4 ms·
It is sad how little U.S. voters seem to care about anyone but themselves. Near everything the Finns are dong could be done in here, but too many voices would c
by suzdude 7mo ago
It is sad how little U.S. voters seem to care about anyone but themselves. Near everything the Finns are dong could be done in here, but too many voices would complain about the cost, the paternalism, or how they might be slightly inconvenienced.
Those seem like harder challenges then the changes themselves.
- pixl97 7mo agoGreed is good! Anything that's not greed is socialism and we can't have that now, can we.
- tombert 7mo agoI find it amusing that people will quote the "Greed is Good" speech by Gordon Gecko, and they will do it unironically, I guess forgetting that he's the villain in that movie. You're not supposed to agree with him.
- busterarm 7mo ago[flagged]
- tombert 7mo agoI'd argue that the way that socialist Russia turned out was very specifically because of very greedy people, so not negating my point. Stalin basically appointed himself kings while using anti-king rhetoric to take down the Romanovs.
- busterarm 7mo agoExcept it's not just Russia...
- tombert 7mo agoMy point still stands. I think a lot of the awfulness that has come out of the implementations of socialism has come from greed. North Korea’s awfulness came because Kim Il Sung decided to appoint himself as king right after their revolution. Cuba’s awfulness came because Castro decided to appoint himself as king right after their revolution. I could keep going, but my point is, and call their surrounding system whatever you want, these things are still a consequence of immense greed. ETA: You keep trying to turn what I said into some anti-socialist thing, which seems to imply that you think I am a socialist. I am not. I think that a lot of the biggest issues with socialism come from greed. Greed is not good. Greed is bad. It’s bad when it’s in a capitalist context, it’s bad when it’s in a socialist context. It’s bad in every context. You can keep going on about how horrible you think socialism is if you want but that’s orthogonal to what I was saying.
- busterarm 7mo agoI don't think greed really has much of anything to do with the Great Leap Forward and the mass famine that was a direct result of some of those policies. I don't see how greed plays into telling farmers they need to stop farming and melt down all of their tools to make shitty pig iron that isn't worth a damn and then starve to death because they didn't grow any food. Or to stop long-established working farming practices in favor of the unproven ideas of some dumbass who thought they were smarter than simple farmers and had never done it.
- suzdude 7mo agoAnd how many hundreds of millions has capitalism killed? Considering American involved Wars: American Civil War, Vietnam War, First Gulf War, Iraq War, World War 2 Considering how many millions have died due to unrestrained capitalism destroying ecosystem, contaminating air, water, soil? Please do not pretend that capitalism does not promote nor allow the deaths of those who it is profitable to allow to die.
- kelseyfrog 7mo agoEvery death under socialism is attributed to socialism. Every death under capitalism is attributed to individual failing or inevitability. Please follow the rules.
- analognoise 7mo agoIt’s a very convenient set of rules, that allow us to place all the deaths into another column in our tabulation.
- busterarm 7mo agoSocialism's high death toll is the _direct_ result of the _implementation_ of socialist policies. No other form of governance shares this honor.
- tombert 7mo agoUmm, I would argue that Fascism shares that honor actually.
- busterarm 7mo agoYou mean the National Socialist party? Heh, no I don't think that Nazis were Socialists, but NSDAP certainly used socialist rhetoric to broaden the appeal of their party. In fact in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes the argument that Marxists merely hijacked Socialism and corrupted it. In any case, I don't want to entertain horseshit. It turns out that if a significant part of your political ideology is about elevating one group of people at the expense of another, mass starvation and mass murder is an inevitable consequence. The whole point about spotlighting catastrophically bad ideas is that hopefully nobody gets the stupid idea to try that shit again. Except here we are.
- blell 7mo agoThis but unironically. If it wasn’t for greed we would be in the caves still.
- pixl97 7mo agoIt turns out any kind of extremism is a problem.
- tazu 7mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 7mo agoWe've banned this account. HN is not the place for this kind of rhetoric, and looking down your comment history, there is a recurring pattern of this kind of comments that we can't allow to continue.
- skrrtww 7mo agoWhen I was 12, I watched a redneck in a pickup truck try to race the light rail downtown and cut across the road in front of it, only to get T-boned by the railcar against a nearby station. It was the middle of the day and the guy was definitely sober. People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently, and as a result I think are unfortunately immune to a lot of the subtle forces that generally help to improve safety in other civilized societies.
- jibal 7mo agoPeople? You mentioned one person (who won a Darwin Award--hopefully he hadn't already bred). P.S. As for the absurd response, the assertion was > People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently and a handwaving reference to an intercity train system from someone who can't even be bothered to make any sort of argument does not establish the point.
- SauntSolaire 7mo agoLook up the brightline rail system in Florida if you want a lot more examples.
- jasonfrost 7mo agoAsk yourself if calling him a redneck offers your story anything or if you're just using it as a slur
- autoexec 7mo agoI don't doubt that US voters won't want to limit speeds to 18mph and fill our roads with speed cameras to enforce it. I'm guessing that if average commute time in Helsinki was anywhere near what it is in the US they'd probably want to get to their destinations a little faster. We could probably get away with it if we also redesigned every city and suburb and invested massive amounts of money into public transportation to get something comparable and after all of that I'm sure that many people would probably be happy with what we ended up with, but the disruption of every person's lives in the process would be extremely painful. We're better off focusing on making sure that new developments are better designed than bulldozing over people's homes and businesses in order to redesign everything we already have.