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posted by cmn32480 on Friday December 18 2015, @10:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-do-you-spell-that dept.

The Guardian reports that "socialism" was the most looked-up word on Merriam-Webster's site this year, a change the American dictionary publisher attributes to US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who has positioned of himself as a "democratic socialist".

As a socialist (or communist) myself, I personally think it's great that especially people from the United States try to figure out the meaning of the word beyond McCarthyism. I'm glad that people show interest in politics and finding out about positions of candidates.

Past years winners are available on Wikipedia.


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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @12:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @12:47PM (#278155)

    Isn't it funny how it is still socially acceptable to say you're a communist, or to wear the hammer-and-sickle or Ché in public?

    The amount of people killed by Communist regimes is an order of magnitude higher than the amount of people killed in Nazi regimes, and yet the more murderous one is the one that's still socially acceptable.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Friday December 18 2015, @12:56PM

    by inertnet (4071) on Friday December 18 2015, @12:56PM (#278160) Journal

    It's comedy alright. Both communism and capitalism are clever plots to keep the masses working for the happy few. The 'follow the leader' gene must be closely linked to the 'become the leader' one, because people usually only have one of either.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @04:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @04:09PM (#278238)

      If you want to see working models of Socialism, look at Mondragon [google.com] in the Basque country of Spain.
      They started with 6 worker-owners and now have over 100,000 worker-owners.

      The thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of worker-owned cooperatives in northern Italy [soylentnews.org] is another example of successful Socialism.

      Is it working at a -national- level?
      Not yet. Give it time.
      It's a bottom-up mechanism (unlike your poorly-informed notions).

      ...and TFA|TFS make it clear that USAians|English speakers know that Capitalism is screwing them and they're interested in an alternative.

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @10:06AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @10:06AM (#278528)

        > worker-owned cooperatives in northern Italy

        Yes, a community of people working without the capitalist infrastructure and cultural framework is possible. I work with one of those cooperatives and shop in their malls sometimes.
        But another community of people working without the capitalist infrastructure was the army when draft was in place.
        But cooperatives and associations in Italy are often used to conduct commercial activities without the onerous-to-insane requirements that have been imposed on commercial enterprises.
        But the tale of the italian CoopCa crack is literally identical to the tales of a capitalist bank crack, with problems hidden to the associates, suicides...

        So, if I had to draw a conclusion it is that capitalism and socialism are not obstacles nor guarantees of peaceful cooperation, and are useful ways to divide and conquer. See this thread.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @01:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @01:21PM (#278167)

    people killed by Communist regimes

    Stalinism and Maoism were NOT Communism.
    Those were Totalitarian governments controlling State Capitalist economies.
    The workers had no say in anything.
    Hell, you couldn't even vote in their fake elections unless you joined "the (one) party".

    Big hint: "Top-down" is NOT Communism.
    You swallowed a bunch of Cold War bullshit.

    ...and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea isn't even slightly democratic nor about the people.
    The self-naming thing doesn't provide any more truth than when the "democratic" USA spews propaganda about another country.

    -- gewg_

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @01:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @01:34PM (#278173)

      Yeah, and what Hitler did wasn't real National Socialism either.

      Real National Socialism has never been tried! (obligatory [imgur.com])

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @01:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @01:38PM (#278176)

        That is all.

        -- gewg_

        • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @03:01PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @03:01PM (#278206)

          Disregard that, I suck cocks.

          -- gewg_

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @04:50AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @04:50AM (#278479)

          This is my name now.

          -- gewg_

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @07:37AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @07:37AM (#278508)

        You probably think that North Korea is democratic and people's too...

    • (Score: 5, Touché) by wisnoskij on Friday December 18 2015, @01:40PM

      by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday December 18 2015, @01:40PM (#278177)

      Hell, you couldn't even vote in their fake elections unless you joined "the (one) party".

      Which is completely different from not counting unless you joined one of "the (two) parties"

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by isostatic on Friday December 18 2015, @02:48PM

        by isostatic (365) on Friday December 18 2015, @02:48PM (#278202) Journal

        In america you don't need to be a member of a party to vote, anyone can vote for John Jackson OR Jack Johnson. Freedom yeay!

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Joe Desertrat on Friday December 18 2015, @08:12PM

          by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Friday December 18 2015, @08:12PM (#278337)

          Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @07:45PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @07:45PM (#278673)

          Jack Johnson for President! Dude is a fine musician! And the US would be a better place if all Presidents were from Hawaii.

    • (Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Friday December 18 2015, @03:07PM

      by curunir_wolf (4772) on Friday December 18 2015, @03:07PM (#278208)
      "No True Scotsman"
      --
      I am a crackpot
    • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday December 18 2015, @06:31PM

      by jmorris (4844) on Friday December 18 2015, @06:31PM (#278288)

      Ah, gewg_ (or this incarnation...) isn't even bright enough to avoid the No True Scotsman Fallacy. Listen up bucko, if Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and yes, He Who Must Not Be Named are all 'not socialists/communists' then your political philosophy is simply defective on the grounds that nobody can do it. All those folks were self professed socialists of various schools and made a serious run at implementing Marxist theory. If all of them, by your fevered imagination, are all fakes, losers, incompetent, couldn't understand it, whatever, then there is zero rational basis to believe you and the other idiots in your school of Marxist thought are going to be any more successful than the long line of failed attempts before. After all, they all thought THEY were doing it right. How many more millions must die for your dreams? More bluntly, how many will YOU kill.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @07:10PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @07:10PM (#278303)

        B-but... muh commie utopia!!

        -- gewg_

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Friday December 18 2015, @08:02PM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday December 18 2015, @08:02PM (#278331) Journal

        And the founding fathers claimed they were capitalists while owning slaves, which is about as totalitarian as you can possibly get. You can't go by what a country calls itself because names are often part of propaganda...or you do consider the DPRK a democracy since it has democratic in the name?

        --
        ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
        • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday December 18 2015, @11:23PM

          by jmorris (4844) on Friday December 18 2015, @11:23PM (#278394)

          Nobody said they established utopia. They did revolutionize political thought though, even if they left unfinished business. And note well they did leave pretty obvious hooks in their political code to make eliminating slavery easy, Lincoln was just an incompetent fool and made a hash of the patch.

          This is simple folks, we have two proposed political systems.

          Option one, the Enlightenment's vision of a Free Society, Capitalism, etc. Best perfected to date with the U.S. Constitution but widely implemented successfully around the world atop a variety of underlying cultures. From America to Singapore, the basic free economic model has brought forth a rising standard of living and economic bounty. While the details, especially the social order beyond economic affairs can vary to fit the local culture, there are only two basic requirements. Establish a stable enough monetary unit that economic calculation is feasible and second establish property rights and Rule of Law to allow those who invest in longer range plans than the next harvest to have a reasonable chance of predicting the outcome and believe they can reap the benefit of delayed gratification. That is it, the whole magic formula. Do those things and your society will prosper, leaving even the poorest and those least inclined to capitalistic efforts better off. You can refine it to increase the rate of growth, trade a little growth for other desirable things (military strength, economic independence, etc) but just those two are sufficient.

          Option two, Socialism in various flavors, ever changing because since they all fail nobody ever wants to emulate an existing implementation. But the silver tongued servants of the Dark One keep tweaking it and promising that THIS one will work. Being based on envy and malice they seem to have no problem attracting adherents though.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @12:54AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @12:54AM (#278427)

            But the silver tongued servants of the Dark One keep tweaking it and promising that THIS one will work.

            Dark One? OK, the new Star Wars movie just came out, so it is not surprising you have Darth Cheney ++++Vader on the mind. Really, any empire ought to be able to get a Death Star right on the third try!

            Not that one? Could it be, . . . (best Church Lady voice)> SATAN?!? Magic formulas and the Market Economy. Hookay!! Been nice talking to you.

            [And South Park did is best in The Battle of Heaven and Hell episode, where Satan's advisor came up with a devilish plan, but Satan asks, "But how can we do that?" Advisor: "We'll do what we always do, use the Republicans!" ]

          • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @01:48AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @01:48AM (#278447)

            the Enlightenment's vision [...] Best perfected to date with the U.S. Constitution

            Let's see:
            - Partisan legislators drawing up voting districts
            - The anti-democratic Electoral College
            - First-past-the-post elections
            - The lack of automatic registration of those eligible to vote
            - Lifetime tenure for federal judges
            - A fixed term for politicians, with no pre-defined method for quickly removing bad performers
            - A chamber of the legislature with a non-proportional structure

            Meh. American Exceptionalism and its promoters are difficult to stomach.
            Parliamentarian systems existed before the USA emerged and those actually give proportional representation as determined by the vote.

            Socialism in various flavors [...] Being based on envy and malice

            You forgot the obvious: Deceptive naming of their anti-Democratic systems.

            Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?

            -- gewg_

          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 19 2015, @02:12AM

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday December 19 2015, @02:12AM (#278453) Journal

            I agree with you on what you're saying here and in your previous post upthread about Socialism--it's been tried many ways in sufficient number and variation to discredit its chances for successful implementation (though, to be pedantic, we're really talking about getting to the end stage of Communism when human productive culture will have been liberated by the false consciousness manufactured by the capitalists, and government can be abolished entirely. Socialism was supposed to be a transitional stage designed to prevent counter-revolution and back-sliding due to force of habit.).

            But I would argue that the same thing can be said of Capitalism to a lesser degree. We have had interludes of prosperity, but it too keeps regressing to Crony Capitalism that throttles entrepreneurs, smothers small businesses, and concentrates money and power in fewer and fewer hands. Teddy Roosevelt's progressive reforms at the dawn of the 20th Century broke the grip (or at least significantly loosened) of the Trusts and set the stage for the rise of the American middle class. But all that has been reversed now. Even in that happier interlude in the 20th century the Trusts/monopolies and concentrated wealth and power never truly went away, thus we have never really had the blissful capitalism you've described.

            So it is not, contrary to your characterization, simple. It could only be deemed simple if you're squinting, glossing, and sticking your fingers in your ears.

            The truth is both of the major political-economic theories from the last 150 years have played themselves out without a successor theory waiting in the wings. We have different flavors of hybrids, inversions, and such roiling and tumbling around, but nothing fresh, exciting, and resonant. It would take a towering figure to cast such a new theory, one that could break through the apathy and deeply engrained sense of betrayal that its predecessors left behind and try to take the world through the next 150 years of progress. But ours is a world where many have stopped studying the Humanities and where others belittle even the attempt to think about such things (even here, on a daily basis, in fact). At this point such a person would have to be on the scale of the Second Coming of Jesus.

            So, what we're probably going to get is a collapse and a new Dark Age.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
            • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday December 19 2015, @05:53AM

              by jmorris (4844) on Saturday December 19 2015, @05:53AM (#278492)

              It is hard to compare a free market to what we have had since the Progressive Era began. I'd suggest getting Ludwig Von Mises's Human Action (free in several formats from mises.org) and reading around in Part Six - The Hampered Market Economy. All these attempts to 'fix' imagined problems only make it worse. And of course the 'solution' to the unintended consequences of one round of intervention is of course more government intervention. In the end there are only two sorts of monopoly and most are of the government creation type where the solution is to get the government to stop doing that. As for Crony Capitalism, that is obviously a symptom of the problem of government intervention and that too will tend to degrade into Socialism if not checked. The boom/bust cycle? Yup, that it usually government intervention directly (money printing) or failing to do one of the few jobs it is actually supposed to do and keep the banks honest (credit expansion).

              No we don't need a new economic theory, there is no third way. What we need is to somehow return to the moral and educated public we were before the Progressive Era and I'm darned if I see how that happens. It takes an educated people to see the trap of redistributionist schemes and a moral one to not be seduced by the envy and greed Socialism uses to gain power. One advantage though is that last time we really didn't have the solid economics knowledge to properly defend Capitalism. If we could get hold of the education machinery we could probably immunize the next generation with solid education as to why Capitalism works and why Socialism is a trap.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @07:46AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @07:46AM (#278510)

                Von Miser, eh? The Deuce you say! So your garden variety Vienna Circle Libertarianism, and next we will hear that "true" libertarianism has never been tried!

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @07:58AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @07:58AM (#278512)

                For a guy who supposedly dislikes utopias you seem curiously stuck with "pure capitalism", which is based on impossible requirements, such as

                *Perfect information
                *No barriers of entry and exit
                *Zero transaction costs
                *Non-increasing returns to scale
                *No externalities

                and the most impossible of all

                *Rational buyers

                I guess people like to publicly root for some other ism besides egoism...

                • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday December 20 2015, @01:27AM

                  by jmorris (4844) on Sunday December 20 2015, @01:27AM (#278791)

                  I see the Marxists are here with their talking points. All those issues and more are addressed in the referenced book. And it and a metric crapload more are freely downloadable in multiple formats. In this great Age of Information there really is no excuse for ignorance.

                  Seriously. Perfect information? It is the market economy that can deal with it, planned ones reliably fail in the presence of incomplete, or worse conflicting, information. Externalities? Yup, it is in there. Scale issues? Open a book and learn. Even the problem of rational actors vs irrational ones is addressed.

                  Economics is mostly a solved problem. What apparently isn't solved is the political science and psychology to get people to actually accept the science. We live in a dark age of New Age Religions, wicked political systems, half baked redistribution schemes masquerading as economics and general unreason. It won't end well.

    • (Score: 2) by nukkel on Friday December 18 2015, @07:57PM

      by nukkel (168) on Friday December 18 2015, @07:57PM (#278329)

      No True Commie!!

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 19 2015, @01:48AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday December 19 2015, @01:48AM (#278448) Journal

      It would be more accurate to say, using the terms of the authors, to call them "Socialist." But your description serves well enough. That is, socialist is what they were in fact. I'm not an expert on Stalinism as an ideology, but I can say that Maoism as an ideology was communism, albeit an agrarian one. The reason is the Chinese Communist Party got nowhere with classical Marxism. They tried and tried to bolster their ranks by recruiting the urban proletariat Marx predicted and described as those who would lead the revolution. But there were two problems with that, first, there was almost no urban proletariat to speak of at that time in China; second, the Japanese military controlled nearly all the major cities that had any degree of industrialization so every time the CCP tried to operate there they got their butts kicked. They were quite on the verge of extinction when Mao said, "hey guys, you do know that 99% of Chinese are rural peasants, right? We should do our recruiting there." So they did, Maoism was the ideological framework they used to make their case, and eventually they were able to triumph over the Japanese and the Nationalists.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @06:07AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @06:07AM (#278495)

      So, the "No True Scotsman Fallacy" strikes again?

      "911/411/Paris attackers weren't True Muslims.
      "Wall Street bailouts weren't True Capitalism.
      "Child-molesting priests aren't True Christians.

      Statements make not one whit of difference. What makes a difference is what *you* *do* to oppose evil.

      Doctrines come, go, blend, and disappear... and right now, I'm convinced a semi-athiestic cleric is blending some utterly unique mix of faith, business and social principles somewhere.

      Something truly good happens when words and actions are utterly aligned with conscience.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 27 2015, @06:54PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 27 2015, @06:54PM (#281475) Journal

      "Big hint: "Top-down" is NOT Communism."

      Fine, then. Give us one example of "bottom-up" government - that has WORKED.

      The US was supposed to be an example of "bottom-up", with government accountable to the people. It really hasn't worked out that way. If I thought for awhile, I could probably come up with some other examples, our so-called "democratic republic" isn't really unique. But, which ones have WORKED? Fekkin commie pinko fag.