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

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.

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.

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.

Why would you spoil the punchline in the title?

What’s the logic in this?

4chan? Producing? Since 2014? HAHAHAHAHA

The pic (generally) rang true when it was made but is a decade out of date.

then i took an arrow to the knee

It’s a pretty dismal strawman in the first panel. Hell, even in 2010 they were famous for being that site that just recycled memes from other sites. Comments were same shit different era, ‘le’, ‘good sir’, ‘narwhal bacon’… well at least that last one was original even if lolrandumbxD.

But yeah, ‘based’ and ‘this’ are literally reused from other sites, especially ‘this’, which its entire purpose is to show agreement on sites that don’t have voting like reddit does. People saying ‘this’ on reddit don’t understand reddit