Superfluous Matter
Happy Birthday Jeremy

Did you know you share your birthday with Leon Trotsky? Does that make you a communist? I'm no political scientist, but I suspect it might.

A short summary of Trotsky's life courtesy of Wikipedia:

Leon Trotsky was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Lenin. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.

After leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union. As the head of the Fourth International, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a term coined as early as 1905 by his opponents in order to separate it from Marxism. Trotsky's ideas remain a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism.

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