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Joined vor 3 Jahren
Cake day: 24. Juni 2023
  • schnurritotoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What’s the difference between communism and socialism?
    1·
    vor 10 Stunden

    The point of democratic elections is, in my mind, to somewhat tame the natural tendency of government to work against the interest of the people. We still need to remember that even a democratic government isn’t the same thing as the people themselves (who for the most part want to live a life where they can do what they like as long as they aren’t harming anyone else), and has its own interests that may be quite different from that of the people… it’s better than a dictatorship, no doubt!

    We currently have a very good example of this: a lot of governments around the world are currently passing laws requiring age verification on social media. Did the people ever ask for this? Is it in the interest of the people to have that? Is it harmful to anyone if young people are using social media? No: it’s in the interest of governments to be able to identify people posting on the Internet, it’s in the interest of governments if there aren’t too many different social media sites operating so that they have an easier time monitoring what’s going on on them… it is, I guess, also in the interest of governments that young people aren’t having too much fun and don’t hear too many diverse voices so that school is the main source of information for them and they don’t get distracted too much? Nobody can tell me that any government that’s doing this is acting in the interest of the general population, especially not the ones affected!

  • schnurritotoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What’s the difference between communism and socialism?
    56·
    vor 15 Stunden

    The countries that were ruled as single-party states by communist parties in the 20th century, including those that survive until today, called themselves “socialist” and called the goal they were supposedly working towards “communism”.

    Of course all of this ideology was always nonsense. The liberal revolutions of the centuries before that were all about taking power away from the (monarchical/aristocratic) government in order to establish a society in which the government was elected by, and served, the people, and there were no longer any formally defined classes and all inequalities that remained were about income and property, which were (at least ideally) possible to overcome through one’s own achievements… why did communists ever think that the next step after that might be to once again establish a powerful government that serves as the only (or only major) employer, that’s a movement precisely in the other direction, not the natural next step…

    So as much as communists may mock the idea that “socialism is when the government does stuff, the more stuff it does the more socialist it is, and when the government does everything it’s communism”, I think that (while very simplified) is certainly a more accurate description of things than what communists claim their movement is about. Government and people are never going to have the same interests and it’s generally a good thing to take power away from the government and let the people handle things through free association; it’s a bad thing to do the opposite.

  • schnurritotoFunny: Home of the Haha@lemmy.world•I have fond memories of these days
    3·
    vor 1 Tag

    You could use SeaMonkey if you want a modern Netscape.

    “Before search engines” is very early and the problem with that is just that if all you have is links, it’s difficult to find anything at all…

    I think the Internet of the mid 2000s to early 2010s was the best era. There were amazing new things to discover on it almost every year, people were still using actual communication platforms rather than advertising platforms, it was easy to find out all kinds of interesting facts about the world.

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