News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
U.S.—According to sources, several prominent leftists are expressing worry that Communism failing every time it’s tried could be making Communism look bad.
“This is a real problem,” said Dr. Petri Smirnoff, a local leftist college professor. “There is a real danger of kids being turned off to Communism due to the annoying fact that it’s a godless and inhuman ideology that fails in spectacular fashion resulting in death or starvation literally every time it’s implemented. It’s really not fair. It may lead to people thinking Communism is bad even though we know it’s really good when implemented correctly.”
Historians say that the gulags in the U.S.S.R., torture in North Korea, concentration camps in China, starvation in Venezuela, and people desperately escaping Cuba could serve to make people incorrectly think Communism is a less than stellar way of organizing society.
Studies have indeed confirmed a slight drop in support for Communism in light of Cuban Communism’s spectacularly disastrous failure on the world stage as Cuban citizens call for freedom. According to surveys, support for Communism among Millennial and Gen Z voters dropped from 78% to 77%.
Go here to read the rest.
I read all the tweets by Bernie, AOC, Omar etc., in support of the people of Cuba on today’s show…https://t.co/XgHcar8BX1 pic.twitter.com/D8dSWOapu1
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) July 12, 2021
Rolling brownouts, blackouts, water restrictions, contaminated beaches, and on and on. Locusts lurking. Welcome to California; Welcome to America.
I’ve never met anyone who has actually read all of Marx, Engels, Bakunin, etal; yet, I have met a lot of experts on the subject of communism. Go figure.
I hasten to add, these outspoken experts believe an imposed, centralized command socio-economic system is preferable to untidy, unfair freedom.
On a different note: I once ran across a grade school student outing at my local library. It was a presentation of Lysander Spooner-Anarchist. Make of it what you will. (Full disclosure: Spooner is my cousin)
OT:
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=394714
As for the Latin Americanization of our political economy see this
Brazil: annualized inflation rate, 8.4%; ratio gov’t debt to GDP: 0.76
Mexico: inflation, 5.9%; debt, 0.46
Argentina: inflation, 49%; debt, 1.02
Colombia: inflation, 3.6%; debt, 0.63
Peru: inflation, 3.3%; debt, 0.35
These account for about 70% of Latin America’s population and production.
U.S.: inflation, 5.4%; debt, 1.07
It’ll take us a while to reach the levels of violent crime you see in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. I think our homicide rate has already surpassed Argentina’s and Peru’s. And it’s a reasonable wager they all now have cleaner elections than we do and quite possibly less politicized militaries.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ARG/argentina/murder-homicide-rate (has links to other countries at the bottom)
Even if the increase is a full 25% over last year’s, and there weren’t drops, we’re roughly at Argentina levels– and that assumes that all the extra deaths are not justified, which I know at least a couple were. (Various “mostly peaceful” folks finding out the soft target wasn’t.) Depending on which stat is being used, killing of a felon during the commission of a felony isn’t counted as homicide.
In context, we’d have to have a 200% increase to reach 90s level of homicides, and are hanging around the 1960s murder rate.
https://disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm