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LOL its funny because its true.
@freemo I think it depends if you mean socialist countries currently under sanctions by USA or not. Mainstream propaganda deliberately forgets to mention important facts like this.
@modrobert all socialist countries regardless.
@freemo No, for example, there is a clear difference between Venezuela and Norway, both of these socialist countries main export is Oil, one of these socialist countries is under USA sanctions and one is not. Guess which one?
@modrobert Norway is not a socialist country, no european country is socialist. Several prime ministers from multiple european countries have already stood up and explained/corrected this when Trump called them socialist. Norway is a capitalist country with strong emphasis on welfare of its citizens, not socialist.
@freemo Both countries are social democracies. I was born in Sweden, which was social democracy for the most part the past 50 years. The difference is that we didn't have our gold reserves held and all our asserts frozen by IMF, but we did have at least one socialist PM killed in Sweden covertly by CIA (he was openly against the Vietnam war).
@modrobert Social Democracies are not Socialism. The democratic from of socialism would be Democratic Socialism. So moot point, my point stands.
@freemo The difference is like comparing the term "rebel" and "terrorist", they can do exactly the same thing, like killing people, but the term is used depending on how you want to frame the reporting. Consider this, USA permanent state hates successful socialist countries because it undermines their own system and power, and they really hate it when said countries finance their socialism with natural resources like oil for example. We are talking decades of propaganda in mainstream media, CIA planing stories, so I understand if you have difficulty accepting this. It's fine, I will not continue this argument.
@modrobert No its not... Social Democracy is a distinctly different form of government than Democratic Socialism. It is trivial and straightforward to determine if a country is one or the other based on, among other things, if it has a free-market system of capitalism or not. European countries are a capitalism as they employ free markets and taxes are used to pay for social programs. A democratic socialism would be government owned markets, and would not have significant capitalist elements like we have in europe.
@freemo Free markets are always OK, as far as I know free markets are only excluded in pure communism (which doesn't seem to exist the real world). As I mentioned, these terms have different meaning depending on media framing, also your background and culture in general.
Food for thought (if you can bare with me): Logically in a true democracy the masses will vote for a system which favors the many rather than one which favors the few, simply because the many always win when counting votes in a democracy. Also, historically, people generally vote against war when given the option to vote. The only way to prevent the mentioned from happening is to rig the system in some way. (Footnote: The word 'democracy' originates from ancient Greece.)
@modrobert Socialism is where the means of production is owned by the people and equally distributed. Communism is the same but where production **and** consumption are regulated.
Therefore all communistic countries are socialist by definition, just a specific form.
China, for example, is a socialist country because its government owns huge portions of the businesses (the means of production), however people are free to make more or less money and buy more or less things from one another.
Communist countries go a step further, they ration the people to ensure everyone has equal buying power as well. So the "means of consumption" as people say is also controlled.
Since no country in europe ensures the vast majority of its means of production are owned by the government, no country in europe is a socialist country.
These terms are well defined since the 1800s... now if the media wants to reframe and misrepresent them (I agree they often do), thats on them. But I'm using the real definitions here, not what the media uses.
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To your point about democracy, yes generally they will vote for what favors the many, not the few... but that is not socialism or communism. Many would argue (correct or not) that pure capitalism with no regulation of any kind benefits the many also.
What defines socialism is not, and never has been, who benefits. It is about who owns the means to production and/or consumption, nothing more or less.
@freemo I didn't bother with the memetools, so no font outline, sorry.
@freemo Second thought, the lower box should have been a scene from the show "Breaking Bad", oh well, always room for improvement.
@modrobert First one should be a picture of a casket :) China, being one of the few successful socialist countries to compare to, have a horribly morbid survival rate when it comes to cancer compared to the USA.
Attached are the survival rate for prostate and eye cancer by country. As you can see china is pretty much at the bottom, usa top.
@freemo China is communist, you are wrong about Socialism, it includes countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Lets just agree to disagree.
@modrobert How in the world can you consider those countries to "control the means of production" which is the definition of socialism... and no china is **not** communist as it doesnt constrol consumption, we covered this, it only controls production, thus is socialist not communist by the definition, the definition that has been established since the 1800s by the very people who founded socialism and communism.
Your welcome to disagree, but you are wrong.
@freemo That's your definition, not that I like wikipedia, but they are closer to the truth.
"Western Bloc countries which have been democratically governed by socialist parties such as Britain, France, Sweden and Western social-democracies in general, among others."
@modrobert No it isnt "my" definition, it the wikipedia definition.
Your quote is talking about socialist parties which hav eoccasionally taken rule. That is **not** the same as saying they have a socialist system of government.
HEre is the definition os socialism and communism from wikipedia, exactly agreeing with "my" definition.
> Since the 1840s, communism has usually been distinguished from socialism. The modern definition and usage of the latter would be settled by the 1860s, becoming the predominant term over the words associationist (Fourierism), co-operative, and mutualist, which had previously been used as synonyms. Instead, communism fell out of use during this period.[27]
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> An early distinction between communism and socialism was that the latter aimed to only socialize production, whereas the former aimed to socialize both production and consumption (in the form of free access to final goods).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_socialism
@freemo Occassionally? Funny, after WW2 Sweden was socialist for 50 years straight, with elections every 3 years, and they still win some elections, although not the last one.
@modrobert how did they control the means of production (Wikipedia cited definition of socialism) for those 50 years? The party in control isnt what defines if a **country** is socialist, only their laws.
Dude even the prime minister of several ofyour so called "socialist" countries stood up to say they were socialist. Come on now.
Examples of prime ministers saying their country is not socialist
Denmark:
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9650030/denmark-prime-minister-bernie-sanders
Sweden:
https://mises.org/power-market/swedish-ex-prime-minister-rebukes-bernie-socialism-only-destroys
Notice thats two out of three of the countries you listed where the prime ministers stood up and expressly stated that they arent socialist
@freemo These days they all bend over to the empire, unfortunately, but it wasn't always that way.
@modrobert and in the 1800s when the terms were defined to mean the same as the prime ministers and myself use them, I guess they were bending over then too?
@freemo Looks like it was a century, not 50 years:
"Swedish Social Democratic Party at May Day demonstration in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2006. The party has dominated Swedish politics for nearly a century. The trade union palace in Stockholm is seen at the end of the picture."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day#/media/File:1maj2006soc.dem.sthlm.jpg
Also, first of May is still a public holiday in Sweden.
@modrobert Doesnt matter how long it was. What defines a socialist country is its laws, not the views of a party.
@freemo I think you are confused, partly because of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1tfkESPVY
The video is old but still holds true about decades of mainstream lies. Cuba and more countries are mentioned as being lied about.
@modrobert The definition I quoted was and is the accepted definition since 100 years before the CIA was even founded.. what are you on about.
@freemo nazism is socialism 😂 😂 @modrobert
@frankie95 @freemo Correct, or rather it was. That's how the nationalist socialist party won their first election in post depression Germany, by running trucks with bread to poor people. A party for the working man.
If you only read NSDAP programme rather than stick to silly US Republican cherry-picked nonsense, you'd quickly see the difference between modern European social-democracies and nazi Germany. Your confusion is a direct outcome of you sticking to the "socialism" vs "capitalism" reductionism. This is especially ridiculous as you yourself clearly have experience with multi-variate machine learning, but categorically insist on interpreting this one as binary 🤦♂️
Social democracies arent forms of socialism, so moot point. Democratic socialism is the democratic form of socialism
I never once equated social democrats to nazis... social democrats have no relationship to socialism. Nazis are socialist, europe is not.
I did, however, claim that democratic socialist countries (of which none exist in europe) are socialist.
So sounds like you are objecting something I never said. I also never said it was binary.
> Nazis are socialist
That's why I referred you the the NSDAP programme, which is 50% composed of postulates shared by SPD (German social-democrats) and Bolshevik, with the other 50% taken from Italian fascists, American & European rasists, and hotly contested by the Bolshevik.
Your other statements are unverifiable and cannot be argued with since you're using terms derived from your private semantic space without any unambiguous definition.
"Your other statements are unverifiable and cannot be argued with since you're using terms derived from your private semantic space without any unambiguous definition"
Nope every definition I used to took from cited sources which I already shared earlier in the conversation.
You *quoted* it but you are not *using* it.
Quite the opposite - you're applying a reductionist labelling ("China, being one of the few successful socialist countries") where the paragraph (Communism & socialism) clearly highlights the semantic complexity and vagueness of both terms.
I've explained explicitly how and why I am using it. If you dont agree, thats fine, I explained why your wrong. I will leave it at that.
@modrobert You are conflating two things... social is bad, which even europeaners believe (ie nazi party, chinese government, etc, all forms of socialism), and the baseless american trope that social democracies are the same as socialism (which you seem to be on board with).
Personally not sure why your fighting for European countries being the same sort of category of government as nazism (fill title: National Socialist German Workers' Party). There is very good reason european countries are socialist like china or Nazi Germany, lets not back track on that.