Cuteness, or 'kawaii' as it is known, is pervasive in Japanese culture.

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

> consumption tax — arguably the most universal and fair way to raise money for the burden of the aging population

Consumption tax is not fair as it is hardest on the poor, and does very little to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom of society.

I'm only a simple country weeaboo, but i'm halfway certain this fails both as kawaii and as communist propaganda... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9s0V42omIs

> It should also be noted that the JCP apparently hired an ad agency to design the mascots, which hardly smacks of trying to pulling down the pillars of capitalism.

Common misconception is that communism is the antithesis of capitalism; Marx wrote instead about overclocking capitalism so hard that a better society could be built out of its extreme conclusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

Accelerationism is trendy now, but also pretty controversial. It's not so much that Marx wrote about accelerationism, just that the technological advances of capitalism were an important part of humanity's development, while containing contradictions that would eventually bring about its end.

Sadly Marx seems to have talked himself in circles, and those trying to make sense of his writings went off on a tangent.

Marx seems to have started out with the basis of a "energy theory of value" but then talked himself into the idea that only labor was the source of excess value (more value out than needed for continued operation). Thus we ended up with the whole "labor theory of value".

Never mind that he seemed more interested in a cooperative system of industry (workers owning the factories the work in) than the state run system that the soviet union produced.

He considered the idea of Russia going right to socialism to be crazy, as it was still mostly agrarian.

He was looking at heavily industrialized nations like England and Germany to transition instead, having used capitalism to get the required infrastructure and legal framework into place.

I'd have to say that kawaii sure beats the heck out of traditional Soviet art! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism)

Either can be done to excess. I find most anime these days so coated in kawaii that i must either walk away or risk barfing rainbows. I really miss the days of OVAs...

OTOH the ultraviolence on display in a typical 80's OVA might actually make you barf.

I can't pass up this chance to post the Moe Dictators artbook.

https://imgur.com/a/2i3rH

Nothing says 'cute' quite like an ideology thar killed ~300000000 people.

That's not the work of Communism, that's the work of a mad dictator using his power to change his government into an authoritarian sovereignty.

If it was actually communism, he would have never had that kind of power.

If I was going to be nitpicky, it was not actually communism, but it was partly the work of some aspects of communist theory, as the idea of state communism was that you had to go through this immense struggle and remake society before you got to the nice fluffy city on the hill.

However the folk who rose to the top realised that if they wanted to stay on top, they had to keep the struggle bit going indefinitely.

Never mind that the nation was a bad starting point from the outset...

That had absolutely nothing to do with communism.

It's about as stupid as saying that every person killed in other wars was killed by capitalism.

Communism was merely a convenient way to distract the masses while the fat cats were making off with the loot.

Anybody can say that ideology kills during periods of intense famine, but on the other hand, that really doesn't seem that related to the ideology itself. I don't know what a better alternative would have been, but I'm not sure that Fukuyama-style liberal democracy would even work in times of desperate famine, let alone allow people to pull themselves out of their own misfortune.

I dunno. Cats are cute and they are murderous bastards.

edit - even Stalin had something of the lovable rogue about him, back when he was a 2-bit gangster and before he commanded the deaths of millions.

Someone could easily do a kawaii cartoon version of the adventures of young Stalin. - http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSstalin1.jpg

http://rainbowstalin.ytmnd.com/ and http://rainbowstalin[2-5].ytmnd.com/

Indeed they are...

http://i1.cpcache.com/product/199796497/follow_chairman_meow...