...100,000,000 million people murdered in the 20th century. Lenin's broken eggs. Gulags, concentration camps, purges.
A Borepatch post from 2010, and he quotes TJIC:
...[I]f when you attempt to implement “wonderful communism” and every single frickin’ time you get mass murder, starvation, and gulags, then that is communism.Emphasis in original.
Communism is murder, oppression, horror, and terror. It always leads to that end, always, because it can not do otherwise.
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Here's something for Republicans to discuss in detail. Just tell the American public that Obamacare is law. Repeatedly, until people are sick of hearing it. I can guarantee that enough people will connect "Obamacare is law" with "my health insurance just doubled in price" that we can win on this issue and repeal that bitch.
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Obama is the greatest gun salesman ever. That's just how it is, folks.
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"Return to the gold standard" used to be the cry of crackpots, self included. These days, however, the wisdom behind those words has become more apparent; "backed by the full faith and credit" is fine as long as it lasts, but sooner or later all fiat currencies fail, when someone discovers that all he has to do is to order the printing presses to "emergency maximum". That's what's happened here (QE, QE2, QE3) even as the feds continue to hide inflation by gaming the numbers. ("Food and energy are too volatile to include in our calculations of the Consumer Price Index...." while food and energy prices are skyrocketing, but "there's no inflation". Yeah.)
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Because the economy has been in the shitter since 2008, home ownership is perilously low. "Lowest since 1995," the headline says. People are renting out houses rather than selling them; there are too many houses and not enough buyers.
Thanks, government!
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The United States has an immense amount of exploitable oil deposits. Gee, if only government would get the fuck out of the way....
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This comes as no surprise. Friend of the Fungus Brian Dunbar remarks on Gene Roddenberry's penchant for lecture.
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Vox Day writes about the difference between fiction and science fiction. Interesting stuff in the comments about Game of Thrones, too, primarily about the economics of Westeros.
40,000 person city supporting a 10,000 man army? Uh, no. Sorry, George Martin, no. Economically impossible.
Speaking of which, I'm now 2/3 of the way through GoT, and I do have to admit that the story is keeping my interest despite the plodding nature of the prose.
...which also, incidentally, reminds me of something I scoffed at in the second season of the TV series. King Joffrey got a fancy new sword made and he named it Hearteater and I laughed my ass off.
"King Joffrey is a fuckin' munchkin!" I hooted. If he played WoW, he'd make an orc death knight and call him "Pwnerlord" or something equally stupid, then whine and complain about how he can never win duels or PvP battles because everyone else is cheating.
When the big battle he anticipates finally arrives, he runs away like the little punk-ass bitch he is. And:
Joffrey has a habit of frequently getting new and quite impressively made swords, and giving them fierce names like "Lion's Tooth" or "Hearteater", but he never actually swings a sword against an opponent at any time in the narrative. When he does personally execute people he uses a crossbow, because he doesn't actually know how to wield a sword.Don't go looking at that page if you don't want spoilers, though.
Interesting point, probably already known by my readers: in the real world, the crossbow was seen as peasant's weapon. It's a subtle hint about Joffrey's character that he prefers them to any other weapon.
Other interesting point: the only time we see Joffrey wielding a sword against an opponent, his opponent is a common-born boy armed with a stick, who knows he doesn't dare even pretend to hit the crown prince of the seven kingdoms. This scene, I have to say, very nicely delineates Joffrey's personality. (I didn't say George Martin couldn't write. I just said I found his prose "plodding".)
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I can't think of anything else to write about. Sorry.