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Wait!!! This isn’t the question thread? What’s wrong with me???
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It isn’t? Where should we start, товарищ?
“Stir over Pope’s Communist Crucifix”
He looks utterly baffled!
I doubt if anything much will come of the following nontroversy, apart from the usual vague speculations of “ooh-er… Communism?”
This bit I found amusing, characterising the unfavorable reactions:
There was also anger on the Facebook pages of the Catholic News Agency.
“One cannot simply combine Communism and Christianity!” wrote one user.
I was surprised to read that there has been a significant history of Communism & Christianity (it even sounds like a breakfast cereal…). Apparently Marx and Engels had themselves studied writings by and about US Christian communes of the 18th and 19th centuries and considered them as being recent agricultural models. I was reading a book this year (The Shakers: Two Centuries of Spiritual Reflection) which got into detail and suggested interpretations of Christian theology and tradition which are quite rigorously communist indeed. In a dialectics-of-mystically-sublimated-materialism kind of way. Also there have been numerous monastaries and wandering ascetics going back through to the first century.
Now, if people were going to complain that Stalinism or Maoism are incompatible with Christianity, I would tend to agree. But communism did not start with Marx, and I am surprised that many Christians are supposedly unaware of their groups long history of living this way.
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Oh, man, I need dis as a 3d print for my girlfriend’s birthday. She is such a guilty ex-catholic pinko. It’d be perfect.
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I just saw this pointed out on Twitter, and I think it’s a nice connection to the traditional Boing Boing interest in intellectual property law.
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Isn’t Ultima IV prior art?
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Have you seen THIS:
There are those like the Postmodern sophist Slavoj Žižek
who argue that Stalin’s crimes were his aberrational distortion of an
otherwise admirably utopian Marxist-Leninism whose reputation still
deserves respect and maybe a Lacanian tweak in light of the genocidal
reality of Marxist/Leninist regimes. But can one really separate an
ideology from the genocides repeatedly committed in its name?
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I think I’ve seen some critiques of the book. The article is awful.
He’s clearly satirising the Gamezorgate position, isn’t he?
What an elucidating discussion - is fascism or communism worse?
How about murder is bad, and making a murderer the leader of your country is a bad plan.
The problem isn’t that communism causes genocide, it’s that anyone who would lead a revolution is a very bad person to have in power when the revolution is over.
if (belief_in_my_rightness > value_of_human_life) have_revolution();
Even if you are right, that inequality makes you a terrible person and a monster as a leader.
I think a better question is whether our current leaders in the US - and to a lesser extent in Canada - is worse than Hitler and Stalin. That might sound offensive - many fewer people have died - but what is our excuse, at this point, for not knowing better? What is our excuse for voting for these people?
Oh yeah, historical lessons or no, we’re still just heaps of shit with vague sense organs flailing towards the light. How about: communism, fascism, capitalism, who the fuck cares, just make sure you kill a rich person on your way out (see above for how that makes me a monster).
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wait wait wait wait wait wait a minute.
#You’re back!!!
How ya doin’, comrade!
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No, the article came out in 2011, and I don’t think it’s satire at all. I’d guess it’s got more to do with the far right in Eastern Europe. Obviously, there were brutal dictators who committed horrors while claiming the name “comunist”. But, the numbers of deaths the author claims are ludicrous. 100 million? The current population of Russia is 143 million. And, there are macabre descriptions of things that are physically impossible. No, cannibals can’t eat themselves.
I could agree with that.
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100 million is not Stalin alone – it’s the high-end (pretty close to the low-end) or 20th-century communism mass-killings:
For the past three decades, beginning with what was called in Germany the Historikerstreit, or historians’ battle, continuing with the 1997 French publication of The Black Book of Communism (which put the death toll from communist regimes at close to 100 million compared with 25 million from Hitler and fascism),
there has been a controversy over comparative genocide and comparative
evil that has pitted Hitler’s mass murders against Stalin’s, Mao’s, and
Pol Pot’s.
Here are some other interesting statistics: Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls
I have no idea how accurate any of these are.
Auto-cannibalism is not the answer… - Zork
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This seems historically true, but I think it depends very much upon whether you even believe in leadership, and what may be meant by revolution.
Direct democracy movement can be seen as a way of putting everybody “in power”, acknowledging that nobody really has more or less power than anybody else.
Also, the impulse towards violence in revolutionary contexts can be rather one-sided. If people are non-violently organizing, and the state tries to kill them anyway to maintain its control, killing them could be considered fairly ethical self-defense.
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Okay, so we’re playing Golden Girls and you have apparently already called Bea Arthur? That seems low. Oh well, at least I get to be Betty White.
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