I can’t tell whether James “PoMoCon” Poulos is appalled or just bemused by Russian nostalgia for the Soviet era, in the form of high-priced hipster tees featuring communist iconography. But while it’s a bit unsettling to see the symbols of one of history’s bloodiest regimes treated like a Thundercats logo, I’m nevertheless generally delighted to see the hammer and sickle gelded. Marx wrote that the capitalists would, shortsightedly, sell workers the very ropes from which the bourgeois would hang. As it turns out, though, they’re more likely to sell them the Class War Director’s Cut DVD and Hanging Capitalist Gallows Playset.

Still more heartening for present purposes are these ironic shirts with garlanded portraits of Vladimir Putin (photo by Justyna Mielnikiewicz). As Isaiah Berlin so astutely observed, ridicule kills more surely than savage indignation.

Addendum: D’oh! Apparently, that’s not Marx—it may have been Lenin who coined the expression, or it may just have been attributed to him later. Whoops.