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Comment by samschooler | Hacker News Reader

That whole situation was bad. I don't think anyone is happy with that situation. A developer was going to give us (some) affordable housing, and a "free" park. Instead now we're paying 70 million for the same park.

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In a POSIWID sense, American socialism’s purpose is to prevent affordable housing and create parks. Indistinguishable from what rich neighbors of a plot of land would like, coincidentally.

The purpose of a system is what it does, but here you're saying that the purpose of [American socialism] is what [the Denver DSA] does.

Interestingly, many DSA chapters follow the same playbook so the Denver DSA is fairly representative of the DSA, which is the largest socialist organization in the US. So either the DSA is not socialist, not representative of American socialists, or is representative and American socialists are a device to stop affordable housing and create parks.

Which proposition or conclusion above do you disagree with and why?

I don't really know anything about the DSA so I can't agree or disagree with any of this. I guess I misread your comment, I interpreted it as "Based on the events described in this thread, American socialism's purpose is ...". It seems like your statement is actually based on a very broad context of the DSA's history and activities, which are not common knowledge, so it would have been nice to include some of that if you wanted to make such a sweeping statement.

You're also making another implicit claim here that DSA chapters have never had any impact other than stopping affordable housing and creating parks, which I think would be difficult to defend. After a minute of Wikipedia research, I see that at least nine members of Congress were active DSA members during their tenure, and obviously had other accomplishments. For example, I see that DSA member Major Owens was in Congress for 24 years and was a significant factor in passing the ADA.

I am certainly happy to amend it to "The DSA's primary purpose in America in the last twenty years is to oppose affordable housing and convert the sites of such housing to parks".

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