Interstate Highways and similar systems are "successful" socialism, as far as I understand socialism

I must be blunt here: socialism is not about taxation. At all. Socialist communes don't even require taxes or money to exist. Socialism is about workers' relationship with work.

I acknowledge that 'socialism' is a vague term with dozens of definitions, but this strange strictly-American idea that publicly-funded infrastructure is socialist isn't a useful definition, nor a common one. It will really just confuse people.

Historically and presently, socialism is a labour movement which, despite all the variations, had the common goal of the workers controlling their means of production, rather than the owning class. Almost every political dictionary and socialist will back that up, and also Wikipedia (for something we can check right now). It's not about whether something is private or public.

Paying taxes and voting in a (systematically broken, throroughly corrupted) government representative democracy isn't really accomplishing this. We are arill beholden to the owning capitalist class. How I spend my working hours is still governed by a bourgeois board of directors, I don't own the tools I use, I don't have meaningful power to make democratic decisions about my work or my society governance.

You are correct that socialism exists (present tense! see: Zapatistas) without planned economies. But if you want to see what socialist modes of organisation look like within capitalism, it would be a workers cooperative.

Anti-car movements are not socialist nor socialism. They are good and pro-society, but are completely incidental to the socialist movement.

Collectively-funded operations like roads, police and our military airstriking hospitals aren't socialist nor socialism. We have no control over the use of our money and labour; even if voting was democratic power in practice, a campaigning platform isn't a guarantee of policy, they can completely ignore that once elected. And also, no matter who you vote for, your tax money will still go towards anti-socialism!

As for the parts about communism, well, no. The definition you've invented wildly conflicts with both theory and historical events. You're gonna have to start from scratch on that one, even just looking at the Wiki article will provide a much better base. Very popular ideologies like anarcho-communism just completely contradict all that.

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Soon to be [email protected]

One of the top-rated replies so far is an Asian who expresses they are offended, so that can't be right.

What power and control does this even give someone?

Lemmy has had a huge bias towards seize-the-means-of-production socialism from day 1, which is very important in understanding why it's different from other reddit clones, and why it has unique features and anti-features. The political orientation is not incidental, it's vital, and I'm glad to see it hasn't completely died from the sudden influx of reddit-natives when the API thing happened.

What makes it spam? We're invited to lemmy.ml, it shows up on our homepage the same as it does yours (probably even higher because instances more likely to downvote or ignore political posts don't link with us atm).

If you meant flooding, it's not that either. We're a big instance (1k users weekly) with a general interest in politics and a historical anti-lurking culture, so we'll be disproportionately active in political threads compared to a general instance like lemmy.ml, just like programming.dev is in tech threads. Are we meant to just not share an opinion because too many other people in the same instance already posted their (different) opinion?

A politician... blaming themself?

It's so crazy it just might work!

Wait until you see how much the typical Westerner cares about Africa.

Disagreeing with you isn't spam.

Enron, perhaps. I think it qualifies.

A good documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room

The bottom line is, the victim having autism and being young is irrelevant in the sense that no-one should be treated like that for such a trivial insult.

It's obviously still relevant, the victim is particularly vulnerable, making the abuse so much more obviously callous and disgusting. But I say if this happened to Joe Citizen, it would also be horrific.

Why would you spoil the punchline in the title?

What's the logic in this?