I’ve been doing reporting long enough that I know laughing while interviewing someone is usually not a good idea. It was still difficult to keep a straight face while speaking with a young protester yesterday who said he traveled around the country demonstrating because he was an “anarcho-syndicalist.”

Not that he or his views were funny. It was just that as he expounded them, in the back of my mind a guy with an English accent, straining to be heard over the sound of clapping coconuts, delivered the same spiel:

“We don’t have a lord. We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune … Look, strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing out swords … that’s no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

Regardless, you have to give some sort of grudging respect, if just for consistency, to a guy with a button reading not only “feed the poor” but also “starve the rich.”