Well, socialism died out in Europe around 1989. When the iron curtain fell. Currently there is not a single country that has socialism in it's constitution. In the EU, but also in exactly zero non-EU european countries.
To educate: socialism has nothing to with how influence the execute or legislative has. Nor has it anything to do with health insurance.
The central point of the ideology called "socialism" is that control of the state (not of private owners) over the "means of production". Like capital, land, workforce. To gain this control, socialism is keen to use force. They call it e.g. "dictatorship of the proletariat". Usually this leads to heavy oppression of the people, to some sort of police state. If you look at any real socialist country (like GDR, USSR, Yugoslavia, Cuba, North Korea) you'll always find it to some sort. Even in today's China the banks are still under government control, so "the party" has the ultimate say in everything.
You usage of "socialism" doesn't fit that at all. Perhaps you meant something that isn't fully libertarian?
My guess is the US people are badly educated these days. And thus easily influenced with false factoids coming from libertarian oligarchs like the Koch brothers.
And also it seems like they never heard about "social market economy" ... I mean, there is a spectrum between a fully socialist country like e.g. North Korea and a fully capitalist like ... actually we don't have one that is purely capitalist. Not even in the USA does the "market regulates everything".
And also I think that quite a few people never pondered about the idea that there are two words ("social" and "socialism") for a reason.
The term socialism wasn't defined by Marx. That's the heart of why you don't understand the definition of that word. There are a half dozen different branches with different definitions, all of which predate Marx. The only reason that you think that is that Lenin made him famous. But you can have socialism without any of the things you mention. It still doesn't work but its different. Think Finland in the 1970s or Sweden in the 1980s. Or Britain and Spain today. Those are all socialist societies by their own definitions. They also don't work.
PS Now a serious question, do you think your country is worth defending? If not, why should another country think it is?
> Or Britain and Spain today. Those are all socialist societies by their own definitions.
... Er, no, Britain is not a socialist society by its own definitions, or anyone else's (unless you want to stretch the term so far that it encompasses Labour's fairly minimal social democracy, but at that point the term is becoming almost meaningless). Where are you getting that?
* "SBZ" -> Sowjetisch besetzte Zone -> sowjet occupied zone
* "Ost-Zone"
* "DDR"
* "Ost-Deutschland"
Almost no one spelled out "DDR" with "Deutsche Demokratische Republik", since that was a lie. There was little democracy there.
People that fled from east-germany early (e.g. before the wall) usually used "SBZ "or "Zone". And it was usually meant in a derogatory sense. "DDR" was more neutral, although few people in west-germany had a neutral view on the eastern regime.
The funniest thing about the GDR was that its railways were still called "Deutsche Reichsbahn" ("German Imperial Railways" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Reichsbahn_(East_Germ...). Apparently they needed to keep the name in order to be able to still operate trains in West Berlin.
Fun thing: some people here in Germany act like there is no East Germany. For them it is "Middle Germany". As if we still had Schlesien and Pommern ...
Look at radio stations. We have SWR: Süd-West Rundfunk (south west) in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz. We have WDR: Westdeutscher Rundfunk (west) in Nordrhein-Westfalen. We have NDR: Norddeutscher Rundfunk (north). In Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Hamburg (not Bremen).
... and then we have Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (middle) in Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen.
There was the ORB - Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg. Which later (2003) merged with SFB - Sender Freies Berlin to RBB - Rundfunk Berlin Brandeburg.
Thus the middle serves the middle. And while Saxonia (Part of MDR) indeed goes to the east most point of Germany it's at least middle in North-South. But the most middle point (depending a little on exact definition) is in Thuringa (also part of MDR)
“National masochism” is a particularly perverse kind of “virtue signaling”. It is the urge and need to malign and disavow your own nation and history, to trample and spit and urinate on it, and – especially – to do so in front of your perceived moral overlords, who are not your compatriots, in order to show off how “good” you are, “goodness” being the level of adversity and disgust you display towards your own nation.
This negative psychological disposition towards your own collective identity is a profound cultural disorder (at the level of mass psychology). It is wide-spread and even mainstream in Germany among the left-leaning. Significantly, it has never been the object of public debate, as public debate is strictly controlled by the adherents of this perverted ideology.
It's the "historical" pre-WW2 name of the region. But as "Ossi" I must say the name never sat well with me and the name MDR is one of the bigger fuckups of the reunification, it's essentially revisionist bullshit
The explanation for that (according to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitteldeutscher_Rundfunk#Histo...) is tradition: there was a Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk from 1924 to 1934, when the geographic designation was correct, and the post-1990 MDR just continues that name.
Actually, if you look at the map of German regional public broadcasters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARD_(broadcaster)#/media/File:...) and squint a bit, the MDR is more or less in the middle: more on the north-south axis and less on the east-west axis (with only the RBB partly more east), but still...
> West Germany attempted to isolate East Germany with the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, which amounted to a pretty solid trade embargo.
The first sentence is true, and is what I know. The second economical leg of this sentence is new to me.
Basically, Hallstein Doctrine was what "One China" politics is. The BRD assume that is is the sole legitimate (since democratically elected) government. For example, someone from east germany fleeing to west german already had the (west) germanship citizenship, no paperwork needed to get it.
However, Hallstein doctrine had --- to the best knowledge ... very unspecified reactions. Germany e.g. stop diplomatic relationships with Cuba. But not economical ties, I know that my father continued to smoke Havanna cigars (eeeek!). They stopped diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia ... but all the Winnetou Films were recorded there, and it even became a holiday destination for west germans. Also all payments continued, it was not an economical embargo.
In the case of Egypt it could be seen like that. When Egypt accepted the state-hood of east-germany, then West-Germany broke it's diplomatic ties AND stopped its economical aid. I'm not aware of it stopping buying oil from Egypt, thought.
Fan fact: there is also two inverses of the Hallstein doctrine. The first one is the Ulbricht Doctrine. That doctrine mandated that socialist countries mustn't normalize their diplimatic ties to west-germany until it recognized east-germany.
And the second inverse is that other countries only saw west-germany as the legal succession of the 3rd Reich and even the german empire. So it was West-Germany had hat to fulfill contracts of that time. Except for the reparations. The USSR took (or stole) more stuff from East Germany than the western allied forces took from West Germany. About 30% of the industrial infrastructure was removed, e.g. 11800 km of railway tracks. And even after they stopped removing the infrastructure itself, they still demanded a percentage of the production.
> For example, someone from east germany fleeing to west german already had the (west) germanship citizenship, no paperwork needed to get it.
Mind that that didn't only matter for GDR, but also East Prussia etc. which was important for all the displaced people from now-Poland, Sudeten Germans etc.
How does that work, are people from East Prussia today entitled to come and live and work in Germany? Or was that right dropped at some point? Or only ever available to those of German descent (which seems uncomfortably close to the values of the previous German regime, and surely would require some paperwork to establish)?
The region that was once East Prussia has now mostly been ruled by Russia since longer than almost anyone there has been alive.
This became stricter with a big reform in 1999 and then further changes.
Till then (West) Germany had quite inflspecific wordi g. The constitution says "German citizen is, who is German" and they kept the old Empire's citizen law to have continuity.
That's one of the reasons why reunification between East and West bad go be done so quickly (from falling Wall No. 9th 1989 to reunification October 3rd 1990) as East Germans could migrate to West easily as soon as the Wall fell and promise of quick unification was a key promise to prevent even bigger migration.
The west had a ton of products manufactured in the GDR. Check your Privileg washing machine - it was made in the DDR! Same goes for IKEA furniture. That was the bitter end of the utopia, that it was basically a capitalist labour camp at the end to survive.
As recently as the late 90s (which, yes was 30 years ago, not all that recent) in the UK we were getting tractor tyres coming in stamped "MADE IN DDR".
Although I don't know if that was more a case of "we really ought to take the grinder to that mould and stick something else on", or what.
Pretty sure it would have been "Made in GDR" ;) Must have been leftovers from before 1991, or maybe Pneumant (the former GDR tyre company) indeed never cared to update the original molds until Goodyear bought them in 1999.
The economy of the DDR was a basket case. It was the USSR that did them in when the Soviets stopped selling them oil and gas for cheap in the 1970s.
Moscow was surprisingly capitalist. They noticed they could sell their resources to the West for dollars or give them away to their communist "allies".
Might have to do with the fact that East Germany's Uranium deposits dried up sometime between the late 60s and early 70s (but of course there was also the global oil crisis around that time). In the early days the GDR provided most of the Uranium for the Soviet nukes, and there was constant haggling about who pays what (usually the GDR) and how much profit the GDR was allowed to take (usually not much). Cheap oil and gas might have been a part of the deal, until West Germany also discovered that the Soviets were willing to sell cheap to the "class enemy" during the 1970s (e.g. that problem of (the whole of) Germany becoming dependent on Russian oil and gas started much earlier than most people realize today.
Also related fun fact: the GDR started to refurbish and use old steam locomotives again as a result of the oil crisis. I remembered seeing those regularly as a child, and then later wondered what caused this anachronism.
It wasn't much of a problem until Russia decided to go all-in on its "imperial ambitions" again which made it an unreliable trade partner for Germany.
Remember: it was Russia which tried to blackmail Germany by shutting down the pipelines, and that was before the Ukrainians settled the matter once and for all by blowing up Nordstream (Russia had been shutting down the gas flow indefinitely by end of August 2022 after three months of back-and-forth, and the dry pipeline was finally blown up end of September 2022).
> And while I don't know whether there was blackmail involved I do know that there was terrorism involved (the GermanWings crash on 3/24/15, ridiculously blamed on "pilot suicide").
What his parents and friends say. And what has been been technologically feasible for decades. Ever heard of drone technology? Ever heard of an analogous "bus driver suicide", of which statistically there should be hundreds or thousands for every alleged "airliner pilot suicide"?
To return the "compliment", consider whether it rather applies here … 49386949. And remember to "flag".
"is Socialism" ... not it's not. I'm always puzzled how bad education must have been to those people putting the stamp "socialism" on everything they don't like.
Socialism is a political ideology centered (it's really at it's core!) the idea of "means of production must be in the hands of the people". In reality the "means of production" (capital, land, workforce) was in the hands of a small undemocratic elected ruling caste. But the core idea still prevails. In socialism banks were seized (capital), land was seized from the farmers and Kolchoses or LPGs (agricultural production cooperatives) were formed by force. Companies were seized and Kombinate" were formed. The underlying idea of all of this force is the "dictatorship of the proletariat", their way to tell themselves that cruelty and excessive physical and psychological force is okay, almost a must.
Right to repair has nothing to do with seizing capital, land, or pressing the workforce into mismanaged cooperatives.
Another central idea of socialism is the thinking of castes, err classes. Most notably the worker classes. That describes the situation in GB around the industrial revolution. But today? Won't fit in most countries.
Right to repair has nothing to do with working class. A professor (the "intelectual class") would also be able to repair his stuff.
Just yesterday news and TV was full of what happened at 9/11, something that was truly horrible.
I'm from Germany, and why 3 to 4 generations ago happened here was truly horrible.
All was done by extremists, thought.
But... just the other day I read https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikanische_Besetzung_Haitis about the US occupation of Haiti. And that was done by a government that claimed to be not extremist and even democratic. Way more people died there than even in 9/11. And it had almost all the things happening as they happened in the 3rd Reich: Racism, looking down at others, concentration camps, torture, forced labor till death, killing family members (what we call "Sippenhaft"). Something between 3500 and 15000 people were killed by US troops. That's still low compared to what 3rd Reich Germany did ... but quantity is not the issue when we talk about traits, quality is.
So the same "human traits" made US troops do cruel things as they made Germany extremists do cruel things. So we must conclude that they aren't all good. And therefore not all desirable.
Fun thing: this is known since a loooooong time. About 2000 years ago a religious leader (that gets way more followers in the US than in Germany) said "There is no good one, not even one".
And even today people act like humanity is inherently good. No, it isn't. If we were, then anarchism or communism would actually work and really give some kind of paradise on earth.
The bad traits are from other, bad humans. We, the good humans, can obviously select the best traits that a good human should have, to give the agents.
A not so well known fact: Hitler visited America and it was the American solutions to the Native American problem that inspired Hitler's solutions to the Jew problem. He just executed them more efficiently (pun accepted).
If we look at this in a non US-centric view, then many other areas have solved this, partially since decades.
For example, in Germany we used to have a bank card, "EC Karte", it is now called "Girocard".
So, if you are a shop and accept Girocard, you pay 0.2% of the transaction plus a fix 0.05 - 0.10 €.
And in Germany virtually everyone has a Girocard, it's part of getting a bank account. The cards are free to the customers.
So assume you're a small Café with 8000€ per months, 70% via Girocard and 30% via credit cards. Then you'd pay ~ 17€ per month for Girocard, but 95€ if you use "blended sum" - a contract with a payment provider to accept all cards. But you don't have bureaucracy. With you do an extra contract with a credit card only provider it's still 41€ for just the 30% of your monthly business.
That creates the effect that in Germany lots of shops don't accept credit cards. The market speaks.
I know that other countries also have payment methods, e.g. Netherland or China. It's just the US banking system that is decades behind what is possible.
Many small business owners are idiots and obsess over tiny sums while being blind to large costs. And they loose far more customers by not accepting payment methods than they save in fees. In your own example it's only €41 per month that they save by turning away who knows how many customers.
Another example is small B&Bs who happily pay 15% or more to third parties like booking.com, but think it's outrageous to pay 2-3% in card fees to accept bookings on their own website.
They all compromise on something to enhance something else. You simply can't map the surface of a 3d shere (approximation of the earths globe) onto a 2d flat surface.
And so we have projections galore. And anyway was (and is) always free to use whatever fits best.
It is insane how the big mistake lasted.
After seeing each country before and after side by side on a website, it's insane how big the difference in false sizes of countries compared.
Like Greenland vs Africa, come on man!! This must be a joke (and still lasted 457 years).
I thought everyone learned the Mercator use case in school? It is for marine navigation. A line of constant bearing will always appear straight on it. If you want to see the relative size of continents that's a different use case and you need a different projection.
Apps with maps use a specific and different Mercator projection which produces a nice quadtree for dynamically loading data. This is possible with other projections too, but reprojection and training users to expect a different looking map is expensive.
Almost nobody plots courses of constant bearing on a map. Almost nobody uses a map to measure area either.
99% of the use cases for maps these days are for local navigation where artifacts are minor. The differences in map projection are basically irrelevant to users in these cases.
A line of constant bearing will always be a great circle. A straight line on a mercator projection of the earth does not constitute a great circle (in fact only the equator line is a great circle and each vertical line is half of a great circle).
> A line of constant bearing will always be a great circle.
That's not right. Imagine heading due West, and keeping your compass pointing West every step anywhere not on the equator. That traces out a longitude line, not a great circle.
If you follow a constant compass heading you will spiral toward the poles in a helix, not travel in a circle around the globe. To travel along a great circle, your compass bearing must constantly change as you move.
I mean even for marine navigation, you use digital solutions now. But paper charts people would use before aren’t exactly zoomed out to show the whole world. So I feel like this whole world Mercator projection hasn’t been very relevant for a long time, even for navigation
The Mercator projection is not a mistake at all, it just chooses trade-offs when mapping a 3D sphere to a 2D plane that are relevant for marine navigation (preserving angles and directions, but not sizes for example).
So if you want to do marine navigation, it's a good choice (no mistake).
I can imagine it's not the best choice for things like Google Maps and learning maps in school, so the choice for Mercator could be considered a mistake maybe.
And the article text does a pretty good job (to me as a layman who was aware Dymaxion existed but doesn't spend much time thinking about this) of illustrating, just the title seems to be for a much more reactionary nonsense article.
> it is possible the size of most nations have been miscalculated
Huh? Are you a Flat Earth believer? We can literally see the countries from space. The problem wasn't that we don't know how big they are but that, as your parent explains, it is not possible to have a flat map which accurately depicts a (roughly) spherical terrain. A flat map has to be "wrong" in some sense and this change picks a map which made a trade off that favours accurate size (e.g. ratio between size of Greenland and Africa)
I don't know what OP's intent was, but the objective reading is likely true; they have (previously) been miscalculated.
Louis XIV famously said "You have cost me more territory than all my enemies" when he received a more accurate map of France in 1682 (the Cassini map), showing its size was ~20% smaller than previously calculated.
This question is nonsensical. Canada is not ONE identity. It's millions of people, hundred thousands of companies and organizations. Go and ask them individually.
Also, the UN voted to use this map for itself and suggested (!) that others should use it. It never said that everyone has to use that map. It actually said that this voting is "non-binding".
#/media/File:ARD_Karte.svg){kind=link}
To educate: socialism has nothing to with how influence the execute or legislative has. Nor has it anything to do with health insurance.
The central point of the ideology called "socialism" is that control of the state (not of private owners) over the "means of production". Like capital, land, workforce. To gain this control, socialism is keen to use force. They call it e.g. "dictatorship of the proletariat". Usually this leads to heavy oppression of the people, to some sort of police state. If you look at any real socialist country (like GDR, USSR, Yugoslavia, Cuba, North Korea) you'll always find it to some sort. Even in today's China the banks are still under government control, so "the party" has the ultimate say in everything.
You usage of "socialism" doesn't fit that at all. Perhaps you meant something that isn't fully libertarian?
My guess is the US people are badly educated these days. And thus easily influenced with false factoids coming from libertarian oligarchs like the Koch brothers.
And also it seems like they never heard about "social market economy" ... I mean, there is a spectrum between a fully socialist country like e.g. North Korea and a fully capitalist like ... actually we don't have one that is purely capitalist. Not even in the USA does the "market regulates everything".
And also I think that quite a few people never pondered about the idea that there are two words ("social" and "socialism") for a reason.
reply