No, the question was about the Soviet Union. That’s why talking about the US is a cop-out.

I didn’t expect to end up arguing with you, Pug.

The Bolsheviks literally couped the democratically elected and socialist post-Tsar government of Russia, kickstarting several years of civil war.

It was itself months old. Just like in France a century and a bit earlier, revolutions have a way of getting overthrown. And the one that stuck was itself autocratic.

If the Tsars had made actual concessions to liberalism earlier, maybe history would have developed differently. But, as it is, they waited until the late 19th century to abolish actual tied-to-the-land serfdom, were similarly reluctant to stop being autocratic feudal dicks in other ways, and set up the Duma right as revolutionaries of various stripes were trying to knock in their door. With the unpopularity of WWI and the necessity of having a lot of angry soldiers running around during it, instability became fait accompli.

Funny, then, that they invaded Poland and the Baltics in tandem with the Nazis and spent several years supplying the Nazi war machine.

The Nazis saw communism as right up their with the Jews as their main nemesis, and invented the term Judaeo-Bolshevik to describe how they’re actually the same. Yes, they did agree to not fight each other and split up some weaker nations (and trade? I’m not sure what you mean by supplying), but calling that an alliance seems like a stretch. I can’t believe both sides weren’t gauging when to break it off and attack the other from the start. Stalin spent that time shifting his defense production base to the Urals in preparation, even.

Compare Britain and France, or Italy and the Nazis, who were definitely allies.

Fucking what.

Even Stalin regarded the Soviet position as unwinnable without the Western Allies.

Yes, it would have been a very different war if the Nazis weren’t already fighting. But, as it was, they were in a stalemate circa 1941 when they started Barbarossa, and the Soviets ended up taking the lion’s share of casualties tipping the balance hard against them. Being a history student, I’m sure you as well have seen actual historians explain that human wave tactics weren’t a thing - Soviets died in spades because they were fighting hard against an enemy that saw them as subhuman.

In a few words “they basically won it themselves” is the best I could do. Since there were many topics at play I didn’t want to start pulling out statistics and narrative to explain the nuances behind that, or talk about counterfactuals relating to it being a 1-on-1 fight.

Yes, you have several EmAiLs to complain about instead of actually addressing anything. I doubt anyone here thinks the US is perfect, but that’s not the question.

Socialism as outlined in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is a little sketchier because it makes a lot of unrealistic assumptions about human nature and is just generally super hard to implement without creating a power vacuum.

And is still pretty vague. There was a lot of colouring in for the Bolsheviks to do.

Socialism as in the USSR’s Socialism is a century old practice of the cruellest and most war hungry culture imagineable, having taken advantage of the afforementioned power vacuum to starve and torture millions at home, ally with the Nazis in WWII and then change sides halfway through, tear down democracies around the globe, and push us all the closest we have ever been to thermonuclear annihilation. A threat so great that even 30 years into its grave is still a great stone over our heads, having crafted a world power balance that will threaten our destruction for generations to come.

I’m glad it fell (plz don’t ban), but there’s hella artistic licence there.

The power vacuum came from the Tsar. They were always enemies of the Nazis, although they did temporarily agree not to fight them, and then afterwards they basically won the war themselves. The US went first with the nukes. I don’t even know what you mean about the current power balance - Russia is laughably weak, China is behind where it would have been if it took the Japan path. And, the thing about their cruel culture just sounds like bigotry.

Economists would not label Scandinavian countries as socialist.

Economists would say that’s a matter for political scientists. And aren’t all conservative.

But yes, in the English-speaking world, conservatives and the far left use the traditional definition, while the mainstream left has recently gravitated towards something like “when the government does things”.

Putting aside from the implied EV context, I’m not sure I’d go that far. They were repairable, but had a lot of proprietary design in them as well.

I would still go with one of the “legacy” manufacturers for myself, though.

It hasn’t existed anywhere before - the OG fascist countries were built on top of fairly typical market economies for the time, with actually had much more interventionism than now, maybe China-level.

You didn’t give a third option, so I guess we’re done.

But this is Lemmy, where there’s lots of communists, so that’s how I interpreted OP’s question. (Also, the Marx definition came first)

I think most self-described socialists don’t have a very specific idea what they want, but more an idea of who they think is good (public servants) and who they think is bad (corporations). Which is like most voters in general.

There’s also people who use a weaker definition not mutually exclusive with capitalism.

This is you. I wasn’t talking about that version of the term.

Depends what you mean by capitalism. It doesn’t have one universally preferred definition either.

If you mean markets, even the USSR had one.

If you mean big corporations running everything, we don’t live in capitalism right now.

Feel free to add if you mean something else.

I think the standard thing at this point is to agree it’s a nice idea, but also say it doesn’t work in practice. Edit: And sometimes a certain kind of person will turn a simple disagreement into tribalistic hate.

A version was tried a few times from 1917 on, and it went poorly. So, if you’re still for collective ownership of the means of production, you either need to be a denialist about that history, or explain why your version would be better.

There’s also people who use a weaker definition not mutually exclusive with capitalism.

FairCar when?

In a scripting language, is there an advantage to no garbage collection? (I honestly don’t know)

Someone else also pointed out to me, when I made a similar suggestion, that ability to partially fail but keep going is desirable in a web context. I don’t know, maybe there’s some way to make Rust do that more automatically than C. Python seems the be the standard for general-purpose scripting, which is why I mentioned it.

X to doubt.

About the “hurting the economy” part. Replacing more stuff = more economy is a well-known economics fallacy and they should know better.

Invent a new internet where you can script pages directly in Python or TypeScript.

Otherwise, you get to enjoy a silly toy language from the 90’s.

So you don’t want to go against the jerk, okay.

Thanks?

Agreed. The point being that people aren’t really upset about whether it’s art or not. They’re mad about money.

And that’s not exactly dumb either, making bread is important. It’d just be nice if it was admitted to.

AI being appropriated for neural nets which might even do things unrelated to what we think of as intelligence is annoying, I’ll give you that.

What art is is kind of a huge can of worms, though. In any case, it’s pretty clear they can satisfy potential clients a lot better than human digital artists, and that’s where at least part of the butthurt comes from.

It was, but doesn’t that seem shortsighted now? When there’s a change it’s usually bad for someone, but no change since the 1700’s would definitely be bad, even if there’s a steady two pence or whatever to be made weaving.

Sitting in 2025, we can identify a whole lot that was wrong with the world and conditions of labourers (including literal slaves) then. It seems kind of odd to blame technology for them, at least directly. But, that’s where the luddites turned their anger, and Lemmy seems to slide into doing the same thing - although there’s a lot of overlap with valid skepticism about things people claim AI do, that it actually can’t.