42 CommentsWe heard earlier today that the College Republicans had brought a bunch of black balloons out to the Sundial to “commemorate” May Day (traditionally a celebration of pagan ritual, the workers movement, and loyalty) while a band of merry activists subwayed it down to a march for equal rights in Chinatown. This is how adorable small children dealt with the symbolic protest.
This is how graffitists dealt with it.
Pictures by Alex Weinberg.
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42 Comments
@Charles Fourier Down with Capitalism and Communism! Long live the Phalanx! Human society will be organized in vertical, columnar cities! Surrounded by fields!!! And factories!!! And then the end times will arrive!!!!!!
@mamma mia communism is bad
its just not good
communism ain’t rad
hate it you should
capitalism is dumb
or capitalism is smart
it kills everyone
this poem is art
capitalist grandpa
ha ha ha ha ha
communist grandpa
oh hell naw
@Graffitist Hahahaha fuckers. Of COURSE capitalism doesn’t literally kill millions of people a day. I had to work with what was on the poster. And as inarticulate and witless as my comment was, what prompted me to leave “graffiti” on the poster was how completely vapid its point was. Of COURSE Stalin and Mao were evil bastards, but that doesn’t mean that exploitative capitalism is wonderful, or that May Day is about celebrating totalitarian mutations of Communism. It’s not even just about Communism–it’s a leftist workers’ holiday. The Republican posters were the equivalent of an intellectual fart.
@ahem It seems that anarchism would be the best compromise here. Anyone with me?
@CUCR also celebrates Columbus Day every year with a bbq, which can be construed as celebrating death, slavery and colonialism. So isn’t this a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black?
@yes celebrating columbus day is pretty sick. one thing to say the US is here now, but to celebrate the extermination of 90% of the indigenous population? also noteworthy that there aren’t any actual active stalinists on campus, so there’s no equivalent on the left to that kind of celebration of genocide. the ISO are trots, and trotsky & his supporters & family were among stalin’s millions…
@Joseph McCarthy The adorable little girl IS the communist. SHE defaced the poster! I demand her immediate imprisonment.
@soo if someone put racist comments on an AAA or BSO poster… that would be ok?
How stupid can you be.
@It's interesting that conservatism has been pushed into such a narrow corner on campus that it’s the only thing that seems even vaguely revolutionary anymore.
@pragmatist Those were colored posters, it seems pretty rediculous that the CU GOP spent that amount of money on these silly posters. It just serves as further evidence that these people aren’t party activists. They don’t actually care to further their cause or actually make a difference. They just want to seem as obnoxious as possible. And let’s give credit where credit is due: they’re very good at it.
@you are not pragmatic. you’re stupid. obnoxious? come on. there’s nothing obnoxious about making a point about an ideology that some people on this campus would defend. i see nothing ‘obnoxious’ it pointing out the failure of communism, even if the “110 million deaths” argument is glib. it’s a short way of getting at a big point, so stop bitching.
@well i’m pretty sure i haven’t killed anyone. that means i am awesome and better than capitalism and communism combined. it probably also means i am really good in bed.
@blah Try-outs for Chairman Moore’s Red Guard do not begin until June. Stop posting!
@erf? I don’t think it’s fair to say either Communism OR Capitalism really killed anybody. Ideologies don’t kill people — people kill people.
@not 3 nor an idiot you obviously didn’t read the next post
@Personally I find fascist cunt kinda sexy. I mean, it’s a little cunt, a little authoritarianism — what more could you want in a Saturday night?
@Pff Commies and CUCRs both suck.
@I am going to assume that the 110 million doesn’t even include fascist states. Toss any “statist” & “centralized planning” based government in and I’m sure the numbers tops 200 million – easy.
@what about all the lives capitalism has saved? What about all the years it has added to the world’s population?
Medicine? Technology? Industry? Universities?
Historians believe 9.4 and 12 million slaves arrived in the New World. Disregarding the fact that neither slavery nor mercantilism is capitalist (as capitalism requires a non zero-sum transaction), if we BUMP the number up to 20 million and considered every one of those lives “lost” or dead, that’s TWENTY MILLION FEWER than the number of lives lost in Mao’s China under the Great Leap alone.
Nobody said capitalism is perfect, but for all those who have suffered under the system, it was due to the system, not because of some government agent’s grudge or incompetence.
@and... nobody has a problem with the way someone defaced the poster?
And you wonder why free speech and respect(or the absence thereof) is a problem at Columbia.
@Nope Nope, no problem – if there’s a right to put up signs, there’s a right to respond to them, on them.
@What about the asterisk in the flyer? The bottom of the flyer is cut out.
@it's an attribution for the 110 million statistic.
@what's the attribution.
@some professor of who I have never heard.
@OMG some “professor of who I have never heard.” What the hell does that mean? We’re not to take the citation seriously because YOU have never heard of him? Google, do you use it?
Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii.
in 2003 was given the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conflict Processes Section, American Political Science Association.
That means either Putnam or Jervis gave him the damn award when they ran the organization… wait, is that enough name dropping for you?
@Death Tolls I think we can chalk up the transatlantic slave trade and most colonial empires to capitalism, if only in its more primitive beginnings in some cases. They were pretty fucking bad too…
@Yay Adorable Children = +
Graffitists = +++
And did someone just say that Chris Kulawalkalialk blows well? Sign me up… ew.
@fortran alex, did you take those pictures on your cellphone?
@Songun Marxist-Leninist Communism may have killed many people. But Juche has only saved lives! Glorious Juche brings life to all while capitalist pigs abuse the poor.
@to bwog: that had better show up on your sidebar. That the funniest bwog comment I think I’ve ever read. Either that or I’m really high right now.
@Soooo What are the numbers on sweatshop deaths since the advent of capitalism Kulawalkalialk?
Forgive my spelling outburst. You know I’m really not upset at you Chris. I’m upset with myself because my buttons are so transparent that you can play on them like a master flutist, twiddling his flute and gently blowing on the tip. You blow me so well, that you can control every nuance of my figurative outrage-music.
So carry on, good sir, because your persistent moronics help me to better know myself. And as the Oracle at Delphi said, “Know thyself.”
@... Oh shit, it’s per DAY. Scratch that. You’re right.
@alexw Yo Bwog, where my photocred at?
@lol This is just silly. If capitalism kills a million people a day, then the human race would be extinct within 20 years.
@... Current world population (according to a July 2006 estimate): 6,525,170,264
Millions, plural, implies two million at the least
World birth rate (according to a July 2006 estimate): 20.05 per 1000 population
Thus for the current year, there should be about 130.5 million births.
If capitalism killed two million people every year, there would still be 128.5 million people to take their place.
@uhh Ummmmm……. You can add, multiply, and look up facts about world population but you apparently don’t pay attention to detail! THe ridiculous claim is about Capitalism killing millions DAILY! So, taking 2 Million a day, that would mean there would be 700 Million or so deaths by capitalism yearly, far outweighing hte number of births you mention using your statistics.
Now, I might have to say that this conversation is all the fault of Frontiers of Science for making this school love back of the evelope calculations… As that girl’s song says, “Sexy ladies, bust out those calculators”….
@I think... you’re a tool. And so are all the people debating whether or not capitalism kills “millions of people a day.” The person who really wrote that was trying to make a point. The CUCR flyers were blunt and served no other purpose than to be rude. You and the others who are arguing the numbers like that were SO that guy in my Lit Hum class. Obviously you haven’t changed much.
@... Yes, they were making a point… a stupid point… That’s why it’s always amusing to take stupid points to their logical extreme…
@die, pussy awwww poor wittle communists got their wittle feewings hurt by the wepubwicans
@Rude? What the hell is wrong with you? Rude to who? Campus socialists? Campus communists? Pointing out how many people ideological regimes killed is… rude?
We should demand that the CU GOP apologize to Stalin and Mao. How dare they!
@Cam What’s rude is pissing on someone else’s holiday for their own whiny little ideological hang-ups.
It’s May Day, for pete’s sake. People celebrating a day for workers’ rights and the start of summer are not in fact doing this to worship Stalin and Mao. You don’t actually believe they are, and neither does the CUCR. They nevertheless imply that celebrating May Day is celebrating mass death, which is hideously rude – and all the more so because the flier serves no other purpose than to hurl the insult.