Quote of the Day: David Mamet on Communism

Playwright David Mamet has just written a piece for the Daily Beast.  It's all worth a look, and it gives us the quote of the day:

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.  

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

It's depressing just how readily this historical fact has been forgotten/buried by statist educators, activists, and politicians.

LOL: Snarky Response of the Day

A message board in the Writing Center of St. Mary's University:

Nerd News: A French Academic Takes On Totalitarian Smurfs

No, really!  Link via gentle reader Dignified Rant.

Quote of the Day: "Marxists. I Hate These Guys."

Read the whole thing.  It's really not about hating Marxists in general, but about a particularly virulent and nasty subspecies: the shameless apologist for totalitarian Communism, that blood-soaked and evil creed.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Heh.  If, as the old joke goes, there are only two parties in American politics (the Stupid Party and the Evil Party), then I must side with the Evil!  I still think we should cheerfully offer these pie-eyed idealistic Marxist idiots a field trip to the proletariat workers' paradise of Cuba or North Korea ... and leave them there.

Weird Political "Analysis" of the Day, World Cup Edition: Soccer Is the New Opiate of the Masses

Heh! It's unintentionally hilarious. Then again, a self-important professor wrote it.

So we're not getting the prof's much-desired Glorious Proletariat People Workers' Revolution because all the downtrodden are too busy watching soccer to go after kulaks and capitalist running dogs and whatever else. Instead of the hammer and sickle, we've got vuvuzelas and soccer babes ... and lots of 'em! And, hey, on the up side, vuvuzelas (and soccer babes) have killed infinitely fewer people than Marxism.

Well, for plenty of people, sports basically are a religion (remember me during March Madness?), though not in the way this professor seems to think.

(OK, true confessions: I'm typing this as I'm watching the US-Slovenia match. Oooooh, yummy yummy sports-opium!)

Nerd Fun: The Philosophy World Cup Final, Germany vs. Greece

I need a break from the ObamaCare health care reform debacle. Here's some hilarity from (who else?) Monty Python:

Becoming a Free Marketeer in a Communist State: Vaclav Klaus Remembers

Here is an interesting interview with Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic (and holder of a doctorate in economics). Do see.

Bonus: it's an example of grad school and higher education actually having a great result!

Also see Klaus' comment on the current state of things in the relationship between Brussels and the Czech Republic: "We are importing socialism from the EU." Uh-oh. He doesn't sound at all happy with this, as well he shouldn't.

Remembering That Hey! We Won the Cold War... and That Was a Good Thing

Read this, comrade citizen!

Also, read this related post in case you're in any way confused about how the Cold War ended. Then you can think about people like Lech Walesa, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and everyone else famous and not-famous who helped.

Heck, it's as if some people are embarrassed that FREEDOM WON. Would you really rather live under Soviet rule and behind the Iron Curtain, where Marxism led to totalitarianism? Give me a break. Read Solzhenitsyn or The Black Book of Communism. Then read this.

Requiescat in Pace, Leszek Kolakowski

Who was Leszek Kolakowski? Read this obituary. Here's something to get you started:

Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher who rejected Marxism and helped inspire the Solidarity movement in his native land while living in exile, died Friday in Oxford, England. He was 81.

In Warsaw, Parliament held a moment of silence in his honor, for his service to Poland's freedom.

In a long and wide-ranging career, Mr. Kolakowski most famously dissected the intellectual underpinnings of the Communist system he had supported as a young man, at the height of the cold war’s ideological and military arms race. He was an academic whose influence reached far beyond the academy’s gates and a scholar whose writings could be playful and satirical, but most of all, accessible.

. . . His most influential work, the three-volume “Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution,” published in the 1970s, was a history and critique that called the philosophy “the greatest fantasy of our century.” He argued that Stalinism was not a perversion of Marxist thought, but rather its natural conclusion.

Godspeed, sir.

Communism Rising in Japan? Plus, Manga Marx

Hmmmm. How can you tell this is a Japanese story? Here's a piece of it:

Publishers have also produced a manga, or comic, version of Das Kapital, Karl Marx's treatise on how capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Hey, everyone, AGAIN: Communism has never worked. It doesn't work now. It will never work.

I appreciate the fact that people are upset about the recession, but turning to outdated, discredited old dogma isn't going to help.

Here's a reminder of what's what: