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Comment by johnday | Hacker News Reader

The site seems to not currently functioning, which... doesn't bode well?

I am interested in how a social network can be socialist, per se.

The jokes practically write themselves...

I was going go comment "it doesnt work" but I didnt want people to think I was making fun of the political ideology instead of reiterating the website not working.

Keyboard Stalin once said -> "The loss of one click is tragic, but the loss of thousands is statistic."

hahahahaha stop distracting me with your wit

The dev must have used a dysfunctional programming language. They should have used a functional one, without classes and state.

Someone else was supposed to pick up the bandwidth tab.

I think there was a song about that.

Not only does socialism suffer from a "No True Scotsman" problem (there is a wide disparity, from within and without, regarding what the term means), I dare say that's true of just about every -ism under the sun. (TODO: invent a political ideology that includes a formal specification.) :)

"Socialism" being an ambiguous term would not be that much of a problem if people stopped pretending it isn't and every socialist is a tankie. It's hard to believe someone is arguing in good faith if they criticize anarchists for trying to build a totalitarian dictatorship.

We have a problem with people seeing Ms. Scott from England, thinking her skirt is a kilt and getting angry when she claims she can't play the bagpipe.

No dispute. Obviously decades of anti-Soviet propaganda (which does encapsulate many legitimate critiques) have muddled the conceptual landscape, both in terms of oversimplification, and in emotional charge. And, we have significant status quo bias regarding our particular neoliberal form of capitalism; you can't tell a fish about water.

Still, even correcting for those historical factors, I think every -ism, or school of thought, suffers from similar problems in subjective perception: it's easy to find nuance and diversity of opinion if one looks for it, and equally easy to find bad actors, tribalist talking points, sloppy thinking, etc, if one looks for it.

> We have a problem with people seeing Ms. Scott from England, thinking her skirt is a kilt and getting angry when she claims she can't play the bagpipe.

Maybe its for "Social-Ists"?

Like a weird way of saying people who like to be social?

And hopefully not the kind of socialism that Russia/DPRC employ, that would be the worst of all worlds.

> socialism [...] Russia [...]

Welcome back! A lot has changed in the 30+ years you were in coma.

I was talking about actual Russia not Ukraine/etc.

We could talk about the USSR but not everyone gets what that is anymore...

Russia isn't socialist at all, not even in the Soviet sense.

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