Moe Lane

Mila Kunis*, demonstrating that she is actually in fact the child of refugees from Eastern Europe:

GQ: Your new movie is called Friends with Benefits. Ever been in one of those relationships?

Mila Kunis: Oy. I haven’t, but I can give you my stance on it: It’s like communism—good in theory, in execution it fails.

Smart woman, except that Communism isn’t particularly good in theory, either.  Still, there are times when you have to be diplomatic about the strange and frankly distasteful religious sensibilities of the locals, and God knows Hollywood is full of people who don’t like being told that Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people… (more…)

Admittedly, the big words are hard; but that’s no excuse.  Anyway, in this specific example… paranoia is a condition where someone has an irrational fear of persecution. What avowed Commie* Don Giljum of Operating Engineers Local 148 was describing in the how-to-plan-out-union-violence-and-intimidation video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4oTooyabyA&feature=player_embedded

…was the perfectly natural reaction of a man who is the target of an organized conspiracy to intimidate and persecute him. I’m not surprised that Giljum’s not intelligent enough to understand the distinction, though: after all, Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people.

And the naturally vile, of course.

Moe Lane

*I had tacked on a ‘scumbag’ after that, but I decided below that it was kind of redundant.

Bryan Caplan (via @JonahNRO) asks:

…”Is there any socialist analog of Liberty Fund?”  Is there any leftist charity whose chief mission is to organize small seminars where the participants read and discuss classic political writings?

The answer is simple: sure!  They’re called “American Commies.”  Small seminars where people talk about their favorite Commie writers is about as high as those Commie idiots can reasonably aspire, organizationally speaking.

Moe Lane

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers: also, to quote a (Democratic) friend of mine, when it comes to whether it’s stupid-or-evil to quote Stalin… embrace the healing power of ‘and,’ my brothers and sisters.

…pretty much by definition.  Communism is by its nature an international movement that rejects the fostering and nurturing of individual national identities in favor of some nebulous transnational ‘class’ struggle: there is no place in the orthodox version of the faith for anything less than eventual world revolution.  Although I suppose that you could decide that only a particular racial/ethnic/political group deserved the dubious benefits of Marxism-Leninism: thus creating a sort of national socialism…

…Oh. Right.  Commies hate being reminded of that little detail of 20th Century history.  Anyway, here’s the video of the Russians looking at Communism in NYC; I admit some admiration at the sight (or more accurately, non-sound) of the cameramen not breaking down in helpless laughter throughout.

Moe Lane

PS: Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people – and, believe me: if you’ve got books by Stalin in your library and you’re using those books to look for ideas… yes, you are a stupid person.

Via Instapundit comes this surprising op-ed from the New York Times that admits that the People’s Republic of China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ caused truly frightening numbers of deaths: looking at the actual source material, its author is now estimating a death toll of 45 million (50% more than previous estimates).  That works out to about 6.5% of its population, based on the 1960 census: to put that in perspective, the equivalent for 2010-era USA would be 20.15 million, or just over the entire population of New York State.

Now, this op-ed is not surprising because said famine (which was largely deliberate) is unique in the annals of world Communism: it’s not.  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had deliberate famines in the Ukraine in the 1930s and a general one just after World War II.  The Khmer Rouge of Democratic Kampuchea likewise had a general one in the 1970s, as did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the 1990s.  Half the famines in Africa over the last fifty years involved either civil wars started by Marxists, or started against them.  In short, it’s long been known that the only thing that Communism is good at is in turning large numbers of live peasants into large numbers of dead ones.  That’s because – as I have noted before – Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life.  Literally. (more…)