A friend emailed me yesterday night, “If you don’t feel sufficiently depressed today, be sure to read the readers’ comments on Brett Stephens’s column in the NY Times condemning communism and the Left’s soft spot for it.” The comments were already closed at 522 when he wrote me. I haven’t got the time to read a significant chunk. Some of the ones I saw were quite entertaining. There are lots of intelligent, literate and inventive people demonstrating their power to rationalize away the lessons of common sense. A number had decent points, in that Stephens chose to focus on Stalinism as his means of discrediting communism.  That opens the door to all sorts of arguments. But it was Stephens’s way to stake out his house conservative turf in the ongoing series of articles commemorating the centenary of the Communist Revolution.  A good number already have provided great entertainment, such as the claim that sex was better for...(Read Full Post)