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Book review: The Death of Trotsky

Several years ago, I read Isaac Deutcher’s monumental three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. Naturally, it included an account of Trotsky’s assassination. I’ve also read a couple of Stalin biographies and Richard Pipes’ “The Russian Revolution.” I don’t recall how “ The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy” by Josh Ireland  came to my attention; probably a review in New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. Ireland turns the history of Trotsky’s murder into a book-length narrative by drawing on the various threads of Trotsky’s biography, the biography of his assassin,  Ramón Mercader , and the contemporary events and personalities of people in their orbits. These are all woven together in a style more commonly found in novels.  The weather, sights and smells, landscapes, and personal quirks of characters are described in vivid detail. This gives the story a pacing and color absent from most histories. In several places, I found t...
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What’s in a name?

Godwin’s law states:   "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. ” In my experience, a similar law applies to the words “socialist,” “communist” and “Marxist.” All three words are used interchangeably and as epithets, not descriptions of governments or economic systems. Let’s start with Marxist: “The assumption behind most political debate is that Marxist texts contain a detailed design for a “socialist” society. That assumption collapses into oblivion on contact with the actual literature.   “Marx spent the overwhelming majority of his intellectual energy analyzing capitalism — how surplus value is extracted, how class relations form, how markets expand, how crises emerge from systemic contradictions.   Das Kapital , all three volumes of it, is fundamentally a forensic examination of capitalism’s mechanics. Volume I alone runs to nearly 900 pages of dense analysis of the commodity form, the working da...
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Lying liars and the desperate lies they tell

“Health and Human Services Secretary  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , who has spent decades spreading dangerous disinformation about the safety of vaccines, insisted Tuesday that he’s played no role in the resurgence of measles cases in the United States. “I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” Kennedy repeatedly claimed during testimony to a House committee about President Donald Trump’s 2027 budget request.” LOL! The only thing saving RFK Jr is a Y chromosome. All of the Trump cabinet members fired to date have been female. They’ve all been replaced by men.   https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rfk-measles-never-been-anti-vaccine_n_69e139dae4b0555d213a61a5?origin=home-latest-news-unit
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Quote of the day

Yes, the faux godly Hegseth should really be a bit more versed in the bible. But it’s really perfectly apt that he’s not. If you remember, Winnfield is a hitman, a killer, a man of meaningless violence. He wraps his murders in stylized bible verse imitations to give them some mix of giving them retributional ooomph and just for kicks. Is there any better description of Pete Hegseth? I can’t think of one. Hegseth’s brand of Christian nationalism is a permission structure for domination and violence. The biblical text is a source of handy quotes to the extent it advances those aims. But he’s neither smart enough nor serious enough to mine the text in any serious way. He’s just a different version of Jules Winnfield. ~Josh Marshall
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Hometown boy succeeds

I went to high school with Charlie Ergen. He was two years older, so he was a senior when I was a sophomore. He was on the basketball team and student council and was senior class president. We didn’t share any classes or extracurricular activities. He graduated with a BA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and got an MBA from Wake Forest U. He was briefly a  professional gambler, playing poker and blackjack. In 1980 Ergen, his future wife Candy, and Jim DeFranco started EchoSphere Corporation. They drove around the   Denver   metro area selling   satellite dishes   from the back of a truck. Charlie also founded Dishnet and Echostar. In 2000, he first appeared in   The World's Billionaires   by Forbes with a net worth of $11.2 billion, making him the 21st richest person in the world at the time. Charlie Ergen is still a gambler: “ Satellite cable pioneer Charlie Ergen made a big bet on spectrum and eventually found a buyer in SpaceX. The stock p...
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Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene is a poser

Look, I’m a member of the church of the second chance.   "I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent" (Luke 15:7). But perhaps you’ll forgive me for being cynical about MTG’s recent turn on Trump. It’s pegging my crap detector. “ The former congresswoman reposted a social media post on Saturday from Trisha Hope, a self-described “J6 activist,” who wrote that the details surrounding the July 2024 assassination attempt at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, including the perfectly-timed photo of Trump and Trump’s refusal to talk at length about it, are weird.   “Hope added that Corey Comperatore, who was the only person killed during the assassination attempt when he was shielding his wife and daughter, was killed to be “used in the plot,” otherwise people would think the shooting was a hoax. “Extremely important post worth the read and consideration,”  Green...
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MAHA is about politics, not health

RFK Jr says   "Many of us have come to the conclusion that [the] government actually lies to us." On that, I agree. Our government lied us into the Vietnam war and lied about the ending: Nixon took a deal in 1973 that he could have had in 1969. The Bush Administration lied us into the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq based on fake claims of WMDs and collaboration with al Qaeda that ended up spawning (a) an Iran-aligned government and (b) ISIL/Daesh. The Trump Administration lied us into the current war with Iran. And JFK Jr is lying about vaccines, autism and the virtue of red meat consumption. “We shouldn't be confused -- MAHA is not a public health strategy. If it were, it would not come alongside plans to underfund care or undermine confidence in science and proven treatments. Its goal would be to move every American toward evidence-based public health practices. “Rather, MAHA is a highly disciplined political and  omnichannel marketing strategy  seemingly d...
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