DavidF: "Marxism is tyranny appealing to authoritarian peasant countries such as czarist Russia".

David,
Correction: Marxism is a philosophy that has never been put into practice. Theory and practice are two different things, and “the best laid schemes of mice and men” etc.
As I've said, I'm more interested in Marx's critique of capitalism and is theory of how it would pan out.
You might like to look at this short article http://www.keghart.com/node/623
based on a piece by Leo Panitch, "distinguished research professor of political science at York University", which discusses Marxism in the context of the GFC. Among other things it says:
"there was as little in common between Marx and Stalinism as there was between Jesus and the Inquisition", "Marx's prescience on capitalist globalization...","Marx's profound understanding of capitalist dynamics".
But whatever you care to make of Marxism, surely you acknowledge the vast and growing disparity between rich and poor, the disgustingly rich and the destitute (mostly offshore, out of sight out of mind), and are just as scathing of the other evils of capitalism? Among which is the unsustainable devastation of this planet.
Fredric Jameson (he who said "always historicise") has come up with a novel new theory of the impasse of "late capitalism", which he calls a "spatial dialectic", designed to account for anomalies in Marx’s crude, linear model. Jameson notes that Marx predicated revolution on the notion of global capitalism as its final and fatal horizon, globalisation and the inevitable limits to growth would spell its demise, but argues that the current impasse is due to the “spatialization” of commodity culture and the interdependence of global capital and consumption (Valences of Dialectic 2009 p.66). Capitalism is literally "too big to fail", a point I've made elsewhere on OLO.
Sadly, I think we're stuck with it until its inevitable "big crunch". Hopefully the survivors will learn something from our madness.

Squeers wrote: Among other things it says: "there was as little in common between Marx and Stalinism as there was between Jesus and the Inquisition"

I accept your analogy. I think there was a lot in common between Jesus and the Inquisition. In the New Testament it states: John 10:9 I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.

It doesn't matter how good a life you have lived or how decent a person you are, you are only saved if you accept the Christian mumbo-jumbo. There is an intolerance for the people who didn't wish to accept the mumbo-jumbo expressed there and in other places in the New Testament. I see a direct link between the words of Jesus and the Inquisition.

I have already cited the words of Marx which called for murder.

The seeds for the Holocaust and the Inquisition are in the New Testament, and the seeds for the communist murders are in the words of Marx.

Squeers also wrote: Correction: Marxism is a philosophy that has never been put into practice.

The apologists for Christianity say something similar. No philosophy or religion has ever been put in practice since philosophies and religions always have to be put into practice by humans. The reality of Marxism is what you got when humans implemented it. Marx recommended sweeping away all the protections between humans and the state that had set up to protect people from the state in the bourgeois democracies. They wouldn't be needed in his utopia. What happened was pretty much what one would expect to happen.

We disagree.

I think we would better off without either Marxist or Christian intolerance of those who don't accept either mumbo-jumbo..

Squeers, concerning the failures of capitalism, maybe your term MADNESS should be replaced simply by LOOSENESS, thus we might blame Adam Smith for the term Free Market, moving on to the more modern term Deregulation.

It is so interesting that when first learning economics, new students are told that politics and economics can be related to good family structures.

Thus we might say that business politics and economics could have been ruined from the start simply owing to the use of two terms that should never be used in a growing up family.

Free Market and Deregulation.

There have been over 2500 religions and Gods invented by mankind, the only reason we have these last few remaining corporate religious cult brand names we have today is simply because the cult puppet masters and their devotees slaughtered and burnt alive every single person that ever opposed them in inter religious warfare over the last couple of millenniums. It really is that simple these people have perfected killing for Gods. If you people haven't noticed yet, we are on the precipice of an abyss into a new religious dark age! We are de-evolving back into the darkness of the primitive superstitious religious. Don't just worry about the Bin Ladens and Netanyahu's destroying the planet! The murdochbots from Fox News channel and limited News Limited, the Pat Robertsons and Sarah Palin's tea bagging confederates and the Australian equivalents Steve Fielding, Paster Danny Nalliah, Tony Abbott, David Clark are just as capable of making your skin crawl!
The high court of Australia ruled that "charlatanism" is the price we pay for religious belief and if any religion was asked to prove their "superstitious religious" beliefs, "ALL WOULD FAIL"!
Ask any neurologist, most religious fundamentalist have Temporal lobe epilepsy. The rest of the religious are simply indoctrinated and hypnotized as vulnerable children by bizarre religious rituals designed and perfected over a millennium, threats, fear, lies, false hope, chants, rants, smoke, lighting, music you name it, they scare you into believing anything they say no matter how ridiculous you know it really is?

David Fisher's essay relies so heavily on a fundamentalist style of discourse that it makes me think he is scared of where a more rational, honest and evidence-based discourse would lead.

Dear David,

OK, Perelman is an eccentric (geek?) with no mental disorder, so was Heaviside. However, from what I have read about Perelman - and there is more than just not accepting the Fields medal - he is certainly not in the same category as e.g. Paul Erdoes, an eccentric mathematician par excellence, whom I had met personally (as his interpreter in Prague), and to whom nobody would assign mental disorder.

Apparently your criticism of Plato’s philosophy was meant tongue-in-cheek. There are many (e.g. Catholic) conservatives who derive their philosophy from Aquinas who built on Aristotle.

>>mathematics is …  also getting your work accepted and known so other people can build on it. Like Mendel in genetics …<<
This is not peculiar to mathematicians: everybody wants to get his/her work accepted and known. Also, most mathematicians, like everybody else, like to earn a living from their mathematical activities. This is irrelevant to the inventing-discovering dichotomy.

Perhaps you can compare Mendel’s investigation with that of an applied mathematician, whereas I had in mind the activities of a person “doing” (inventing and discovering pure) mathematics. Well, this introduces a third dispute - beside the theist-atheist and science-literary criticism (C. P. Snow) - on these threads, namely concerning pure-applied mathematics. I am happy to be involved, only I doubt many people would be interested in what they might see as hair-splitting.

Well still, I know, the clear distinction between pure and applied mathematicians is peculiar to my generation. Newton did not distinguish strictly between “pure” mathematics we was “inventing” (calculus) and its application to the understanding of physical reality (phenomena if you like). Later the distinction became very explicit (c.f. my remark about Dirac, Heaviside vs “kosher” mathematics, or yours about Grassman vs Heaviside).

Today the distinction still exists, however it is blurred: applied mathematicians, even theoretical physicists, create/discover new mathematics - to use in their applications to physics - working more rigorously than their predecessors, and many pure mathematicians work on their abstract and rigorous (“kosher”) mathematics while explicitly using imputs from contemporary physics (and, to a lesser degree, from other science).