Drill, that is an excellent and important post. I cannot improve on it.

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How about not against anybody?

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My brother’s father-in-law lost both of his legs in a chain-saw accident a number of years aso; he was standing behind his son who was cutting something with a big saw, the son swung the saw around not realizing his father was there and cut both legs off above the knee. Somehow they got the bleeding stopped and saved his life.

A big chainsaw will go through flesh and bone without even changing RPM. They tell me.

I am extremely careful but the problem is that as much as I use them, it only takes one tiny moment of inattention out of a lifetime of using them carefully to kill me – or, worst, kill someone else.

Not to mention a tree maybe falling on me or someone working with me or bucking back and skewering me like a roasted apple on a stick.

Or a chain breaking when pulling a tree over with winches or machinery and whipping back and beheading me – and the chain is probably American made and not even a radical Islamist.

Or getting attacked and bit by a rabid mad squirrel who did not appreciate his tree being cut down, then immediately swelling up like a giant eggplant from the toxic bite such that I am unable to crawl back into my pickup and drive home, and hence dying alone in the wilderness, except for my dogs who will eventually get bored sitting by my cooling slowly deflating carcass and depart to go back home for supper, eventually.

Dogs always keep their priorities straight.

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there is difference everywhere isn’t there.

But of course mountaineers buy ice axes because they are needed for mountaineering.

But at some level the Trotsky incident means that nonmountaineers might just have become aware of one of the main stay tools of mountaineering.

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I have neither hurt myself with my chainsaw nor have I used it to commit a gruesome crime. I use my pellet rifle for for my violent crimes. I am being written up in the bunny book of genocide.

One of these days I will write a serious post about what I have learned about genocide by murdering bunnies.

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The mountaineering community takes a perverse sort of pride in this fact.

Well, if one is marketing a product, it is perhaps considered useful to advertise (or tout) all possible uses of the product.

Although I myself would not buy (for instance) a Stihl chainsaw based on the model’s obvious utility in some previously committed and celebrated gruesome crime.

But then I am rather old-fashioned in how I determine what to buy, I am afraid.

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no, as I understand it, it actually was a mountaineering ice ax:

“On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was successfully attacked in his home by a NKVD agent, Ramón Mercader, who smashed the pick of an ice axe into Trotsky’s skull.[55]”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky

The mountaineering community takes a perverse sort of pride in this fact.

There is allusion to this in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and most of the local performances get this wrong but the movie has it correct.

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I suppose you could call a pick an axe, however, if you want. I am easy that way.

And Trotsky would not object at this point, I am sure. I think it would seem a minor detail to him at most.

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This probably does not help the conversation and certainly introduces the potential for lots of confusion: it is perhaps great polemics but bad communication.

I think that the political compass efforts is an interesting approach to this exercise decoupling the economic (right vs. left) from the central control (authoritarian vs. libertarian) perspective:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

I am unsure hwo to thank for making the original reference to this site.

In any event, it would at least take us form the simplistic and usually wrong one dimmension perspectvie to at least a two dimensional perspective, which is an improvement.

If we wanted to do this right, we would talk specifics and discuss details of policy. My sense is that there is a common mode failure which leads us to not consider this option.

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it was an ice ax, not a hatchet.

And if he was run down by a Stalinist then you are critiquing the Stalinist gig which indeed was a very very bad gig, but different than Leninist and arguably not Marxist.

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