RT at the Back to the Brecht Center; "Specter of Communism in NYC"

A few months back, I highlighted this silly New York Times puff piece on Manhattan's Brecht Forum, a place where deluded hippies can hang out with other deluded hippies and read the complete works of Stalin, Lenin, and Ron Karenga. Now the Kremlin-funded television network RT, taking a break from interviews with Alex Jones and its deeply serious warning about the Bilderberg conspiracy, takes its cameras into the Brecht Center, a place of sanctuary for those who have been hideously wrong about everything and want to discuss the "taboo" subject of Communism. Most clueless line in the piece? At the Brecht Center, says RT correspondent Lauren Lyster, you the "hear the discourse left out of many American colleges"—provided you went to Liberty University or Bob Jones.

Comments

[Jeffersonian]

Threadjack: Where is Balko when you need him?

LINK

[Jeffersonian]

Goddamn it:

http://www.stltoday.com/news/l.....mode=story

[hmm]

Looks like chief material to me.

[Jeffersonian]

This cop was out of control.

[wylie]

the gas station, which contains a police substation.

Who in their right mind would patronize that establishment?

[wylie]

PS: Hydraulic Despotism

[wylie]

Everyone loves pointless Dune references, but seemingly, hate when it's used as a manual of governance. (Err, a manual of how NOT to govern, w/e)

[hmm]

It's common around Saint Louis. There's a police substation in every freakin' QT. It's gotten a little silly.

[Robert]

I don't think I've ever seen a gas station that had anybody working security, unless they were doing it very discreetly.

[hmm]

Not even on the north side. Not that the state streets down near 55 aren't ghetto, but you'd expect this somewhere up north. (then again the cops don't do security there, they don't care)

[?]

I'm so old I remember when there were commies who appreciated the irony that learning Marx's "discourse" had become a bourgeois rite.

Get off my ??????!

[Koch Brother]

Failing economy?

IT sure as shit isn't failing for MY investments! The stock market is reaching a record high and my investments in China and India are BOOMING!

It's only you working suckers in the US where its "failing", but hey! LIBERTY!

[ryback's cook]

It's only you working suckers in the US where its "failing", but hey!

That can't have anything to do with the $12,000,000,000 debt, can it?

[Koch Concern Troll...]

...is concerned.

[mr simple]

@laurenlyster

Wow, that woman is clueless.

[Dagny T.]

Twitter is a magnet for retards. If you're making a political point in 140 characters or less, maybe waste fewer on superfluous punctuation?!!?!?! Finding a venue whose primary purpose isn't Justin Bieber fandom might also lend a certain gravitas.

[wylie]

Making a Point in More than 140 Chars, but less than 5 paragraphs: Hit&Run;.

Yeah baby, YEAH!

[wylie]

(still waiting to be able to use ampersand without an accompanying semi-colon showing up.....y'all jumped right on killing style attributes, any movement on this front?)

[Ted S.]

Just call it HitAmpersandRun.

It's like that singer (I use the term loosely) Kedollasrsignha.

[Bill]

Yes,

We libertarians have cleverly made sure that the world is exactly the way we want it by getting the exact opposite of what we believe in passed into law. Diabolical.

[Jerry]

Where are the Trotskyites?

[Episiarch]

They all got an ice axe to the head.

[BakedPenguin]

Even if they were very appropriately named, funny that a bunch of commies would get all pissed when someone ripped off one of their riffs. (And, IMO, made a much better song.)

[shrike]

I'm here. What the fuck do you want?

[Max]

ARFARFARFARFARFARF!!!!!!!!!!!

[Chad]

Fuck you, Jerry.

[omg]

So they redistribute the poker chips so no one gets more then their "fair share" after every game, right? And also tithe a portion after every round to a faceless bureaucrat?

Actually, that would make a great game showing why communism doesn't work.

[wylie]

How is poker even legal in a communist regime? And since it's illegal, naturally, the proletariat would be averse to such poor resource allocation methods.

[Koch Brother]

That's right! COMMUNISM is the biggest threat to you today! The Reds are coming! They could enslave you at any time! Your problems are caused by THE REDS!! Disregard that the Cold War has been over since 1989!

Heh, suckers...

[DemocraticUnderground]

What he said!

[Koch Concern Troll...]

...is concerned.

[Veen Deen]

Wow, kinda scary when you think about it huh??

http://www.anon-web-tools.edu.tc

[joshua corning]

so is Haiti punished historically because it was black or because it was a republic?

Hard to tell when a communist is making the claim.

[MNG]

They made a deal with Satan. True story.

[Progressive Guy]

Your primitive religious babble is ridiculous. Science tells us that Haiti was punished by Gaia to send a message to the West about their decadent consumerist ways. Now, you might wonder why she picked a country filled with poor people to do that instead of somewhere in the West, but it makes sense -- the message is for us, and we can't receive it if we're dead.

[hmm]

It was punished for the same reason the Dominican Republic was. Wait a second...

[Dagny T.]

I know everyone loves the OMG HAWT RT girls, but the only instances of not-stupid I've ever seen on that channel are when they aren't talking and someone from Reason is.

[wylie]

I've never tuned into RT (don't even know how actually, aside from clips on this site.)....but yeah, why would you? That's why we're all here, trying to gain some solace from each other, to endure the complete lack of sensibility in the world at large. THAT'S why it's called Reason (DRINK!)

"HAWT GIRLS TALKING NEWS AND POLITICS!!!111oneone"

"Ummm, this is the internet, and like food, I prefer to keep my politics and news OUT of the bedpornoroom, TYVM."

[wylie]

"oh, and, hot girls on the internet? not with their shirts still on." FYI, RussiaToday.

[Robert]

I tuned into RT to see their coverage of some Libertarian Party function or event when they were operating a low power TV station transmitting northward from the World Trade Center. I had no idea they had such cx as mentioned here. Then again, maybe that wasn't the same RT. Or maybe it was, serving the Russians in Riverdale & Yonkers.

[Xmas]

There one of the news stations featured in my hotel in Copenhagen, BBC, CNN, and RT are the 3 English language news stations I get here.

[silent v]

Now the Kremlin-funded television network RT, taking a break from interviews with Alex Jones...

Isn't this the same network that runs that show with the hot chick (Alyana?) that you guys appear on every couple of days?

[affenkopf]

Lack of self-awareness is not something exclusive to the left.

[Floyd]

Did anyone else catch that the song they were rehearsing, calling for a boycott of Israel, was done to the tune of "I Have a Little Dreidel"?

The more things change...

[Floyd]

...although, thinking about it again, maybe they decided going with a Christmas song would sound even more anti-Semitic than going with a Hanukkah one (which sounded plenty anti-Semitic to me). So I may have judged them too harshly. Carry on, singing commies!

[Fist of Etiquette]

Even with sympathetic editing, these people come off pathetic.

[wylie]

Your under-appreciation of pathos is noted.

[Episiarch]

That's probably because they are.

[Kevin]

Oh God, Communists can't have any fun without harping on about class struggle.

[Warty]

Communists can have fun?

[sevo]

Hey! Collectivization was a blast!

[Barack Obama]

It will be again, sevo. Might take two terms, but by God I'll get it done.

[sevo]

Will the kulaks end up in Idaho?

[Barack Obama]

Yes... their own public Idaho.

[sevo]

Seriously:
Reading "Bloodlands"; if you can tolerate stats on Stalin's murderous reign, it puts Hitler in perspective. The man was a piker compared to our "ally".

[Ornithorhynchus]

It's 'spectre', with an r-e! Why can't anyone spell anymore?

[oh well]

So basically none of these people have visited the sociology department of any major research university? That line is especially funny considering that Immanuel Wallerstein, who teaches at Columbia, just publiched a mini-blurb in FP about the coming demise of the 500-year old capitalist world-economic-system.

[sevo]

"...publiched a mini-blurb in FP about the coming demise of the 500-year old capitalist world-economic-system."

Got a link? It's amusing to read tortured reasoning about how prosperity is the horrible fate of mankind.

[oh well]

though I doubt anyone is still checking this, here's the link:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/a.....m?page=0,9

It's part of some series where they asked a bunch of people about predictions for 2011.

[Robert]

The Libertarian Book Club carries on its anarchist forum series at Brecht Forum too.

[LarryA]

Love the "Is America ready to think in shades of gray" bit. That's communism all right. All the real colors hammered and sickled away.

[nekoxgirl]

Where the heck can you go to school in the US and NOT be inundated with socialism? I had to read the Communist Manifesto in high school and college and I went to school in the South. I figure it must be much worse in the Northeast and West coasts.

[Kristen]

In high school I read Ayn Rand and William Ernest Henley. In Connecticut. Maybe you Southerners are the real commies? 😉

[Lurker Kurt]

I remember seeing plenty of pro-commie signs on the door of various proffessors in the humanities departments when I was in college.