The first hint was mentioning Stalin’s purges. It’s always the Stalin strawman.

Get a hexbear in here and their emojis could fix this right up.

Please just cut yourselves off from the fediverse already. Even replying to this drivel has lost it’s fun.

There are a few clarifications to be made and some fallacies in your understanding of communism and socialism here. I’m not the one to clear all of this up, because I’m not going to put the effort and time needed into these subjects, but I’ll try to guide you in the direction of some resources to help.

Some quick clarifications:

Socialism and communism are the same thing. Communism is the end goal, but you cannot just jump directly to communism from capitalism, so we fall the transition period socialism. Communists often use the terms interchangeably, but any actual differentiation is a distinction of progress, not the goals of the project.

Communism is no more extreme than socialism and politics are not a horseshoe or circle where the far ends are the worst. This is a thought-terminating notion meant to keep you boxed within the status quo so that those who are currently in power stay in power, meaning you will remain relatively powerless. The same thing goes for trying to stay in the middle of a conflict: you end up not taking a side, meaning you remain on the side of the status quo, meaning you stay on the side of the oppressor. Your oppressor. As much as people argue communism is extreme, communists can argue that “the middle” or “liberalism” or “other leftists” are extreme. These arguments are always made for the purpose of getting you to stop thinking about those topics, to stop considering their validity. They are not trying to convince you those are wrong, but that they are not worth even considering. I implore you to do the opposite: do some reading and interact with what “extremists” are saying in good faith, then decide what you believe. I’m sure you’ll agree with some parts and not with others. We are all humans and most of us are of the same class. The “extremism” of communists is that we say working class people should run the world and the rich leeches should be oppressed in a sense that they cannot oppress anyone else through the use of their extreme wealth. We want to flip the system on its head to use an overly-simplistic metaphor.

Capitalism cannot be mixed with socialist policies. What you are probably referring to as socialist policies are actually welfare programs and state regulation . This is what we call social democracy, which is still capitalism. Socialism is differentiated more by who owns the means of production, how the economy is organized, and what class is in control of the state. That aside, socialists think social democracy is insufficient to curb the problems of capitalism because you don’t remove the roots of the problem. Most of the successes of social democracy in addressing wealth disparity and living standards are the result of countries trying to stave of socialist revolutions at home due to their workers seeing the success of nearby socialist republics in improving the quality of life of their people. These are capitalist concessions and if you look at the social democracies that exist in Europe, you’ll see that all of these concessions started getting rolled back AFTER the fall of the USSR. They were temporary relief (at home, not in their colonies), but the profit motive always demands more. If capitalism can’t steal enough from the global south, it will turn inward and eat itself like the US and UK are currently doing.

On entrepreneurs…most of the time people want to show the benefit of entrepreneurs, it is in terms of innovation and small businesses, so I’m assuming this is your point? Innovation and entrepreneurs do not disappear under socialism, but the way they function does. Innovation does not always need to be driven by profit motive as demonstrated within the USSR, but there is arguably some room for profit motive driving innovation in a mixed economy like China’s. The main benefit of socialism is that innovation is not at the whims of the market, which tends to act as if it is allergic to innovation, ultimately stifling it rather than nurturing it. Small businesses (and thus entrepreneurs) still exist in many socialist countries and will not be nationalized unless they grow quite big or become central to controlling an important part of the economy. In some ways it can even be easier to start a thriving business because you are less at risk of being stamped out by the “health competition” of a mega-corporation with a monopoly on an entire industrial sector. Those get nationalized, fixing the money attracts more money problem. If you remove the profit motive, this power can no longer be abused for profit. Corruption can happen under any system and has to be handled case-by-case, but you’ll find socialist countries have much harsher penalties for corruption to prevent it, unlike a paltry fine that is the cost of doing business. Jail time or up to the death penalty can be applied based upon the severity and circumstances of the crime. Vietnam and China have applied this last one to large-scale corruption within the last year whereas in liberal democracies, multimillion or even billion dollar fraud cases are widespread and normal with little to no repercussions. In some cases, it is even legal!

On education…if you want more, there are many sources available in many formats. I suggest Dessalines’ crash course of socialism and his reading list but there are plenty of others on here who provide lists worthy of mention (but their links are harder for me to look up). Prolewiki is like Wikipedia for socialism by socialists. Search a topic there that you want to know more about. You can also ask for resources on specific topics in lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net and you will probably get more resources than you care to consume in a year, so long as you approach them in good faith. People in these communities will only troll you if they think you are trolling them. The efforts some of them will go to in order to educate others is ridiculous (in a good way).

I hope this helps.

Oh that’s gold.

I guess it just depends on what your metric is.

Unfortunately one of its leading metrics is its contributions to human suffering. It certainly is the best system in the world at spreading suffering.

You give too much credit. I think it’s pretty safe to assume no one but socialists and historians care (or know) enough about Deng and Zhao outside of China so they aren’t likely to weigh in. Now if the question included the tinyman trigger-word, you’d have people jumping all over this post saying China bad and quoting Wikipedia until their fingers bled.

It’s not clear that this affected the decision to drop the bombs let alone the sole reasoning. Frankly, there was little justifiable strategic argument for use of them at that point in the war aside from as a form of intimidation against the Soviet Union. More likely the US would have dropped the bombs regardless and it was used as a justification after the fact: “the Japanese were barbaric, so this justifies our barbarism!”

And Snatch

That very much sounds like a moment for self-reflection.

Therefore they can continue to extract more from people than before. When you default, the amount owed increases significantly (doubles?).

This means more people are stuck with high payments and are required to work to continue to survive, less people getting retirement or other benefits, a larger workforce that is essentially captive to their debt and can be more easily manipulated because they are worried about making ends meet more than other things.

I see plenty of benefits for capitalists in a wide variety of industries if more people are beholden to more student debt.

There are entire industries that profit from people being imprisoned. The more people incarcerated in a location, the more that location can charge.

All other things aside, there is very much a profit motive.

I’m running arch on mine.

Ah, that’s probably why you like it. I’m talking about a Win 11 machine managed by our institution. I’m sure if I could get away from how we have Win 11 setup, I probably would only complain about the power location and the weight, but those are very minor.

You really like them? I got issued one for work and am not a fan.

The power button on these things is in the least intuitive spot and I’ve had lots of weird driver issues causing hardware to fail intermittently. Specs look good on paper, but the experience has been really lacking. The moment I can swap, I think I will.

Or join an instance they don’t like and they curate themselves for you. :)

Join a different instance, there are ones that are more curated for different regions in the world. Lemmy.world is very US centric and essentially a carbon cut-out of reddit. Lots of redditors migrate there and try to maintain that type of culture on the instance, so they also got many of the most toxic complainers condensed from mass reddit exoduses.

The fediverse is meant to be explored and it may take you a month or two to find where you like best.

Like I said, it’s not the healthy choice, but I’m also not going to demonize a person for having the occasional sweet drink.

A much better hill to die on is the systemic use of known carcinogens in products that we come in contact with everyday as well as the dumping of even worse materials into the environment that make their way into our bodies via the water we drink and the air we breathe. You don’t get to choose whether you are exposed to these things.

I think the consensus on health effects of artificial sweeteners is unclear so long as you only consume a reasonable amount. There are plenty of other synthetics in highly processed foods that are much more concerning.

That said, water is obviously healthier.

At least one company made a soylent, it’s just not soylent green. Not sure if it contains soy or lentils.

I was in the same boat.

Spent all day cooking and listening to podcasts/music. Invited a friend over for dinner like usual and she said she couldn’t come until it was late and well past dark, which was very unusual. Then she told me she was at a Superbowl party and that was how I found out what was going on.

Only way things could have been better is if I had D&D with the food.