in the wake of the week

[rone]

Ah, college, the prime breeding ground of socialists and LaRouchies, same as it was sixteen years ago.  What did the LaRouchie type spout before LaRouche, i wonder?

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"What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order?"

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On Monday night, Crossfire lost again, this time 7-3 to Ball Monsters.  We played our best game yet, but it bears mentioning that Ball Monsters was a player down the whole game.  Lack of conditioning haunted us again; that'll work itself out the more we play.

Comments

Going full circle...

[elmuchacho.livejournal.com]

Is it then just the socialists fate to become jaded in college and give up on change? Seems such a waste of misplaced energy, its like teen angst but without the eventual love making… sad.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Welcome to young adulthood, kid. Now make me a sandwich.

[elmuchacho.livejournal.com]

Make your own damn sandwich; I have learned much to be subdued by mass expectancy.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, LaRouche himself started out as some kind of socialist, I think. Most likely a deranged kind.

Seems to be a common career path-some sub-fraction of the farthest leftists who are particularly nutty always turn into even more deranged right-wingers of some sort when they get disillusioned, and then they can hawk that conversion narrative that the right loves so much*. It happened to David Horowitz, several of the neocons and the British version of the Revolutionary Communist Party (now Spiked Online) as well.


*A political weakness of most left movements, by the way, is that they're insufficiently keen on conversion narratives; when times are bad the leftist reflex is go after one another for not having been true to the cause early enough. The feminist and LGBT-rights enthusiasms for consciousness-raising and coming out are welcome exceptions.

before LaRouche

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

Mosley. Spengler. Sorel--who was, essentially, a socialist, but whose lionization of violent action became a basis for Mussolini's Fascism.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Judging from the Wikipedia bio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Larouche), he got involved with Trotskyites and Marxists purely for self-aggrandizement. Socialism's filled the majority of his adult life and it wasn't until well into middle age that he caromed to the extreme right wing, something he's unlikely to repent since it's made him a lot more money and got him involved with a healthier tributary of the dark murky conspiratorial networks he so desperately needs to bathe in order to survive. (The Wikipedia article is flagged for bias but is surprisingly free of the colorful descriptives I'm using, and it minimizes the really interesting stuff, such as his accusing the British Royal Family of drug-smuggling in cahoots with the Bush family.)

LaRouche never sounded to me to have much personal bias to the left or right philosophically (and I've been seeing his stuff since 'Fusion' magazine in the late 70s). His writing sounds to me mostly calculated agit-prop written by a paranoid monomaniac who doesn't believe in anything but needs followers whose belief in him is unswerving. He can talk a good line and knows how to use it, even if his army is a lot of disaffected callow-faced borderline Aspergers victims. If he had cultivated his talent in marketing rather than among Socialst philosophical tract writers, and if he hadn't declared eternal war against the Bushes, he could be wearing Karl Rove's shoes right now.

[some_other_dave]

I really like the ZIPscribble map! Thanks!

wasn't me

[venividi.livejournal.com]

i always lj from home

josh kornblum used to have a great monologue on that sort of 'party meeting'.