Re: This is Not America

Nah, in my world that means they flunked their Ph.D. quals. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Luckily, 99.8% of Democrats are too wussy to ever murder anyone, even if they want to. *Real* marxists have no limits in that regard.

We just fired a PhD. Great theorist, no common sense.

Karl Marx didn't go in fr murdering people. John Larkin's "real marxists" are an invention of the political propaganda he reads - and being the gullble twit he is - believes.

I've got a masters (in inorganic chemistry) and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. I didn't flunk anything, but the master's project was ill-conceived.

Didn't have enough sense to flatter John Larkin as fulsomely as he should have done. Or maybe a bad case intellectual integrity.

Republicans do seem to keep taking pops at Trump they should try to knock that off.

The "real Marxists" I'm familiar with tend to like coffee shops and Sartre more than the gun range but there are some (nut cases) who believe every cat lady with a "Coexist" sticker on her Yaris is just waiting to pop out guns blazing and initiate the Cultural Revolution at a moment's notice.

Unclear to me why the US university system is considered some hotbed of Marxsim when it tends to be one of the most stodgy top-down organizations there are, with procedures and websites that tend to date to the technological Neolithic.

I'm familiar with a young person with a disability who's in a STEM program at a relatively prestigious university and it's apparently difficult to get many STEM profs to even just fahkin' face forwards and not mumble most of the time, for the benefit of video lectures/ transcriptions for the hard-of-hearing, much less embrace a dictatorshiop of the proletariat.

If someone want a "great theorist" who can also sling solder and knows their way around a bench that seems like something to be resolved at the interview stage, not however many months or years later.

But yeah everyone I know myself included has been turned down for positions where despite being very familiar with the potential employer's actual problem they prefer to discuss some other random thing not significantly related to the job description as written, up to and including sports or what my relationship with my mother is like (seriously.)

I optimistically chalk it up to "cultural differences" but I do prefer employers do that sorting at the interview stage.

It's a fact that you don't really know a person until you work with them.

Designing things is a mix of technology and personality. It's hard to interview for both.

In my last case, the person wanted to do fancy complex slow expensive stuff to solve simple problems.

The real gulag megadeath and starvation Marxists were Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro, not the college-campus party tent crowd.

Sri Lanka just elected a Marxist president.

Cubans are scrounging in the garbage for food.

Nobody can manage an economy, especially a Marxist.

Karl Marx was a nasty lunatic. Google that phrase.

Some bosses do make that complaint a lot. They also resist any suggestion that the problem is any more complicated than they originally thought, and don't want to sit through a tedious explanation of what is actually going on.

The late Ian Crutwell of Cambridge Instruments was remarkably clever, but really didn't want to know that the - much better - lanthenum boride electron source that we'd put into the electron beam microfabricator emitted a fairly tight cone of electrons, so we had to had add a double deflection system to the electron gun to make sure that the beam was pointed in the right direction as well as pointed at the right place.

We did it anyway, and when every column started reliably delivering the

Lenin and Castro were actually pretty sane. Lenin pre-dates the gulags - or at least the lethal form that was developed under Stalin. When Lenin died there were only about 200,000 people in labour camps so no mega-deaths.

He's a left-wing economist - he shares some economic ideas with Karl Marx, but not his view on the "leading role of the party".

Not at the moment. Their economy took a hit when the world sugar price collapsed back in 1985 and 1999, but the Cuban government did insulate the population from the worst of the consequences.

As if John Larkin knew anything about economics, or Marxist economics.

He wasn't an attractive character, but he certainly wasn't a lunatic. He even corresponded with Abraham Lincoln - Karl Marx wrote some 500 articles for the New York Tribune, so he was well known in the US.

Of course he's been re-invented by the American right-wing as the founder of totalitarian communism, which is to say as a cartoon villain.

John Larkin is susceptible to this sort of over-simplification.

Academic brilliance and common sense seldom go hand in hand.

There wasn't even much "eventually" about it, either. By the early

There were certainly murderous persecutions going on - Victor Serge's "Memoirs of a Revolutionary" documents that.

Rubbish. Revolutions are messy, and psychopathic scum rise to power whatever the underlying politics happen to be.

Trump despite his right-wing views, is no less dangerous than his left-wing counterparts and probably much more dangerous than any prominent left-winger in the west.

Cursitor Doom and John Larkin don't seem to know many people who are academically brilliant. Most of the ones I've known have been thoroughly sensible outside their specialities, which does manifest itself in a capacity to avoid creeps like Cursitor Doom, amongst other useful skills.