenever a centralized authority tries to do something like change the weights and measures, the result is a huge uproar, conflict and waste.

    Pierre Elliot Trudeau switched Canada to Metric in 1970. I remember well because I was on a canoe trip that week. I went into Algonquin Park and all the road signs were Imperial. I came out and they were all metric. They kept on forcing metric down everyone’s throat until 1985, when the Liberals were finally thrown out of office and the forced metrification stopped.

    What was the net result of that top-down decision? Almost everything is metric on my 2011 F-250. I just did the brakes today, all metric bolts EXCEPT the friggin’ bleeder screw on the brake caliper is Imperial. FFS! The net result for most people like myself is waste and duplication. I need two complete sets of wrenches, one Imperial and one Metric. Which is plain fucking stupidity.

    That’s how top-down decisions work. They look at the Big Picture. They don’t understand (or they do and just don’t give a f-) that there is no big picture. There’s only 30 million little pictures, one for each citizen. The Big Picture is a mirage made of wishful thinking, bad data analysis and graft.

    Here’s another example, the NY Times says your lawn is racist.

    https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/08/13/new-york-times-lawns-are-symbols-of-racism-and-bad-for-global-warming/

    Lawns are racist and cause global warming. (Don’t even ask, it’s dumber than you can imagine.) This is a recurring theme I’ve seen from Greenies and other “urban planning” nerds, they hate grass. It isn’t “efficient” because you have to cut it and you can’t eat it. There is a constituency of pointy headed boffins out there pushing for “natural” ground covers and eliminating lawns. You can see a future Green Party decreeing that lawns must be dug up and planted with their preferred ground cover/cash crop.

    Which will be a disaster, because lawns wouldn’t be planted world-wide unless they had a variety of beneficial attributes beyond mere aesthetics. Like preventing erosion, animal control, insect control, et cetera.

    That, right there, is what kills every Communist country. Dear Leader decides to eradicate sparrows because they eat grain seeds. Two years later there is a plague of beetles that destroy everything and a million people starve to death. This is what they always do.

    Which is why the all-powerful entities in -my- books don’t run around telling the monkeys what to do. They shut up and say NOTHING, because they know what will happen if they start throwing their weight around.

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