re: #375 Guanxi88

I’m not Beck, nor do I play him on the web.

Radical chic - the kitschification of totalitarianism. If you don’t see a problem with quoting these folk approvingly, or doing up campaign artwork in the style of early Maoist propaganda, then you should see no problem with Euro-fascists and their “cute” riffs on swastika etc.

I think you will find that a great many things are in fact riffs on stuff like the italian futurism movement of the early 20th century and so on. These are things that have turned into pop cultural icons. I am sure there are tons of art directors out there who will happily wax poetic on the subject of totalitarian esthetics.

Obama aint’ a radical - he just hangs out with, appoints, and is attractive to, radicals.

Which radicals did he appoint?

She chose to quote Mao precisely because it’s a sort of “in” thing on the left; has been for years. Atwater quoted him, too, but I daresay that the points of intersection between anything espoused by Atwater or his president and mao would be fewer than those intersections betweeen say, Van Jones and Mao, to name but one.

You THINK that’s why she did it. You don’t KNOW that’s why she did it. And I will happily argue that if you fail to understand Mao you have missed a huge part of 20th century history, his writings have a lot of interesting things to say and failing to see that (and even worse, making it impossible to quote him in public for fear of being insta-commiebranded just goes totally against everything I believe in) is naive in my opinion.

Mao was a ruthless dictator, he is responsible for the deaths of millions. He was however a very astute thinker. He was NOT a deranged populist. This is an important distinction to make and I have personally quoted him on numerous occasions.