No True Scotsman is a good point here; likewise the motte-and-bailey issue mentioned elsewhere in the thread. There might be some baby somewhere in the bathwate

No True Scotsman is a good point here; likewise the motte-and-bailey issue mentioned elsewhere in the thread. There might be some baby somewhere in the bathwater, but I'm not really very interested in sifting through 19th-century hermaneutics in order to figure out whether or not it exists. Either Communism is an unusually badly-designed system, more than usually volatile and likely to implode by accident; or it was built to implode on purpose, using good intentions as cover for a world-historic power grab. There's no way to prove which of these theories is true -- but that says something pretty unflattering right there -- but either way, it's rather horrifying that there are still people out there who go to bat for it, some of whom aren't even on Vladimir Putin's payroll...