Thread below the Gardening Thread: Checking the Undergrowth [KT]

Wow. What a jaw-dropping week. Hard to keep up. In addition to the news items we've seen at AoSHQ, I was accidentally exposed to the Facebook page of an avowed communist. He lives in Canada. He was the only new lefty follower not blocked by a guy I follow who has some interesting ideas. In other words, this communist is a "nice" communist, not given to automatic abuse of those with other opinions. Rare. He said that Marxism was a way to analyze society - not a way to organize society. But wouldn't Lenin turn over in his grave (if he had a grave) to see how the USA rejected his message? Heh.

There were posts on his page demanding that imperialist Canada just leave poor Venezuela alone. There was an old video touting the ability of Soviet scientists to revive the severed head of a dog. There were posts of admiration for North Korea(!) including a clip from an old movie about a little Korean girl selling flowers and the Japanese occupation.

The posts on this Facebook page sent me on a search for context at The People's Cube. Why the nostalgia for the USSR among young communists at this time, for example?

Didn't help much with figuring out the Canadian communist, but during my visit to The People's Cube I noticed their news sidebar. I found this follow-up to California's official response against President Trump's ordered review of national monuments. You can't reverse the executive orders of other presidents creating national monuments, said the Attorney General of California. You can only make new monuments, or make them bigger. So:

Trump signs executive order making California and New York national monuments; residents have two days to vacate

Guess this weekend is going to be busier than I thought.

Meanwhile, back in the real world the oligarchs of Sacramento and Silicon Valley are cooperating in California's descent into socialism.

California's progressive regime of severe land-use controls has helped to make the state among the most unaffordable in the nation, driving homeownership rates to the lowest levels since the 1940s. It has also spurred a steady hegira of middle-aged, middle-class families -- the kind of tax-burdened people Gov. Jerry Brown now denounces as "freeloaders" -- from the state. They may have access to smartphones and virtual reality, but the increasingly propertyless masses seem destined to live in the kind of cramped conditions that their parents and grandparents had escaped decades earlier. . . .

The oligarchs of the Bay Area have a problem: They must square their progressive worldview with their enormous wealth. They certainly are not socialists in the traditional sense . . .

What would Lenin think of this alternate route to socialism? Why does anybody still care what Lenin would think?

You got anything interesting going on this weekend?

posted by Open Blogger at 11:11 AM

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