Tag: Communism

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general freedom

The Most Deadly Disease

Anyone knowledgeable about medicine — or history, for that matter — is taking very, very seriously the coronavirus outbreak in China, and its subsequent spread across the globe, including to the U.S.

More than 70,000 Chinese have been diagnosed and over 1,700 have died, along with one death in each of France, Japan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. 

Over the weekend, Taiwan — the independent island nation a hundred miles off the coast of a hostile, threatening People’s Republic of China (PRC) — announced its first fatality. The deceased Taiwanese taxi driver, whose health was already compromised by diabetes and hepatitis B, likely caught the virus from customers traveling from China. 

Last week, China finally allowed the World Health Organization to allow Taiwanese experts to participate in discussions about containing the virus. Unlike China, Taiwan boasts one of the best medical systems in the world.

Also over the weekend, news broke that Chinese President Xi Jinping had mentioned the coronavirus in a speech given many weeks before officials first alerted the public. 

That’s how the totalitarian PRC rolls. At all levels. One victim of the virus is Dr. Li Wenliang, who warned back in December that the disease was spreading. First, he was reprimanded and then “apprehended by Wuhan police for spreading ‘rumours,’” reported Aljazeera. 

“As more information leaks out from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak,” a recent Taipei Times editorial argues, “it is clear that Beijing was unable to prevent the virus from spreading out of control precisely because it lacks the accountability, freedom of speech and free flow of information that form the bedrock of democracies.”

Yet another way that freedom affirms life and totalitarian tyranny kills. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Not Your Mother’s How-​To Manual

communism, socialism, freedom, capitalism, motherhood, family,

“Want to Dismantle Capitalism?” asks The Nation headline for a recent interview with feminist Sophie Lewis, immediately answering: “Abolish the Family.”

In a world of YouTube videos on how to do almost everything, apparently the progressive publication noticed something missing: There is no reliable guide for going full commie.

Rosemarie Ho prefaces her discussion with Ms. Lewis, author of “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family,” by observing that “the most infamous demand of The Communist Manifesto is the ‘abolition of the family.’”

“The family, Marx and Engels noted, was where patriarchy and capitalism worked in tandem to produce willing, alienated workers,” writes Ho, “where women became little more than ‘instruments of production’ for the men who lorded over them.”

Ah, “little more” — how depressingly reductionist.

Ho applauds that Lewis “takes up this forgotten struggle” and “gives us an account of the material conditions — the biological and societal violence — that gestators, or people who are carrying fetuses, have to bear.”

“Mothers nurture,” acknowledges Lewis, “but they also kill and abuse their wards. That’s why it’s so valuable to denaturalize the mother-​child bond. To do anything otherwise is to devalue that work. That’s the horizon that I think opens up the space for a revolutionary politics.”

Through 2,000 words of jargon, we learn that “motherhood is a very powerful ideological edifice,” as Lewis attacks “the idea that babies belong to anyone — the idea that the product of gestational labor gets transferred as property to a set of people.” After all, she informs that we should “think about babies as made by many people.”

Gestators of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our sanity!

Oh … and the family. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

communism, socialism, freedom, capitalism, motherhood, family,

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meme

Guess Which is Real.

communism, New York Times, Nazism,

NOTE: 100 million human beings were killed by communist ideologues in the 20th century.

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ideological culture media and media people Popular

Gray Lady Commies

New York Times, communism, socialism, journalism, pandering, newspaper,

The New York Times has long leaned left. But is it really a stable Pisa-​tower lean, at this point? It sure seems that, in recent years, the Gray Lady has gone extreme, abandoning its “respectable” center-left perch. 

The change, economist Alex Tabarrok writes for FEE, appears to have happened “around 2010 – 2014,” when we can see “an inflection point” where phrases and buzzwords like “social justice” and “diversity and inclusion” increased in number in Times editorials and news stories.

Forget, for a moment, the why — is it demand side, with the paper trying to court Millennial readers; or supply side, a result of new hires out of journalism programs and other indoctrination factories; or a mixture of both? — and concern ourselves with how far will the Gray Lady go?

Communism, apparently.

Or, at least, “Automated Luxury Communism,” as identified in what may be the stupidest article to appear in any newspaper in years.

“The plummeting cost of information and advances in technology are providing the ground for a collective future of freedom and luxury for all,” the author asserts, upon the evidence of innovations he has identified as arising … in our capitalist mixed economy, chiefly in the market sector: lab-​grown burgers and “molecular whiskey.”

It all smacks of a loafer’s Marxism, with robots and AI as the proles. I could explain this better had the author bothered to do any real work on his vision, but, unfortunately (?), he offers nothing but a “wouldn’t it be neat if” blog post. 

That the Times’ placed on its front page.

I guess since Democratic pols are now calling themselves socialists, their lead thought organ must seize the advance guard position by going full commie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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New York Times, communism, socialism, journalism, pandering, newspaper,

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folly ideological culture moral hazard

Mass Murderers Are Cool?

Walmart, hammer and sickle, USSR, mass murder, socialism, communism, cool

If you have a lick of sense, you wouldn’t emblazon images of Ché Guevara on your chest or your wall — and yet Ché t‑shirts and posters have been a pop culture hit for decades now.

He is cool, we are told, because he was ¡Viva la Revolución! and all that.

But it could get worse. You could be emblazoning a hammer and sickle.

Walmart’s website is there to help. Under “men’s sleeveless,” for example, we see an artistic rendering of the old Communist symbol, frankly identified as a “Soviet Hammer and Sickle,” white on black for $14.97.* Walmart files it under “Pop culture.”

Aren’t men’s sleeveless shirts called “wife beaters”? Should we now call them Kulak Killers?

It’s hip to murder millions!

No wonder Lithuania and several other Baltic countries — who suffered greatly under Soviet rule — object. Indeed, many of these countries go too far in actually banning the symbols. Now, they have contacted Walmart requesting a cessation in hawking the offensive merchandise. “You wouldn’t buy Nazi-​themed clothing, would you?” Lithuania’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius tweeted. Or sell such items.

But a few people might. Certainly, a lot of people do buy stuff that others regard as “Nazi.” Sometimes to be “cool”; other times to make a controversial political point.

At the Uhuru Store, Gavin McInnes’s “ProudBoys Official” sells a “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” t‑shirt for twice the price of Walmart’s Hammer and Sickle shirt — and that surely has annoyed leftists who have seen it.

I’m waiting for the death of cool.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The shirts also come in Navy, Royal and Gray. I guess to get a red commie shirt you have to go for the sleeves.

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Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard responsibility U.S. Constitution

China Marks Marx Anniversary

Karl Marx, communism, socialism, death, failure, China, Chinese, German city of Trier

The Chinese government has sought to honor the birth of Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) by giving a giant bronze statue of the social philosopher and pseudo-​economist to the German city of Trier, his birthplace. 

Agreeing that Trier and Marx should be thus honored, local officials shamefully accepted the donation.

Marx was a bad guy. His willfully destructive anti-​capitalist theorizing and polemics have been enlisted to enslave and murder many millions of people in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere. The story is told in works like Modern Times and The Black Book of Communism. One effective critique of Marxian ideas may be found in the second volume of Murray Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought.

We often hear that Communist implementation of Marxian theory poorly translates “real” communism/​socialism/​collectivism. No government unswervingly enacts all the ideas and prescriptions of a single intellectual founding father. But there is much in Marx’s volumes that openly demands the razing of the division of labor, profit-​seeking, and other requirements of civilization.

In one article, Marx scribbled that “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” There’s plenty more where this came from.

When a major nation-​state gives a town a statue, it’s hard to say no. But one needn’t accept it at face value. Install it on a base that lists the separate bouts of Marx-​inspired mass murder. Or use it as a target in paintball tournaments.

Or just place it in the local cemetery. Where deadly ideologies should go. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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