China bans individuals from registering domain names

Sweden is a socialist state, and a family is a commune.

Just because ideas have failed spectacularly in some places and on some scales doesn't mean they don't work well elsewhere.

Among a well-educated and logical population, knee-jerk reactions are always improper.

During the civil war, the communists has substantial support from the academics and intellectuals (think Spanish Civil War). This combined with successful economic policies during the early 50s made Mao overly confident of his support base.

At the time the Nationalists in Taiwan was still recognized as the legitimate government of China on the world stage, so Mao wanted some vocal support. To his surprise he opened the can and worms came out, which caused huge embarrassment, and he blamed it on rightist infiltration.

As a reaction he locked up "naysayers" and implemented radical ideological-based economic policies that ended up in disaster, so he stepped down for a few years. During the time his rival Liu Shaoqi became the chairman, who played with the idea of market economy and was warming up to the west.

This infuriated Mao as it implied his failure as a visionary, so he out-maneuvered Liu and launched the cultural revolution to manufacture support for his vision on a large scale. It helped him to maintain power til his death, but at the cost of running the country into the ground.

My own wife's family hail from North Vietnam. Not particularly educated or politically opinionated, they nevertheless saw several off their family wiped out by what we'd today call 'collateral damage' - in this particular case, the family home had the bad luck to be within spitting distance of a factory, and got flattened by an American bomb.

Permit me a degree of skepticism about the moral purity of institutions we take for granted. though I'm neither a communist or a socialist, I don't see that being democratic and capitalist gives anyone a free pass to kill people.

There's a pretty big moral space between advocating the overthrow of a government and the behavior of a Stalin or Pol Pot. Marx belongs to the former category, not the latter. But because of events that happened decades after his death, he's remembered as something he wasn't. His crime was being wrong, not evil.

I think you're dismissing a bit too easily soviet russia. Under communist command, russia rised to the status of superpower.

As far as I know, khmers rouges were "reactionary" marxists : for instance they refused western medicine and dubbed peasants as "old men" and city folks as "new men". This is not what marxism is about.

"A Finnish inquiry commission concludes that 1 million or fewer people died in the Pol Pot period. The commission documented that at least several thousand of those were because of direct military battles with Vietnam. Part of the discrepancy in death figures comes from those who fail to account for the decrease in births that inevitably happens when a population is lacking adequate food and fighting a war. These missed births get counted as deaths in population projections that assume the birth rate did not change."

"The United States war in Southeast Asia killed 600,000 people in Cambodia according to the Finnish Inquiry Commission. The total U.S.-caused deaths in Indochina run into the millions."

"By 1975, an estimated 10 percent of the Kampuchean population -- 600,000 -- had already died as a result of the Vietnam War. Those 600,000 deaths were caused by U.S. efforts to track down Vietnamese communists. According to the Peter Jennings documentary "The Killing Fields", Cambodia specifically absorbed 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs in the early 1970s."

"The U.S.-instigated war -- and the bombings in particular -- also caused the creation of 2 million refugees, who flooded the cities. The cities then came to depend on the U.S. food aid to live because of the war and the inefficiency of the right-wing Lon Nol regime."

"Hence, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power from Lon Nol in 1975 in the worst possible situation: The people were starving, Kampuchea was the poorest country in the world and one-third of its people were refugees."

"Executions and other deaths"

"The Boston Globe coverage of Pol Pot's death contained this characterization of the Khmer Rouge: "When the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital on April 17, 1975 to establish their agrarian society, they chased out city dwellers at gunpoint, killed anyone suspected of being an intellectual, forced millions into labor camps, and demanded that children inform on their parents. People were often arrested simply for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language. Money and private property were abolished, schools and temples were shuttered, and medicine and food became scarce. During a nearly four-year reign, as many as 2 million people died of starvation, execution illness or overwork."

"Pol Pot did execute between 75,000 and 150,000 people between 1975 and 1979. Most of those executions took place in the context of war between Vietnam and Cambodia.Vietnam invaded in 1978 and threw the Khmer Rouge out of power.The famous skull-pile pictures from Kampuchea come from a policy especially aimed at the Vietnamese.Serious famine followed again after the final Vietnamese invasion of December 1978, and by the time international aid started it was too late for many. A total of 2 million, or 30 percent of the population, died in the 1970s from the U.S. war, the Pol Pot period and Vietnamese invasions."

"The United States aided the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, because they were enemies of U.S. foes, the Vietnamese, who had invaded and ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979."

If you're not heavily mentally invested in an ideological tribe and look objectively at history you'll find that lots of "-isms" have been used to sell people on collaborating in atrocities.

This is mostly correct, although the correct translation for him would be the ruling class.

It was far more broad, attacking ones citizen neighbors simply because they were landowners, for example.

Never. One's neighbors are one's allies in the class struggle against the ruling class. Landowners would never be the "neighbors" of a peasant in Czarist Russia. More precisely, it would be a war waged beneath the underclass (in Russia, the serfs and such) and the ruling class. I think you have your view of history tainted by modern preconceptions. Also, you have to be careful of certain translations. Das Kapital and Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei in the original German lead to certain nuances of language that can be lost in a poor translation. Moore's is probably the best, although not perfect.

The results of "communist" revolutions of the 20th century are orders of magnitude greater than the fallout of any other revolution, before or since.

Oh, so the October Revolution (Октябрьская революция) had many more casualties than the American Revolution? Or the French Revolution (Liberté, égalité, fraternité!)? Or the American Civil War? Well, no. The incidents to which you refer are the massacres conducted by despotic rulers in so-called Communist countries. In fact, they weren't even called "Communist". They were Stalinist. Or Maoist. You hang these acts around Marx's neck like a noose but he didn't advocate them and would never approve. Marx didn't advocate massacre or mass slaughter or starvation (of the proletariat, no less!). He advocated violent revolution. Once that was done, however, the state was under the control of the people and no more violence was necessary than that needed to keep the peace. And Pol Pot? Pol Pot wasn't even remotely Marxist. Most of the Khmer Rouge attacks were targeted at the intellectuals. The intellectuals?! These were Marx's people! The intellectuals were necessary to help build a global Communist free state. Marx certainly didn't advocate killing himself.

You see, you have mistaken the acts of depravity that are the responsibility of the ones who committed them as done under the order of the "eternal Marx." In truth, Marx was nothing more than a name and a scapegoat. The people who committed these actions were stark, raving mad and committed most of them out of personal prejudice and thirst for power and control. As far as history goes, nothing out of the ordinary.

Financing means accepting the financial risks for industry. It doesn't mean accepting the risk of having your hand crushed in a cheap machine, or being poisoned by the chemicals used in the factory, etc. There is more than one kind of risk, and to imply that the investor is the only contributor to an enterprise is as stupid as saying the same thing of the laborer.

Furthermore, overthrow is a fundamentally political conflict. At the time of Marx's writing, poor people were not allowed to vote. Was that equitable? A 19th century political thinker looking at today's society would conclude that Marx had won because today everyone over 18 (with the exception of criminals in some countries) is allowed to vote. This would have been unthinkable when Marx was writing his communist manifesto.

You are assuming that the political ascendancy of a proletariat (which has arguably already happened) is directly equivalent to genocide of the middle class. Nonsensical.