I’m actually attempting to exit this conversation at the moment. I initially commented when I was having a bad day and would rather that I hadn’t.

That’s only true within the sphere of Marxist ideology and is not a widely-held distinction made by the rest of society. i.e., actual current law wherein:

Private property refers to the ownership of property by private parties - essentially anyone or anything other than the government. Private property may consist of real estate, buildings, objects, intellectual property (copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secrets). The transfer of a private property commonly takes place by the owner’s consent or through a sale or as a gift.

Outside of Marxist ideology, and in actual practice, individuals are one class of private entity, making personal property a type of private property. The average person can not be expected to fully understand the nuances of how Marxism alters these definitions, nor accept them in practicality.

Fine.

Google, define communism:

a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.

Britannica:

communism, political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society.

dictionary.com:

a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state

Merriam-Webster:

a: a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed

b: a theory advocating elimination of private property

Oxford English Dictionary:

A theory that advocates the abolition of private ownership, all property being vested in the community…

Remember that it is unnecessary to cite sources when dealing with common knowledge.

Where did you get this definition? Look up communism in any standard dictionary or encyclopedia and you will see that it entails the removal of private property.

Edit: ugh, y’all got me arguing about communism again. I need to go outside.

At least we are disagreeing respectfully :)

I think you must have inferred something from my comment that I didn’t actually say. I didn’t say every communist country ceases to exist. I also didn’t say that communism can’t generate a large economy.

What I said was that it has a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals, where those goals are economic equality, and elimination of poverty and class divisions. Most open pro-communists today have an additional goal of increasing access to basic human rights which communism has historically failed at as well. I did mention that some communist states have failed outright.

In the case of China, which you alluded to, note that China deliberately weakened their communism in the 90s as part of a series of economic reforms that introduced capitalist principles designed to stimulate growth. Specifically, agriculture was de-collectivized, Chinese business were opened to foreign investment, permission was granted for entrepreneurs to start businesses, state-owned industries were privatized, and many price controls were removed. By 2005, the private sector was responsible for 70% of China’s GDP. There is no reason to believe that China’s economy would be anywhere near as large as it is today absent these reforms.

But is that what you personally want out of your system? A large economy? Is that what matters most?

Yeah I get you. But it’s important to realize that we’re talking about much more than a handful of attempts. I see the value in learning from history and iterating on processes to try and get better over time. But if we’re honestly striving for the best system for humanity, what we shouldn’t do is say, “I really want it to be communism so let’s just assume that must be the right answer and keep trying it over and over again until it works.” At some point you do have to be willing to try something new.

It’s my opinion that communism has had more than a fair shot and has been eliminated from the running. But I am also not so crazy as to immediately disregard some new communist paradigm that theoretically works in some new way that is designed to fix the problems that continually appeared in communist systems historically. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it presented yet. And it’s also not what these “western teenagers” (as the meme calls them) are advocating for. They use language and symbols characteristic of very specific brands of communism that were massive historical failures in terms of preserving human rights and eliminating poverty and class divisions.

I think fundamentally most people would agree with that. The problem with communism though is that it’s not just a staple of the USSR. There is something on the order of 48 countries that have experienced state-sponsored communism in relatively recent times and it has never once succeeded in achieving these goals but tends to exacerbate poverty, class division, and government oppression of human rights, if not resulting in completely failed states.

Some will read this and assume I am advocating for capitalism. I am not. Asserting problems with communism does not imply capitalism is perfect or even good. But if we do choose to abandon capitalism, the wrong decision is to move to a system with a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals over dozens of historical attempts. As the meme suggests, many Eastern Europeans are old enough to have personal experience with those failures.

Where communism can work well is on a smaller, voluntary scale. When people choose to get together and establish their own rules for pooling resources, small communities can sometimes live quite satisfactorily this way. But no, if we are willing to call capitalism a failure based on its history we have to be honest enough to say the same thing about state-sponsored communism.

Yes and no. CEOs do have autonomy but in a case like Reddit they are also beholden to the Board of Directors. They make commitments/predictions/projections for the board all toward the ultimate end of working toward a high return on investment for the members of the board and other shareholders. The CEO is then responsible to make these things come true and has autonomy to do things as he sees fit. But if the board has enough power, in any case where they don’t like how the CEO is performing, they will eventually vote to remove him.

Oh. Yeah. If you ever start to wonder if you might enjoy any part of our political process, you will not.

This one is a deep cut.

Might I respond with þistill mistill kistill

Notice how most “big words” are just Latin or Greek borrowings. And most of them are completely unnecessary.

“parses HTML with regex”

Right. By whatever logic we deduce that our universe is simulated, it would be just as likely that our simulators are also simulated. And from there you get simulations on to infinity and a simulation becomes as real as reality gets.

Well, if we are in a simulation, there is very likely an admin ;)