The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Renegade Jesse Myerson

Posted on | February 8, 2014 | 89 Comments

Jesse Myerson (@JAMyerson) in a March 2012 cable TV appearance.

“Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.
“The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws. . . .
“One cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and implies . . . revolutionary violence of one class against another.”
— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)

When Lenin was wounded in an August 1918 assassination attempt, Josef Stalin knew what to do. The future Soviet dictator sent a telegram to Moscow, announcing that he was “instituting open and systematic mass terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.”

Stalin ignorantly blamed “the hirelings of the bourgeoisie” for the shooting of Lenin, but in fact the would-be assassin was a 28-year-old Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya Kaplan, who had spent 11 years at hard labor in tsarist prisons after being arrested for her part in a terrorist bombing plot when she was 16. What inspired Kaplan’s resolve to assassinate Lenin was the forcible suppression of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, less than three months after the overthrow of the Kerensky government in October 1917 .

Lenin never erred on the side of leniency. Kaplan was executed with a bullet to the back of the head four days after her assassination attempt, as the Bolsheviks unleashed the Red Terror which, among thousands of deliberate atrocities, resulted in the summary execution of some 800 members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

“[T]here 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.”
— Karl Marx, 1848

Communism’s explicit and enthusiastic embrace of violent “revolutionary terror” is among the many facts that self-described communist Jesse Myerson seeks to ignore or evade in pretending to correct our “huge misconceptions about communism.”

Supposing the enemies of communism to be as ignorant as himself, Myerson boasts of making “points” that his opponents are incapable of answering, thus to display his imaginary intellectual superiority. Myerson’s posing is intended, as I explained yesterday, for entirely selfish purposes: By presenting himself as an insuperable advocate of far-left “progressive” ideas, he expects to be praised and admired, and thus to be elevated to a position of leadership, obtaining for himself not only fame as a sort of radical celebrity, but also an easy income as a Professional Progressive Thinker.

Glorious Idol of the Obscure Masses

Myerson’s sociopathic dishonesty suits him well for this project of pseudo-revolutionary self-advancement, and his resemblance to Anonymous “famewhore” Barrett Brown is not coincidental, the main differences being that (a) Barrett is a much better writer, and (b) Barrett had the courage of his convictions, with the result that (c) Barrett is now in federal custody awaiting trial on enough felony charges to put him in prison for life, while (d) Myerson is still running free, getting paid to publish in Salon.com and Rolling Stone, and enjoying as much sex, drugs and rock-and-roll as he can afford.

Nice work, if you can get it, but not every leftist enjoys the privileges of the radical celebrity elite. For every rock star type like Myerson, there are many hundreds of their ideological comrades who toil in obscurity on behalf of the progressive cause. The leftist masses, by their silent acceptance of Myerson’s leadership, thereby acknowledge their inferiority to him: If they were as capable as Myerson of articulating their shared beliefs, they would be his equal. Instead, because Myerson is better than them, he gets the Rolling Stone commissions and the invitations to appear on cable TV talk shows. The role assigned to the progressive masses is merely to admire and applaud Jesse Myerson, contenting themselves to bask in his reflected glory.

Sic semper hoc.

The extreme egoism of communist leaders is a trait displayed throughout the history of the movement since Marx’s ridiculous insistence that only his socialism was “scientific.” Yet such is Jesse Myerson’s egoism that he imagines himself superior even to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. At least they had the integrity to admit that the abolition of private property — the expropriation of the bourgeosie — could only be accomplished by violent revolution, and that the victors of such a revolution would have to employ the methods of violent terror to establish their dictatorship.

When Myerson’s Jan. 3 Rolling Stone article drew criticism, he responded that he did not “want the 1% dead just dispossessed.”

This was ridiculous, as any true communist could have seen. Does this young Bard College alumnus expect that billionaires will voluntarily surrender their wealth? Eh, never mind: Myerson deleted the Tweet, evidently in embarrassment.

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is … And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.”
— Friedrich Engels, 1872

Nearly two decades ago, after undertaking a careful study of Marxist philosophy, I concluded that 19th-century Germans were envious of the French Revolution and craved a sans-culotte epoch to call their own. Marxism’s “dialectical materialism,” with its allegedly scientific devotion to historical development, assigned to the French Revolution a sort of runner-up trophy in history, declaring that the quest for political equality that had inspired the uprising of 1789 was mere “bourgeois democracy,” destined soon to be eclipsed by the coming socialist revolution of the proletariat. Though Marxism advocated internationalism and appealed to the “workers of the world,” its authors were distinctly German — deriving their concept of the dialectic from Hegel — and it was generally expected that Germany, with its advanced industrial economy, would be the scene of the outbreak of the proleterian revolution.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in backward Russia, critical sniping from the German social-democrat Karl Kautsky inspired contemptuous sarcasm from Lenin and Trotsky. But who could not pity the hapless German socialists? Here their own idea had been unexpectedly successful in an inferior nation — one the German army had beaten in the World War — and there was an unmistakable humiliation in the fact that the German people had once more lost out in the world-historic revolutionary sweepstakes. The 19th-century German socialists Marx and Engels borrowed the idea of revolutionary terror from 18th-century France, and yet it was 20th-century Russians who experienced the bloody fulfillment of that hand-me-down nightmare vision.

“Marx and Engels hammered out the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . the idea that the political autocracy of the proletariat is the ‘sole form in which it can realize its control of the state.’ . . . The man who repudiates terrorism in principle . . . must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism.”
— Leon Trotsky, 1920

Terroristic violence is the sine qua non of communism, first in overthrowing the capitalist order and then in maintaining the authority of its revolutionary dictatorship “unrestricted by any laws.”

This explicit rejection of civil rights and the Rule of Law, this maniacal devotion to violence as a core principle, guaranteed that the Soviet government would be a murderous totalitarianism. Nevertheless, self-described communist Jesse Myerson airily dismisses the bloody record of Marxist-Leninist regimes with a bit of rhetorical arm-waving as he lectures us on our “huge misconceptions about communism.” Revolutionary violence disappears in a fog of moral equivalence:

In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by the state’s willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant. If I lay claim to one of David Koch’s mansions, libertarian that he is, he’s going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn’t a state, whoever has the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord, a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.
This is true both of personal possessions and private property, but it is important not to confuse the two. Property implies not a good, but a title — deeds, contracts, stocks, bonds, mortgages, &c. When Marxists talk of collectivizing ownership claims on land or “the means of production,” we are in the realm of property; when Fox Business Channel hosts move to confiscate my tie, we are in the realm of personal possessions. Communism necessarily distributes property universally, but, at least as far as this communist is concerned, can still allow you to keep your smartphone. Deal?

Ah! We are ignorantly confused between “personal possessions and private property,” Myerson tells us, so that the principle which justifies expropriation of a billionaire’s wealth (property) will not be extended to your iPhone (a mere possession).

Of course, in actual practice — as opposed to Myerson’s word games — communism’s lawlessness routinely resulted in ordinary people being deprived not only of property and personal possessions, but also deprived of liberty and life. Beyond its inherent tendency toward terroristic violence, communism proved itself incapable of producing an adequate supply of those consumer goods (not just sophisticated devices like iPhones, but also such mundane items as shoes and bread) that Myerson takes for granted in capitalist America.

So not only do the rich people lose their wealth, but everybody else is doomed to hopeless poverty and — oh, yes, by the way — your communist rulers might decide to kill you and a few million other people, just so nobody forgets who’s in charge.

The Secret Elitism of the Occupy Movement

Did I mention that Jesse Myerson’s original claim to fame was as “media coordinator” for Occupy Wall Street? Remember when that mob of smelly losers shut down the Brooklyn Bridge?

New York City police say about 700 protesters have been arrested after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and blocked traffic lanes for several hours.
On the second week of protests by the Occupy Wall Street movement, a large group of marchers broke off from others on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway and headed across the Brooklyn-bound lanes.
Police say demonstrators spilled onto the roadway Saturday night after being told to stay on the pedestrian pathway. They face charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Some of the protesters said that authorities had tricked, trapped and then arrested them, according to The New York Times.
“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us onto the roadway,” Occupy Wall Street media coordinator Jesse Myerson told the newspaper.

Blame the cops! Yes, that’s it — the cops tricked us into breaking the law!

Here’s another bit from the same October 2011 article:

Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and social inequality took their “solidarity march” to Brooklyn, but battled in a war of words against officers, chanting “We are not criminals” and “Let us go!”
Some protesters tried to get away as officers started handcuffing members of the group. Dozens of protesters were seen handcuffed and sitting on the span as three buses were called in to take them away, witnesses and organizers said.
The New York Times reported a few protesters had “clambered dangerously up the structure of the bridge to get to the wooden pedestrian walkway, which is about 15 feet above the road.”
Erin Larkins, a graduate student at Columbia University who says she and her boyfriend have $130,000 combined in student loan debt, was among the thousands of protesters on the bridge. She said a friend persuaded her to join the march and she’s glad she did.
“I don’t think we’re asking for much, just to wake up every morning not worrying whether we can pay the rent, or whether our next meal will be rice and beans again,” Larkins wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

Oh, noes! A graduate student at Columbia (annual tuition, $44,716) is eating rice and beans and worrying how she and her boyfriend can pay their rent because . . . corporate greed! Social inequality!

Why do these neo-communists always have to attend elite private schools? Jesse Myerson attended Bard College (annual tuition $45,730) where he majored in theater and “human rights studies.”

Why would Myerson pay so much to attend an elite school in Annandale when, a half-hour drive away in Poughkeepsie, Dutchess Community College boasts that it offers “the lowest tuition in New York state,” just $3,200 a year? After a couple years getting your associate’s degree at DCC, then you could transfer to a SUNY campus — say, Albany, about an hour’s drive from Annandale — where annual tuition is $5,800.

Although I don’t know if Bard College requires any math classes to get a degree in human rights, by my calculations, the difference in tuition between attending Bard ($182,920 for four years) and going the DCC/SUNY-Albany route ($18,000) is $164,920.

Saving yourself $164,920 in tuition might not put you into the 1%, but it sure will buy a lot of rice and beans, so . . .

Why did Jesse Myerson go to Bard? Because he’s better than you.

Myerson’s intellectual superiority to others is both the premise and conclusion of his every argument, and you don’t expect someone with such superior qualities to rub shoulders with those lowbrow plebians at community college, do you? No, of course not. Educating the revolutionary vanguard requires the “prestigious faculty” and “vibrant” campus life “with world-class performing arts venues” that only an elite private $45,730-a-year liberal arts college can provide.

This young communist can’t be bothered to learn history or economics, nor has he studied Marxist theory enough to understand that his rejection of revolutionary terror condemns him to the same “renegade” category to which Lenin assigned the pathetic Kautsky. And this same Jesse Myerson (Bard ’08) presumes to enlighten us as to our “huge misconceptions about communism”?

“The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

At least Marx got that much right . . .

 

Category: Culture, Economics, History, Intellectuals

Comments

89 Responses to “The Renegade Jesse Myerson”

  1. Craig S. Bell
    February 8th, 2014 @ 1:16 am

    You may recall how the elite Occupiers rented some nice office space near Zucotti Park, where they could keep out the riffraff (and the media) while they parlayed their leadership into future careers.

  2. M. Thompson
    February 8th, 2014 @ 1:35 am

  3. Bob Belvedere
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:09 am

    Another insightful essay on Leftist Thinking and the willful idiocy and Nihilism that fuels it.

    Bravo, Stacy.

  4. Katie Scarlet
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:36 am

    When we run out of toilet paper, as they have in Havana, can I trade my iPhone to this dolt for roll of Charmin?

  5. RKae
    February 8th, 2014 @ 3:41 am

    “…property rights rely on violence.” Wow. I always thought that concept relied on a peaceful agreement between us all. I mean, is it violence from me that stops people from raping my wife, or is it that we’re not animals? Isn’t it an agreement in morality and behavior? Isn’t it the rapist who is the violent one? But this nitwit is trying to make us believe WE’RE the violent ones for having some sort of moral code of order wherein we only flex our muscles when violence enters our lives.

    His thinking is not so much Communism as it is Satanism: good is bad, virtue is evil, morality is oppression, chaos will save you.

  6. dicentra
    February 8th, 2014 @ 3:43 am

    The extreme egoism of communist leaders is a trait displayed throughout the history of the movement

    “Egoism” is a misnomer: such men are full-on psychopaths with Messiah complexes. They are not motivated by ideology but by dark, insatiable desires. Psychopaths have an enormous black hole in their souls; their lives consist solely of trying to fill that void by pursuing the God-like power it would take to Immanentize the Eschaton.

    Nothing else is heady enough, and no one can persuade them that they should leave off such an evil pursuit.

    They must have their fix.

    Marx’s screed provides an ex post facto justification of such a pursuit. People like Marx begin with “I Must Be In Charge” and then devise the intellectual framework to manipulate others into supporting their quest for Messiahship.

    Psychopaths (and sociopaths and narcissists) never use language to say what’s on their minds; for them, language is a weapon against their enemies and a tool to acquire what they want. It’s important that we approach their discourse from that angle rather than attributing to them the beliefs and mindsets that they ostensibly profess.

    (Rather than saying, “Marx didn’t understand that the free market is the best way to lift the poor from their lowly state,” say that “Marx rejected the free market because it is a self-organizing system that he and his ilk could never hope to control; only a centrally controlled system could satisfy their lusts.”)

    Marxism never quite goes away because it is some truly ingenious sophistry: it whispers sweet nothings into the ears of the masses (you’re going to be rich) while flattering psychopaths and their enablers among the intelligentsia with “only you can Set Things Right in this miserable, miserable world.”

    The replacement of moral considerations with “practical” ones plays right in to the psychopath’s deadened soul: the power-rush that they get from wielding the God-like power of Death makes it all worthwhile, even if it is transitory.

    Failure to spot charming psychopaths and to deny them influence is what always destroys a society. Like opportunistic flesh-eating bacteria, they are harmless while outside the body but deadly when the tiniest scratch lets them inside.

  7. SDN
    February 8th, 2014 @ 6:01 am

    Of course, this twit doesn’t realize that he makes the clearest argument for dealing with Leftists by force, since that’s all they understand.

  8. Mm
    February 8th, 2014 @ 7:12 am

    Indeed, the airy dismissal of 100-million plus dead and additional untold suffering, plus the advocacy for theft and murder, does make that argument. I’ll bet he’s anti-gun, too. After all, the riff raff should not defend themselves, just die.

  9. WJJ Hoge
    February 8th, 2014 @ 7:51 am

    Moi? Je suis Marxiste—tendance Groucho!

  10. fredbarringer
    February 8th, 2014 @ 7:54 am

    The thief comes only in order to steal, kill and destroy; I have come so that they may have life, life in its fullest measure. John 10:10
    I have always believed the real author of communism is Satan. I also believe that communism is depicted as the wild beast in Revelation – the government of the Anti Christ. 100 million people murdered in the past century doesn’t faze these people. It’s not even an issue. These are truly the walking dead. They look at human slavery, and misery, and see Utopia.

  11. Mm
    February 8th, 2014 @ 7:54 am

    There is some chatter on Twitter about who started Occupy. It was Adbusters, a group that Myerson often includes in his tweets.
    http://www.litkicks.com/Adbusters#.UvYoZWt5mSM

  12. Socialism: Organized Evil
    February 8th, 2014 @ 8:09 am

    Like marxism, the “big idea” of today’s liberalism is the notion that a small group of academics and intellectuals are somehow magically entitled to consciously direct the future of mankind.

  13. Socialism: Organized Evil
    February 8th, 2014 @ 8:16 am

    If today’s liberals will callously murder the unborn, who won’t they attack?

  14. texlovera
    February 8th, 2014 @ 8:41 am

    Stacy wields facts like a Samurai swordsman wields his katana. It’s beautiful to watch….

  15. Cube
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:02 am

    Fools like this one see Utopia in all the misery mostly because they aren’t one of those being killed. Yet. When the executioner comes for them, they sing a different tune. “It’s not FAIR!!!”

  16. Cube
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:11 am

    The fatal twin conceits of Progs – “I’m smarter than you” and “I’m better than you” blind them to the realities that most are actually more stupid than the rest of us and are in fact bad people.

  17. rmnixondeceased
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:12 am

    Je suis d’accord que vous êtes un Marxiste de la variété Groucho et un praticien adepte de cet art.

  18. JeffS
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:16 am

    That is the essential difference between a “nation of laws” versus a “nation of men”.

  19. DavidD
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:16 am

    ” ‘[S]he and her boyfriend have $130,000 combined in student loan debt….’ ”

    Nobody held guns to your and your boyfriend’s heads, Ms. Larkin, and forced you to take out $130,000 in student loans.

    I’m sure you’d be more than happy to have others hold guns to the heads of the 1% to get them to pay off the loans for you, though, wouldn’t you, Ms. Larson?

    Oh, wait; that’s the whole foundation of our system of taxation, isn’t it?

  20. rmnixondeceased
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:17 am

    It’s always a “none for thee all for me” belief in the background of the ‘thinking’ (*snort*) process with these idiots. Their souls are corrupted and black as their (usually unrealized) Master’s intentions.

  21. PineBaroness
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:18 am

    I wonder of Myerson ever read The Gulag Archipelago? What are the chances that is required reading at his elite college?

  22. rmnixondeceased
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:19 am

    Zero.

  23. Da Tech Guy On DaRadio Blog » Blog Archive » McCain Myerson Communism and the perspective of age
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:29 am

    […] Stacy not only has a mem­ory of the cold war but the per­spec­tive and knowl­edge to back it up so when some­one fool­ishly speaks of Com­mu­nism as a pos­i­tive good and of the mass mur­der­ing sovi­ets as not true rep­re­sen­ta­tives he brings you this: […]

  24. DaTechGuy on DaRadio
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:33 am

    The real question is ignorance or battlefield prep

    I’m betting the latter

  25. Socialism: Organized Evil
    February 8th, 2014 @ 9:34 am

    There is another dissident less well known than Solzhenitsyn, but just as important – Igor Shafarevich. Shafarevich notes about “socialism”:

    “The experience of many thousands of years is rejected and replaced by cliches from the realm of the irrational, such as the claim that all the different socialisms of today and yesterday or created in a different part of the globe were not the real thing, and that in the special conditions
    of “our” socialism everything will be different, and so on.    “

  26. RS
    February 8th, 2014 @ 10:50 am

    I comment only to note that the troll who snidely remarked RSM’s initial post on Myerson did not address Myerson’s points individually has not resurfaced for the most recent efforts which do just that. Snark is always easier than actually learning something.

  27. RS
    February 8th, 2014 @ 10:58 am

    Let’s add another quote to the mix, just for the hell of it:

    You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person the the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way and made impossible.

    –Marx & Engels
    The Communist Manifesto

    Query how they intended to “sweep” such people “out of the way?”

  28. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    February 8th, 2014 @ 11:36 am

    I only question calling him a “renegade”

    Isn’t “useful idiot” more Lenin-esque?

  29. Boricuafudd1
    February 8th, 2014 @ 11:44 am

    If you were to own an I-phone in Cuba you would be most likely arrested as a smuggler or black marketeer the only ones able to afford such luxuries. Not to mention that it would not work with the State run cell service. Even the internet is all dial-up and cost an exorbitant amount of money when your maximum wage is $20 a month.

  30. Wombat_socho
    February 8th, 2014 @ 11:44 am

    A nation of riflemen. Because unlike the unborn, we can shoot back.

  31. Dave Mears
    February 8th, 2014 @ 11:45 am

    he also has weak, shallow, emotionally heavy arguments and couldn’t understand less about economics if he was personally tutored by Krugman.

  32. Wombat_socho
    February 8th, 2014 @ 11:45 am

    He got whacked with the banhammer, and apparently took the strong hint that he wasn’t wanted here.

  33. PineBaroness
    February 8th, 2014 @ 11:57 am

    My father, who escaped a communist country to settle in the US, used to tell this joke, which is quite apt here: “Old Bolshevik I once knew used to say ‘Everybody shovel the s*%# ‘dis way, (hand motions of shoveling over left shoulder) but I; I shovel the s*%# ‘dis way! (hand motions of shoveling over RIGHT shoulder)

  34. Trespassers W
    February 8th, 2014 @ 12:26 pm

    Property is not the same thing as possessions? That he’s unaware of the “distinction without a difference” fallacy tells me just about everything I need to know about this twit’s supposed intellect and the quality of the so-called education–indoctrination is more like it–that he received at Bard.
    That he can’t see, or sees but won’t admit, the unalloyed evil that has been done in the name of Communism, tells me just about everything I need to know about his character.
    I’ve borrowed and modified Indiana Jones’ signature remark: “Commies. I hate those guys.”

  35. Dave Mears
    February 8th, 2014 @ 1:39 pm

    I found it especially irritating that he said that the Koch Brothers owned whatever mansion because the state said they did. The chain of possession involves those who expended labor and capital, not the state, which is principally involved in making sure the contracting parties honor their obligations to each other.

  36. ChandlersGhost
    February 8th, 2014 @ 1:51 pm

    What’s offensive is that this guy is being groomed as some sort of elite. His writing sucks, he’s ignorant of history and his logic is terrible, but because he can favorably cherry-pick quotes from Karl Marx he is presented as an intellectual.

    I don’t think I’m much older than Jesse Myerson, but I’m starting to understand the whole “get off my lawn” thing.

  37. Adjoran
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:15 pm

    And he complains that when he attempts to seize the mansion, Koch can call “the government and guns” to defend it. As if the thief is the only one allowed violence! What a twit.

    Speaking of twits and Kochs, Reid Wilson in WaPo bemoans why “there are no Kochs of the left,” conveniently omitting that Soros himself gives more to Think Progress alone than the Kochs donate to all political causes every year.

  38. Wombat_socho
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:16 pm

    And that’s why all the Old Bolshies wound up in the camps. Splitters!

  39. Adjoran
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:19 pm

    Nicely eviscerated, sir!

    A couple of notes: no one who majors in “theater and human rights” is intellectually superior to anyone at all. Period. The dumbest plumber on the planet is smarter than Jesse.

    Also, “Free Speech TV” isn’t paying him. That is the channel where Alex Jones and other conspiracy nuts’ stuff appears. It is half a step up from the old public access cable channels.

    Myerson’s view of property is rather unique even for a communist. I would pay to see someone catch him in Starbucks and “seize his laptop for the revolution,” just to get his reaction recorded. I bet it would be priceless.

  40. Adjoran
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:21 pm

    Yeah, I bet the punk touches himself when he thinks of himself as a “renegade.”

  41. Adjoran
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:27 pm

    He lacks the attention span. Fortunately, Solzhenitsyn illustrated most of what you need to know in a shorter work you can read in an hour or two, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

    Even Jesse could probably get through that one.

  42. Steve White
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:33 pm

    Well he DID say (per Stacy) that one could keep one’s personal possessions. I think that includes (and perhaps especially includes) his keeping his laptop.

  43. tmitsss
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:36 pm

    You shall not covet…anything that is your neighbor’s.

  44. Steve White
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:38 pm

    Particularly if the November elections go very, very poorly for the Left. Mr. Myerson’s December appearance on ‘Free Speech TV’ might be a call to the barricades and the ‘dismantling’ of the bourgeois.

    What these jokers don’t realize, of course, is that in the usual socialist revolution, the ones who start the violence usually aren’t around at the finish.

  45. Steve White
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:40 pm

    The idea has been around since Hobbes and Leviathan.

  46. Quartermaster
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:43 pm

    It is small, local governments that keep the record of title to those mansions, not BigGov as seen in state and federal capitals. It is those records that say that Koch owns his mansion, not government. They just keep the records.

  47. Socialism: Organized Evil
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:44 pm

    Plato’s Republic seems to be the earliest account of it, at least as far as I can tell.

  48. PatDissent
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:44 pm

    Look, what part of “we used to shoot goddamned commies” is so difficult to understand? We didn’t have to pen a treatise or use flowery language in speeches. Hell, we didn’t have to explain anything. We just shot them because it was understood communism was evil, therefore goddamned commies DESERVED to be shot.

    Why are we still discussing this?

  49. Quartermaster
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:44 pm

    It was usually done with a sudden brain hemorrhage.

  50. Kirby McCain
    February 8th, 2014 @ 2:46 pm

    The left’s biggest tool is to tell people to covet their neighbor’s possessions. It’s the core of the entitlement mentality. Preaching to the masses with GEDs that it’s unfair that people with MBAs earn more than they do is the stock and trade of the left who is never interested in fairness or justice only power for the sake of power.