[cranked]

Embodiment of the clueless becoming even more clueless or ignorance is bliss.

[Monty22002]

Imagine is an amazing song and serious earworm. I love it. I can’t STAND 75% of the lyrics though.

[Robert DeLong]

Lisa Howard

Lisa Howard was an American journalist, writer, and television news anchor who previously had a career as an off-Broadway theater and soap opera actress. In the early 1960s, she became ABC News's first woman reporter, and was the first woman to have her own national network television news show.

Born: Dorothy Jean Guggenheim, her family was Jewish, April 24, 1926, Cambridge, Ohio, U.S.

Died: July 04, 1965, East Hampton, Long Island, New York, U.S.

Cause of death: Barbiturate overdose

[ronnie raygun]

Imagine........communism

[rellimpank]

bflr-

[xp38]

I’m sure this flick will be a fave with Justine who wept when Fidel cashed his chips in.

[Stravinsky]

It’s a horrible song. They deserve every bit of criticism for singing that leftist nonsense during this pandemic.

[sphinx]

Castro idolatry is one of the queerest affections of the left. It's a story that should be explored, but it would be a tricky film to make. The roots of it, I think, are straightforward and run back to old Uncle Karl. Marx claimed to have understood history "scientifically," as an expression of an inexorable economic logic (everything else being epiphenomenal) that would lead to the dominance of a ruthless capitalism, the immiseration of the working class, and eventual but inevitable socialist revolution. This theory was never fully embraced by the social democrats, democratic socialists, and left-liberal reformers of many stripes, but it came to dominate the radical left because it justified violence and rationalized the left's will to power.

The problem was that history was unkind to Karl's predictions. Democratic reform socialism got traction in the western democracies -- and the Marxists always hated the democratic socialists as much as, or more than, they hated the capitalists. Then came WWI, and to the utter shock of the Marxists, the European working classes turned out to be patriots. They marched off to war, not revolution. Karl's theory was a shambles on all fronts. Then by freakish chance -- and considerable German intervention intended to knock Russia out of the war -- Lenin imposed a Marxist dictatorship by force, and the theoreticians went to work squaring the Soviet police state with Karl's fantasies. That was always a shabby fraud, but academic leftists took it seriously, and still do.

The problem was that Marxist socialism had been spread, not by the inevitable unfolding of iron historical and economic laws, but at the point of the bayonet, first in Russia, then across Eastern Europe, and then China. That's not the way history was supposed to work, and it was a problem for a movement that wanted to believe communism would be liberating. Gulags and Berlin Walls were bad optics, and only morally stunted academics were willing to overlook them. Then came Castro, at the head of an apparently indigenous revolution from below, with the Red Army nowhere in sight.

For academic Marxists, Castro was a figure of redemption. Marxists had grown sick of defending the gulag, but since that was all they had, they had either to soldier on or break with the party. (The honest ones broke with the party.) Now they had an actual communist revolution! The whole Marxist left was orgasmic. Maybe Karl had gotten the details wrong and the confident timelines had been reduced to rubble, but history was grinding in the right direction after all. Ecstasy!

The enthusiasm for Castro was orgasmic, enough to perhaps attract the attention of a filmmaker politically independent enough to make sport of the farce. The Castro story could be usefully told as a failed romance, a love story in which the object of desire turns out to be a psychotic killer. Hollywood knows how to tell this story. It's a movie that should be made.

I wonder if Gal Gadot has a glimmer of historical understanding. Someone needs to sit down with her soon.

[Redmen4ever]

If Adam Smith had written Imagine

Imagine no established churches
It’s easy if you try
No inquisition of dissenters
Heretics not made to fry
Imagine all the people
Enjoying freedom of religion

Imagine no right of conquest
It isn’t hard to do
No initiation of war
And no enslaving the defeated too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Imagine no abject poverty
I wonder if you can
No mass starvation or high rates of infant mortality
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Joined in specialization and trade

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one ...
and as many at the same time

[Hot Tabasco]

“Imagine” is the Communist Star Spangled Banner....I hate it and John Lennon.....

[fieldmarshaldj]

For all those who think Gal Gadot is hot stuff, she’s apparently a Grade-A efftard.

[Rummyfan]

I’m inlined to give Gal Gadot a break... on anything.

[TalBlack]

Gal Godot is 34? Seems she just came along . Didn’t starlets used to be younger? Technically she’s about middle aged.

[Lazamataz]

Gal Gadot is ugly and talentless, and smells mostly like corned beef out of a can.

[kanawa]

I’d give her a break but first I’d have to give her a good spanking.

[Vermont Lt]

It wasn’t easy to watch, but the heart was in the right place. I don’t respond to stuff like that anyway...but they are “artists”, the don’t know any better.

[Paradox]

Wonder Woman was a far better movie than Captain Marvel. And Gal Gadot is somewhat more conservative than the other lady too. I like Gal, I’ll cut her some slack.

[Chasaway]

Nick Searcy - "Imagine" re-imagined:

Imagine, re-done by Nick Searcy.

[dfwgator]

Multi-millionaires telling me to “Imagine No Possessions”.

Celebrities can go die in a fire for all I care.

[Persevero]

“Imagines a world without strife” actually it’s fantasizing about nirvana without heaven, or hell, or obviously, God. It’s like the atheist anthem. Beautiful tune though.