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Re:Broadband Communism: Jeremy Corbyn gets serious about fre... by eloff on Friday November 22, 2019 @04:53PM (#21610510)
Knowing it and having taken the lesson to heart are two different things. Plenty of people advocate for socialist policies of the "we already know the outcome" kind. They sound fair, and good to the poor, but are in fact harmful to those same people.

There are plenty of beneficial socialist policies, but sometimes the distinction between the two is not so clear.

Re:Broadband Communism: Jeremy Corbyn gets serious about fre... by thundergolfer on Friday November 22, 2019 @06:29PM (#21611193)
So seeing as you say the distinction is not so clear, how about you provide some examples?

Is public healthcare one? Public education? Public housing? Worker co-ops?

Re:Broadband Communism: Jeremy Corbyn gets serious about fre... by tristram_shandy on Friday November 22, 2019 @05:21PM (#21610748)
More reasoned analyses of 20th century performed by actual academics tend to view the collapse of the Soviet Union as a complex process with multiple confounding factors, including heavy losses in WW2, meteorological tragedies such as drought, ensuring crises and massive social changes from a feudal serfdom being transformed into a space-faring nuclear superpower within two generations, corruption within Stalinism itself, inherent geographical and power advantages of America and West Europe, etc. Careers are built on this.

No reasonable person objectively looks at 20th century history and says 'workers owning the means of production caused this', and it's equally asinine to suggest 'public broadband will lead us back to this'

Re:Broadband Communism: Jeremy Corbyn gets serious about fre... by andrenth on Friday November 22, 2019 @09:57PM (#21612134)
> performed by actual academics

It turns out academia is the one place where these ideas live on, because there is zero skin in the game required from those defending them. There is no consequence for backing a nice sounding theory that is deadly in the real world (e.g. Sartre and Pol Pot).

Re:Broadband Communism: Jeremy Corbyn gets serious about fre... by eloff on Friday November 22, 2019 @10:13PM (#21612200)
So it looks like you're one of those people who've been fooled.

Look at any communist country and note that the worker ends up with fewer rights and an order of magnitude poorer. The reason is simple and fundamental, if you remove personal incentives for innovating and producing useful things, you get a much less efficient system and smaller economic pie. Everyone is poorer.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is neither here nor there, it's not the point.

Re:Broadband Communism: Jeremy Corbyn gets serious about fre... by thundergolfer on Friday November 22, 2019 @11:23PM (#21612458)
> if you remove personal incentives for innovating and producing useful things

Do you never stop and think about how you're so quickly equating "incentive" with money (and only money)?

If we look at people that have been radically innovative a great many of them do not appear to be particularly interested in accumulating wealth. So much do we owe to Claude Shannon, or Albert Einstein, and yet did these men innovate to get rich? No.

Re:Broadband Communism: Jeremy Corbyn gets serious about fre... by eloff on Saturday November 23, 2019 @02:30PM (#21615964)
Money is not the only incentive, but it's a very important one.