I thought it might have been and didn’t bother checking despite (obviously) being connected to the ‘net at the time.

You are right about Brando. Perhaps his best performance was in The Godfather where he played a fat, mumbling Italian-American with an inflated sense of importance. Now if any casting directors out there have a project that needs a slim Northern Englander who knows a bit about computers but can’t be bothered to fact check something…

Personally, I also think De Niro is over-rated. Dean was by all accounts a good actor but “Rebel” is drivel and his filmography is so small it’s hardly rateable.

But this is my point about “student” icons by which I mean the posters sold in student union “fresher fayres” – they are all degraded into meaninglessness and the same come round and round again… Che, De Niro in Taxi Driver, Jimmy Dean, Jim Morrison, Monroe over a grating. It is an ersatz counter-culture. I couldn’t find Clint in hat, poncho, cheroot and toting pistols. Bah!

Nitpick: That’s actually Marlon Brando (a terribly overrated actor) in The Wild One.

Of course, I think James Dean is overrated too, and Rebel Without a Cause is lousy.

“Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

Maybe I’ll make a poster, along with the last words of Nathan Hale and a couple of other appropriate counter-examples.

http://i967.photobucket.com/albums/ae159/draynes/Che-tickle.gif?t=1331745238

I made my own Che with crosshairs and the caption “El Socialismo ha matado a cien millones de personas en el siglo XX.” I was going to make some posters up and stick them on lampposts last May Day to piss off some Lefties. I once asked a Che-wearing twerp in a bar if he thought it would be appropriate if I were to wear a t-shirt with a picture of Heinrich Himmler on it, since both he and Guevara were the enthusiastic executionors for a murderous dictator. The sarcasm fell flat, since he was such a pathetic ignorant cretin he had no idea about whom I was talking.

Stupid is as stupid does.

It’s useful because it identifies people with whom there is absolutely no point in conversing, and whose opinions on any other matter can be safely dismissed without the need for consideration.

I can agree with the second part of that statement, Laird, but not with the first. I think that it would have to greatly depend on the wearer’s age: young kids have a reasonable excuse for their ignorance, and so a conversation with them can be productive.

Sorry wh00ps, but I think that those distinctions are pointless: all these various kinds of socialism are just reincarnation of collectivism, and the worst, as well as the surest thing about collectivism, is that virtually all of its forms are bound to produce monsters like Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Che. It’s the same thing every time, only with different window dressing.