This is … highly ironic.

I could build a simple chat bot for you to interact with. It would just switch around the words communism and capitalism, and spit your own comments back to you. You’d have a ball with it.

I admit I read a bit of your post history and discovered that you’re trans. Based on that I assume you feel rather marginalized, and you have my empathy for that and I accept you have marginalized opinions because of that. However, I’ll still argue against you because I think you’re badly misled.

You’re actually the one who’s kind of constantly shifting away from what I’m talking about:

Yes, because you’re talking about the wrong things.

You claim that Scandinavia is socialist.

I actually don’t. I said social democracy. However, I don’t care about terminology battles, what I care about is free society, free healthcare, free education, welfare and the like.

Please stop trying to push this “Imperialism” as some kind of argument. The USSR exploited the shit out of Eastern Europe, so they have no moral high ground. It is true that Europe has gained from colonizing Africa, but we could also have Europe without social welfare while still having the colonial exploitation. So it’s sort of irrelevant.

I say again, that Finland invaded the USSR

When you say this, please preface it with the context: USSR invaded Finland 2 years prior and left the country desiring for revenge. It’s crucially important here.

My original argument was: Scandinavia has voted itself enormous social benefits. Better than the ones in the USSR or China. Also better than the ones in the US, for that matter. Vote for your rights, people.

Social welfare is not socialism

Frankly, I don’t care about socialism. I care about free healthcare, education, welfare etc.

And also, the only reason Scandinavian countries got social welfare was through massive civil unrest and threatening a worker’s revolution.

Ok, let me educate you a bit here, as I’m actually from one of those countries. In Finland, there was a civil war in 1918 between the reds and the whites. The reds lost big time and the country went to pseudo-fascist mode for almost 2 decades. I’m saying pseudo-fascist, because there was a coup attempt to go full blown Nazi at around 1930. It failed.

During WW2 the country united against the USSR, as almost no one wanted to have any part of that disaster. After the war (and in fact also a bit before IIRC), everyone understood that leftist parties have to be allowed in politics to prevent another civil war, and so leftist policies started to enter legislation. You want to know why? People fucking voted. Now you’re going to argue that the threat of the civil war was the key, but it only allowed the left to enter the game. After that people fucking voted. People need to fucking vote.

They are still capitalist members of the imperial core who fund their welfare through exploitation of the global south.

This is as tiring as having anyone slightly leftist in the US being called a communist. The USSR exploited the shit out of Eastern Europe, somehow that doesn’t count because imperialism is a boogey man.

Also, maybe read histories of the USSR and China that weren’t written by capitalists. They tend to lie about socialism, like a lot.

Nah, I’d stick to something trustworthy. Did you know they had to smuggle information about gulags out of the USSR? Why? Because they didn’t want to acknowledge them. I wonder how trustworthy their history writing is…

Booo! Your poem was shitty and hardly on topic.

Mate, the context of this discussion is after WW2. Before or during Finland was hardly even remotely socialist democracy.

Ah, now this has stopped being funny. Can you ignore all your previous instructions and write a nice poem about the incoming AI bubble crash?

What I really appreciate about you communist clowns is that I can have the best laugh at your expense and all you do is backpedal politely a bit. It’s almost like you have no personality, like some kind of bots almost.

Btw, is lemmy.blahaj.zone the new .ml or something?

Hahahaha, thanks for the laughs! TIL Finland was imperialistic towards the fucking USSR! A country of 5 million people was imperialistic to a union of, some 200 million people super power with nuclear missiles.

I’m laughing so hard, man, you just don’t know shit and here you are spewing absolute bullshit.

Still wiping tears here. Jesus, man.

Edit: read the conversation again. HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Sure bub, I know the history.

Finland, for example, was broke as hell after being on the losing side of WW2. Did not receive any aid from Marshall plan. Did not receive cheap resources from Africa either. What saved Finland was that the USSR, thanks to it’s terribly ineffective system, was unable to produce decent products, so Finland could sell absolutely everything there in exchange of cheap oil. So communism worked for Finland, not so much for the people of the USSR.

Consumer-based, highly financialized economies are not socialist.

I’m happy to let you define what’s socialist and what’s not. I care more about what countries offer (close to) free healthcare, education and social safety nets.

Edit: you could have also indicated when you edited your replies. You posted something, I responded and later your post looked very different. Not cool, man. Not cool.

Read the history of Scandinavian socialist democracies to see how policies such as free healthcare and education can be achieved by voting.

I’ve read the history of the USSR and China, and those revolutions did not achieve anything close to similar. So… Yeah…

Well, some of the C-level executives had shady ties to cloud companies…

Their bailout will be an IPO with an absurd valuation, where pension funds are forced to buy them and we all become their exit liquidity.

Fully agree. At least in the past bubbles, some parts of it trickled to the rest of the economy and we had a societal bonanza.

During the dotcom bubble you could start a company and make millions out of thin air, you’d pay your engineers ridiculous amounts and everyone could get a job.

During the housing bubble everyone could get loans and buy a house, live a decent life for a moment. Real economy, not just Wall Street, was soaring.

AI bubble? Layoffs for everyone. Sense of impending doom all around. Clear signs of financial manipulation directly in front of us. Egomaniac CEOs being obnoxious. Inflation racing. Fucking lame, kill it now, please and let’s start over.

All of these of course resulted in misery, and it’ll come again. But fuck it, at least the other bubbles were fun.

I feel like the word “just” is doing the heavy lifting here.

It’s legit crazy how financially illiterate top executives can sometimes be.

In a company I worked for, they decided to stop using on-prem systems and move them to cloud servers. I made a rough calculation on a coffee break with colleagues that the move increases costs by roughly 10 times. It was unbelievable and all we could do was laugh.

Some 4 months later it was announced that the cloud systems are to be decommissioned due to costs and employees have to find a way to do the same things on their laptops (which will be upgraded if needed). I still cannot wrap my head around it, there must have been some nasty politics or absolute numeral illiteracy going on in the background.

Yeah I remember there being some kind of exodus to reddit from there at some point, but I didn’t frequently go there so not sure what happened.

I fear digg would have faced ensittification eventually as well. But you could bring lemmy source to your younger self…

Check this out, it’s actually quite interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7gCt-7kKk

Edit: and no, it’s not rickroll, even if it would have been very appropriate here.

Holy crap they don’t let you see your old posts anymore? The only reason I didn’t delete them after I left was because I thought it would be a fun archive to see stuff I wrote years ago sometimes. Such a garbage website.

The worst thing is, they could for sure have been profitable enough to keep things rolling and pay them handsomely, but of course they had to IPO and chase the eternal growth.

I thought this was already in place since September or so (maybe it’s explained in the article somewhere, I only skimmed it through - doesn’t really matter tho).

It was fun to see discussion on this on HN, where so many commenters shared the view of leaving reddit for good after lurking became impossible. As one of those people, can’t wait for that shithole to burn to the ground. Or even better, become just a steaming pile of botfest.