Communism

They Who Must Not Be Named

I have spoken of vzyali quite a few times on this blog. I learned the term from my Scoutmaster when I was a boy scout as a teenager. Greg (I used his first name for security reasons) had escaped from the Soviet Union in the 1950’s as a teenager when his parents managed to smuggle him across the border in the trunk of a car. He never saw his parents again, they were vzyali.

He used to tell me stories of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union. How they used to spy on and watch everyone, to the point where you were required to bring your unsealed envelopes for mailing to their post office. The officials would read your mail to ensure it contained nothing disloyal before sealing and passing the envelope on.

Vzyali is one of the most chilling linguistic phenomena of the Soviet era, particularly during Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s. In that context, “Vzyali” translates more accurately to “They took [him/her/them]” or “They’ve taken.” It was used as an absolute, terrifying euphemism.

  • The Unspeakable “They”: Everyone knew exactly who “they” were—the NKVD (the Soviet secret police, later the KGB)—but naming them aloud was incredibly dangerous. By omitting the pronoun or noun, citizens avoided speaking the name of the state security apparatus, which could invite suspicion upon themselves.
  • Avoiding Legal Terms: People rarely said “arrestovani” (arrested) because “arrest” implied a legitimate legal process, a charge, and a system of justice. “Vzyali” stripped away any illusion of legality; it meant a person was simply plucked from their life, usually in the dead of night, never to be seen again.
  • The Atmosphere of Fear: The word captured the arbitrary, predator-like nature of the regime. To say someone was “taken” meant they had vanished into the Gulag system or been executed, and their family was left to live in terror of being “taken” next.

This linguistic coping mechanism is famously documented in Soviet dissident literature, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Anna Akhmatova’s poem Requiem, reflecting how totalitarianism alters language itself to express trauma.

Our scoutmaster was a good man, but he passed away a few months ago. He and his wife became good friends with my own parents. They lived a few miles from us, and I remember they used to visit often. Pat’s specialty was mango pies, Greg’s specialty was teaching me skills like living in the woods, washing dishes without water, and other useful skills. His wife Pat died a few years ago.

No one hated communists more than Greg, and he would let you know why. All you had to do was get to know him. He loved the US with everything he had, and did more to serve this country than most who were born here. He left a lasting impression upon me, and is a huge reason why I am as opposed to the communist movement that the left has become.

By Divemedic, ago

Not Work

I want to illustrate some communist stupidity. These Marxist idiots have a kindergarten level of understanding when it comes to economics.

A circuit breaker for the front of the house kept tripping. I kept losing power to two bedrooms and a bathroom. 6 receptacles, plus the lights for the three rooms. I spent a good part of the day trying to chase down the cause. It took about 3 hours to discover one of the stretches of Romex running between two receptacles on two different walls had a short between the ground and the neutral wires. They measured less than an ohm between them. I was forced to cut the ends of the wire off in both boxes. Now the breaker stays on. I’m glad the wire in question only powers the one plug.

So tomorrow, I will run to Lowes and get a twenty foot piece of 12 gauge Romex and some nail plates. Then I will have to pull the baseboard between that plug and one that is on the same wall, pull the wire behind the drywall, use a hammer drill and masonry bit to drill into the block, pull the wire up in to the boxes through the hole I just drilled, wire it all up, and then repair the wall and replace the baseboards. Call it another 4 or 5 hours of my day MINIMUM. Even doing the work myself is going to take about 20 hours of work and cost about $60 in parts. If I had paid an electrician, probably $1,000 worth of service call. All because of a tripping breaker.

How is this related to communists? Because, according to Communists, owning and maintaining property isn’t work, and landlords shouldn’t be allowed to charge people money for that.

By Divemedic, ago

We Have To Be In A Simulation

The person running the simulator is just running it on every dystopian novel on their shelf. They were doing George Orwell, now they are using Ayn Rand.

By Divemedic, ago

None For You

So the owner of the business has to provide the compressor, the electricity, the maintenance, insurance, and other necessary items at his own expense?

Pass a law against charging for air, and they will just remove the air station, ensuring that no one will have air available at all.

Oh, and saying “I’m pro-capitalism, but” right before making a statement like this is like saying “I’m a gun owner, but”

By Divemedic, ago

Stupidity.

Background: Some moron came to social media to simp for passing a law reducing the work week to 32 hours. Some people complained that they wouldn’t be able to pay bills with a 20% reduction in income. The response from the advocates of this claimed the law would require an hourly raise so the fewer hours would not affect the employees’ take home pay. That’s the background.

I objected, asking how businesses would pay for this. The response was “studies have shown that this schedule increases employee productivity so that this plan has no net impact on business operations.” I called bullshit- if this were the case, businesses would already be doing this.

In response, they attached a “study” done by the government of San Juan county, Washington. Since 2023, the county has only required employees work 32 hours per week. They have made it permanent by claiming an increase of over 200% in job applicants and an increase in employee productivity.

The catch is in how the government defines productivity. I will quote it here:

Maintaining Productivity: Employee timesheet data shows an average of 18% less sick time used after adopting the 32HWW, and 21% less sick time used during flu season. 

That isn’t productivity. That’s presence. Just because an employee doesn’t call in sick as often doesn’t mean he is doing anything while he is there. This is the kind of bullshit that people pass off as “scientific studies” today.

So I asked, if employee productivity goes up, why wouldn’t all businesses do it? His answer? Business owners are greedy. If by greedy, you mean “all business owners want to earn the largest profit they can,” Then I guess they are. However, if they are greedy and want to maximize profit, you do that by increasing productivity.

There are two types of costs that a business incurs:

  • Variable costs. These are costs that vary with the amount of product you produce. Things like labor, raw materials, etc.
  • Fixed costs: insurance, cost of the factory, administrative overhead like HR and accounting departments, things like that.

If a business is creating 3200 widgets and has 400 labor hours each week, there are 8 products being made per labor hour. That’s a measure of variable labor costs. If I could reduce that to 320 labor hours, but still manufacture 3200 widgets, I just cut my labor costs by producing 10 widgets per labor hour.

But there’s more. At the same time, the fixed costs stay the same, only now there is time in a week to work another 3/4ths of a shift in the three days remaining. If I hire a second shift to work an average of 240 hours per week and they can maintain the 10 widgets per labor hour, I am now producing 5600 widgets per week without increasing my fixed costs.

I just increased my profit margins. Why wouldn’t I??

The reason I wouldn’t? Because productivity doesn’t increase when you cut working hours. If a person can assemble ten widgets an hour, he won’t magically assemble 12 of them because you give him more time off.

So what happened? How did San Juan county’s government departments all meet their targets, even though they were working 20% fewer hours? Two ways: They made salaried employees work more hours, and they had an outsourcing contract that brought in outside contractors to complete the backlogged work.

That’s how leftists and governments define success. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

By Divemedic, ago

Stepping on Your Johnson

Three times I voted for Trump. He was and remains a better choice than any of the three who ran against him. That being said, the Iran war clearly shows him to be stepping on his dick.

Iran is clearly prolonging the conflict until November, because their aim is obviously to influence the election. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out the Democrats are conspiring with Iran to make that happen.

Still,this is a disaster in the making for the Republicans. Fuel prices are sky high. Gasoline is averaging more than $4.30 a gallon. Inflation is high, and the Fed is expected to raise interest rates by a quarter percent today.

The nation, and perhaps the world, is about to enter a recession. Americans vote with their wallets. Republican lawmakers, sensing vulnerability to anti-Trump election pressures, are beginning to turn on him.

All of this signals a return to Democrat control of Congress. Trump is about to become a powerless lame duck.

That also means a likely stranglehold of both Congress and the Whitehouse. Imagine President AOC, but backed by Control of both the Senate and the House.

By Divemedic, ago

Kidnapper’s Morality

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That’s what the communists claim, is it not? My question has always been- “How do you determine ability and need?” Well, Ayn Rand already answered that question:

 Whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it’s all one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht — and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not?

If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth — why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can’t?

Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room? Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars — rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family’ — and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ — so he had to beg in public for his relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm

The key to getting treasure in a communist system is to be needy. To prove need, one needs to have a tragic story, one must claim your victimhood. The contest, then is to be a victim. That’s why social media has become what it has. In this world, the crowd has decided that a black man who has been accused of being a domestic abuser is less of a victim than the mother who has to live with poor mental health and three dead children, even if she is the one who killed them.

The landlord isn’t a victim. The corporation isn’t a victim, and neither is it’s billionaire founder. The victim is the looter, the thief, the person who doesn’t produce anything. Why is this? Because it must be in order for the communist system to work.

Again to Ayn Rand in the morality of the kidnapper. The kidnapper holds a physical captive for ransom. Those who would take from society are holding those who producers captive using the producer’s own morality as a weapon. The “morality of altruism” holds a good person’s conscience, empathy, and sense of duty as a ransom.

theirs is the morality of kidnappers. They use your love of virtue as a hostage. They know that you’ll bear anything in order to work and produce, because you know that achievement is man’s highest moral purpose, that he can’t exist without it, and your love of virtue is your love of life. They count on you to assume any burden. They count on you to feel that no effort is too great in the service of your love.

your enemies are destroying you by means of your own power. Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools. Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you. They know it. You don’t. The day when you’ll discover it is the only thing they dread.

learn to understand the nature of your own power and you’ll understand the paradox you now see around you. You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce.

You have a desire to succeed, to build things, to accomplish things. My entire life, I have always worked, and built, and struggled to accomplish things. Those who would take advantage of me know this, and so they take advantage of my desire to do things, to work, to be useful. They take from me in the form of taxes, of asking that I do the right thing. They take small pieces of my time, my effort, my production for themselves, secure in the knowledge that I will continue to do so. They do the same to you.

As long as we continue to provide, they will continue to take. Like the old plow horse, the useless breeders in our society will continue to take our labor until we collapse under the whip. Not just us as individuals, us as a society. They will continue to take until the entire system comes crashing down.

It’s always been so, and will be until we have decided that we’ve had enough.

By Divemedic, ago

Government Stupidity

First, a word from our elected Representatives:

Let’s say she is successful at capping student loan interest at 2%. You are a lender, and you have funds to invest. You are looking for a low risk vehicle to place those funds in.

  • You can invest it by lending it to a student and get 2% per year, but won’t ever be repaid your principal.
  • You can buy a 12 month T-bill at 4.15%. Wash, rinse repeat
  • Or a 10 year treasury note at 4.75%

The only lender who can offer 2% student loans is the Federal government, but only by subsidizing them using money they are in turn borrowing at double the rate they are lending it out at. It currently borrows at roughly 4%–5% for comparable maturities, then bears servicing costs, delinquency, default, forgiveness, and interest-rate risk. Charging borrowers 2% therefore transfers part of the loan’s economic cost to taxpayers.

Department of Education lending costs $3.3 billion each year using Federal Government accounting practices, and $15.0 billion under fair-value accounting, which incorporates market risk more fully and is the systems businesses use.

Our elected politicians have become idiots who get elected solely by promising people free shit. Noone thinks about how it will be paid for.

By Divemedic, ago

Moving too Far to the Left

You know the Democrat party is moving too far to the left when even Bill Maher says they sound too much like communists, and his vote may be in play. Watch the video in this post, it’s worth it.

By Divemedic, ago