Thank you, and best wishes to you.

The expression has become part of the vernacular in modern Hebrew as an expression of encouragement (though one may well assume it was always used—i.e., over the past several thousand years—wherever Hebrew was spoken or written).

How to ‘vacation’ away from the day to day ugliness? What’s a good break?

Indulging in something escapist or new, for one thing. Another trick is to mix up one’s routine — the adjustment it forces distracts one from worries.

There are many expression of gratitude here. Neo deserves them.

I’ll only echo J.J. and huxley, as he writes,
“neo:
“I’ll chime in with Rufus.

“You cover the waterfront, and I love you for that and this forum, but you are also one ferocious journalist!”

Ditto that!

@ huxley > “to indicate she was a serious, booked leftist,”
That is how I interpreted your comment – only the serious Left made any distinction between the founders of Communism back in the day; now it’s just T-shirt chic all the way down.

That is inspiring but don’t flame out either.

Make sure to take a day every once in a while to not do this.

AesopFan:

To be sure!

Trotsky is the communist whom some leftists gravitate towards as the Guy Who Would Have Done Communism Right. Christopher Hitchens comes to mind.

I’m pretty sure Trotsky would have been better than Stalin (an extraordinarily low bar). Trotsky probably wouldn’t have made an alliance with Hitler.

But Trotsky was an intellectual communist fanatic. I don’t believe he would have had any qualms with enforcing ideological “unity” with violence. If he had supreme power and was in a tight spot, I wouldn’t put anything past him.

The big difference between Stalin and Trotsky was Trotsky focused on worldwide revolution and Stalin on building socialism in the USSR, which is a difference in strategy, not on principles.

I pointed to Hayes as an “effin’ Trotskyite” to indicate she was a serious, booked leftist, not someone who picked up a t-shirt at a demo then wore it.

Trotsky was not the kinder gentler one. See this:

He lost the struggle against Stalin not because he was less ruthless but because he was less wily. …

But when it became clear that the vast crime called the collectivization of agriculture would involve a massacre of the peasantry, Trotsky’s only criticism was that Stalin’s campaign was not sufficiently “militarized.” He meant that the peasants weren’t being massacred fast enough.

We can dignify Trotsky’s ruthlessness with the name of realism if we like, but the question abides of just how realistic his ruthlessness would have been if he had won a power struggle against Stalin and stayed on to rule the Soviet Union. As things turned out, there never was a power struggle. Trotsky wasn’t interested in the hard grind of running the show: Leave that to Stalin. But—an important but—Trotsky yielded no points to Stalin in the matter of dealing with anybody who dared to contradict him.