temptest [any]

Interstate Highways and similar systems are “successful” socialism, as far as I understand socialism

I must be blunt here: socialism is not about taxation. At all. Socialist communes don’t even require taxes or money to exist. Socialism is about workers’ relationship with work.

I acknowledge that ‘socialism’ is a vague term with dozens of definitions, but this strange strictly-American idea that publicly-funded infrastructure is socialist isn’t a useful definition, nor a common one. It will really just confuse people.

Historically and presently, socialism is a labour movement which, despite all the variations, had the common goal of the workers controlling their means of production, rather than the owning class. Almost every political dictionary and socialist will back that up, and also Wikipedia (for something we can check right now). It’s not about whether something is private or public.

Paying taxes and voting in a (systematically broken, throroughly corrupted) government representative democracy isn’t really accomplishing this. We are arill beholden to the owning capitalist class. How I spend my working hours is still governed by a bourgeois board of directors, I don’t own the tools I use, I don’t have meaningful power to make democratic decisions about my work or my society governance.

You are correct that socialism exists (present tense! see: Zapatistas) without planned economies. But if you want to see what socialist modes of organisation look like within capitalism, it would be a workers cooperative.

Anti-car movements are not socialist nor socialism. They are good and pro-society, but are completely incidental to the socialist movement.

Collectively-funded operations like roads, police and our military airstriking hospitals aren’t socialist nor socialism. We have no control over the use of our money and labour; even if voting was democratic power in practice, a campaigning platform isn’t a guarantee of policy, they can completely ignore that once elected. And also, no matter who you vote for, your tax money will still go towards anti-socialism!

As for the parts about communism, well, no. The definition you’ve invented wildly conflicts with both theory and historical events. You’re gonna have to start from scratch on that one, even just looking at the Wiki article will provide a much better base. Very popular ideologies like anarcho-communism just completely contradict all that.

A different response, which comes from a different angle to those pointing out that Marxism-Leninism is not fascist:

The word ‘fascism’ is used so fast and loosely outside of a technical context that I wouldn’t say one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong. It depends on context. (Incidentally, same for ‘socialism’, even principled well-read communists can’t agree on a definition.)

For example, if we’re talking about the actual Fascist ideology (think of Mussolini and associates) then I would even hesitate to include Nazism due to the very different roots: they’re both nationalist anti-liberal anti-democratic, anti-socialist ‘third way’ ideologies and they did ally in the war, sure, but to group them both as ‘fascism’ trivializes core differences in how they formed, why they successfully formed, how they appealed to their followers (fascism actually recruited many self-identifying socialists in Italy and its important to recognise why to prevent it), and why they were ultimately antisocial and unsuccessful in their goals.

This isn’t just some academic masturbation nitpicking or anything: I believe that the ignorance of Classical Fascism by lumping it in with the far more obvious and baseless idiocy of Nazism makes it harder to recognize and counter, especially when neo-Nazis are such ridiculous cartoonish farces. Fascism stemmed from National Syndicalism and has core economic ideas like corporatism (from ‘corpus’) that could fool people, and sounds much less stupid that Hitler’s bizzare esoteric fantasies about Aryan racial supremacy: even Mussolini considered Hitler crazy.

The point of me making this distinction is that the dictionary definition you gave isn’t even wrong in describing fascist ideologies, but, I don’t think that list of common traits should be mistaken for a definition. Those traits are the results, not the foundation of the ideology, and a neo-liberal state like the USA can easily match many of those traits despite being a very distinct ideology. Any you will absolutely see people saying ‘USA is fascist’ as a shorthand for nationalist, racist, imperialist, oppressive, blah blah blah, but it’s definitely not post-National-Syndicalist faux-socialist corporatist collectivism. We should obviously fight both but they are not the same and manifest differently.

@Someonelol@lemmy.ml

Soon to be Noonelol@siberia.su

One of the top-rated replies so far is an Asian who expresses they are offended, so that can’t be right.

What power and control does this even give someone?

I’m not active in the community these days but I might as well through some suggestions in the mix:

• splash (like a splash of paint)
• face
• tweek
• dec (like decorate, or decked out) or deq

I, for one, haven’t had to look at laptop manufacturers for nearly a decade because my Thinkpad is still running Linux without a problem.

Aside from political reasons (which are valid!), what makes those manufacturers worth choosing over a Thinkpad?

Lemmy has had a huge bias towards seize-the-means-of-production socialism from day 1, which is very important in understanding why it’s different from other reddit clones, and why it has unique features and anti-features. The political orientation is not incidental, it’s vital, and I’m glad to see it hasn’t completely died from the sudden influx of reddit-natives when the API thing happened.

I don’t know how much bloat Mint adds

Not enough to make me think about it, it’s not like I’m running a server or fighting for storage space. But if the thought of Flatpaks is enough to frighten, then it could be a problem.

Oceania

Maybe so. For me it was that even Sid was too outdated for me (e.g. with native Linux games and some software development), and to try and Frankenstein it into what I wanted was effort and instability I didn’t want, especially when some Ubuntu-derivatives were much better suited for my personal-use situation.

What makes it spam? We’re invited to lemmy.ml, it shows up on our homepage the same as it does yours (probably even higher because instances more likely to downvote or ignore political posts don’t link with us atm).

If you meant flooding, it’s not that either. We’re a big instance (1k users weekly) with a general interest in politics and a historical anti-lurking culture, so we’ll be disproportionately active in political threads compared to a general instance like lemmy.ml, just like programming.dev is in tech threads. Are we meant to just not share an opinion because too many other people in the same instance already posted their (different) opinion?

A politician… blaming themself?

It’s so crazy it just might work!

Wait until you see how much the typical Westerner cares about Africa.

Disagreeing with you isn’t spam.

Is ChromeOS a distro? (obvious reasons)

I can’t really think of another one I don’t like. I had a bad time on Debian but that is because my use case conflicted with it, not because it’s bad.

It’s worth pointing out that the victim probably isn’t in social circles where the government killing people for no reason all the time gets much attention. Hyperreality is a serious thing, the guy’s worldview probably makes it seem like free speech exists, unless it’s a bad slur on facebook dot commie.

They’re taking away his right to free dreams.

The police force shouldn’t be summarily executing people like this, you’re right about that.

But this post conveys a very strange and counter-productive understanding of what fascism is and what makes someone a fascist. Might as well be saying ‘if you think drinking water shouldn’t be privatised you are just a stalinist’. If we want to stop fascism, we have to understand what it is, and that isn’t it. If anything, a fascist furiously opposes governments murdering “right-wingers”… for pretty obvious reasons.

How is anyone supposed to have an unbiased opinion?

What features of Manjaro would make it something you prefer? A different DE? Mint offers more than just one.