Nothing Left

February 9th, 2010 » Tags: ,

Q: Why does the Left like Communism, again?
A: Because the stock market’s down.
Joking apart, there’s also a selfish reason. The idea of Communism is so abstract now, so cleansed of reality, that it can be invoked at zero cost. It’s a faux-humble chat-up line with a double payoff: you get to look impeccably humane, [...]

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Stalin Had Faith

October 27th, 2009 » Tags: , , ,

Witness – the autobiography of Whittaker Chambers’ – is the dramatic story of a Dostoevskian “lesser man” seeking redemption through suffering and rigorous moral integrity. It is a verbose but remarkable book, centering on his personal pendulum-swing from a tortured, austere, and passionately felt Communism – towards an equally tortured, austere, and passionately felt [...]

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The Fallacy of The Centre

September 17th, 2009 » Tags: , ,

Imagine two people, each stood on the opposite banks of a river. Where then is the “average” of their positions? It’s midstream – the deep water.
“Centrist” politics, as we know it today, treads water in such currents. So-called centrist governments are nothing of the sort. They are actually a remarkable co-existence of radically opposed positions, [...]

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Dog Marxism

August 31st, 2009 » Tags: , ,

Has there been a Marxist critique of dogs? Hopefully not.
Any dog trainer will tell you that dogs are bourgeois wolves. Their wolf-nature remains, barely hidden below a reluctant concession to social norms, tenuously imposed by human authority. The hunter instinct, the killer bite, is still there. They chase anything that moves. Look at the stats [...]

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