What happened in the Soviet Union is more complex than that. I want to emphasize that I don't support the majority of actions of the Soviet government and virtually none of the Stalin government in particular, but it is important to understand how society got where they were.

First and foremost, it is wrong to think that absolute power in a few people is absolutely necessary in this system to work. The reason that the Soviet Union fell into an authoritarian dictatorship is a result of their attempt at rectifying the old system. A strong believe specifically in Marxist-Leninism is that the only way society can move onto true and free socialism is if first, the bourgeoisie is completely and utterly removed from existence. They believe that if anyone still has a semblance of capital based superiority, that capitalism will always have a ground on which it will rise again, no matter how good their society might become. This lead to the believe that, "for now", society needs to be led with an iron fist by idealists who know what's good for it. This obviously fails once anyone with the will to abuse this system gets into a position of such power. There was no plan to get rid of them, no clear mechanism that would enforce their path towards the dissolution of this authoritarian state as was promised and finally no way out of it.

Socialism doesn't need to mean that an authoritarian government owns everything forever. If that were the case, you'd effectively be no better than under capitalism, as all that has happened is that an elite above the worker class has taken control and the worker class is forced to accept it's role in their plan. Even in the Soviet Union, one of the most famous planned economies in history, it was meant to be a temporary state just to set up a stable system and then transfer it into local worker ownership.

What has been shown to work well is at the very least the concept of a cooperative ownership where the workers own companies collectively and benefit from the profits together. While they aren't incredibly widespread, they exist even in countries like the US. Most of them are found in the agricultural sector, but you even have examples of more widespread application of the concept in companies like Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain.

The specifics of where these should ultimately go would completely blow up this conversation and there are better people you can talk about it with than me (just don't try it on hexbear), but the point, in short, is that no, Socialism doesn't imply any of those points you mentioned, but yes, attempts and supposed attempts to instate it have ended in system supporting these things. That doesn't mean that they are intrinsic to Socialism though. There are many factors that play into why it has historically failed and it serves to note that a major part that has made the development of a socialist society near-impossible, even in a good willed system, is the extreme pushback this has received from countries that were capitalist and where the elite was afraid of losing their advantage.

I think the problem just comes from dissatisfaction with the government. If I lived in the US, I'd have my own gripes with paying taxes to be honest. Where I live I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, but not because I don't want to pay them, but because I feel like they could be used better.

The difference to me being that I feel like it's something that can be reasonably fixed here whereas people struggle with believing the same in the US. Then again, there's people who don't want to pay taxes even here, so I guess there's just a general phenomenon going on.

Part of it seems to also just be a lack of social cohesion. People feel so incredibly negative to the thought of their money going to someone they don't know personally because they don't imagine them as people to be empathetic for. I've got the advantage, if you want to call it that, to have lived in poverty, to have had health emergencies and to have required government assistance to help me achieve my goals. I've seen first hand why these systems are critical. It makes it a lot easier to feel like these taxes are going somewhere good.

Literally none of these are an implication of socialism.

Some of these, like taking away all food, are explicitly anti-socialist. Just because states that acted under the name of a socialist government did many of these things, that doesn't mean that they have anything to do with socialism. That's like acting as if the current Chinese government were actually socialist instead of being a capitalist oligarchy, or like the Soviet Union under Stalin was anything but a hyper-authoritarian quasi-fascist military regime.

Socialism is expressed in socialist policies in states in Europe too and while it certain somewhat increases the tax burden on society, it alleviates the grueling effects of wage slavery and lack of access to food, as well as in especially well developed cases, allowing for greater personal expression than can be true otherwise in capitalist settings.

Claiming that having to move only happens under authoritarian regimes, completely besides the point of whether or not that is relevant to socialism in general, is in complete disregard to the constant forces exhibited by uncontrolled capitalism, forcing people to move, eat whatever cheap crap they can get and, believe it or not, experiencing how loved ones and acquaintances disappear, not due to the government taking them, but due to the for-profit society grinding them down into addiction, depression and death.

Note that in no way I wish to support any military regime or other undemocratic government. But socialism is the policy of putting the government to work to support society, by having everyone partaking in society assist in supporting those that need it. What you listed is not representative of that ideal and only serves to show the degeneracy of the governments that did so in the name of socialism.

Your point specifically doesn't stand. Not the one you made in your comment. You're getting incredibly upset over being corrected when the correction was genuinely well meant and important to the discussion at hand. I'm sorry that this is something that angers you, but your hurt feelings don't change the fact that what I'm bringing up isn't pedantry but a correction on a misconception which is being propagated for political gain.

I know what events you're referencing and misrepresenting, yes.

The correction was entirely on point because the framing of this being an example of rampant inflation and thus a major governmental failure is misinformation propagated by the Republican party.

While it is certainly imaginable that the erratic pricing of eggs in particular could have been handled better by the Democratic government, it's entirely false to present it as just one example of a wide reaching problem as the price increase in this case is unique to this product. Inflation has been happening and is comparatively high, putting a lot of pressure on lower income households, but it is not effectively apocalyptic as it is presented here.

Your response is completely unwarranted as in no way was I even attacking or talking down to you.

Normality in some countries means little when it happens somewhere it's unexpected and people aren't used to it. Not only is acclimatization a thing, meaning that people who genuinely aren't used to these temperatures suffer more from them, it's also relevant how the local culture handles high temperatures.

Where it's normally very hot or very cold, infrastructure, daily routine and other culturally influenced elements provide for relief in some form. Texas suffered immensely under a cold period that other places in the world would consider utterly unremarkable, simply because it is utterly beyond what had been anticipated.

Telling people in those situations that something isn't that hot/cold is a bit callous.

Seems like it recognized the mod somehow being installed but, as it didn't go through the normal process, it never set a proper date of installation. Instead it must have defaulted to 0, which in Unix time is the begin of the Epoch, in 1970.

I didn't miss it, I just didn't search through your comment history to find your own arguments for you. Consider editing the actual top level comment if you want to use these arguments without retyping them.

You seem to be implying that fusion is a gimmick of an idea by comparing it to Hyperloop which was nothing but that.

Fusion is a mechanism which has been providing humanity with energy from the first moments in the form of the sun. It's a well known functional form of energy generation. The struggle isn't whether or not it could possibly work, but just to make it practical enough to make it work.

This isn't even necessarily about a single company promising that they have an idea that may work, this is an example of it functioning in some capacity.

Your comparison is simply arbitrary.

So that vision impaired people or people with whatever other impairment can enjoy the content. The text can be read out by a screen reader.

The claim that tensions between those holding power in the capitalist system and the growing communist forces caused the second world war is a pretty hot take as someone who grew up in Germany. Do you have sources on professional dissemination of the facts that arrives at this conclusion? I'm genuinely curious because I hadn't heard of that interpretation yet.

They weren't claiming that people had a habit for paying taxes in general but that because nothing else is a habit they lack the energy to do the things that other people already consider draining when they had to spend so much on things that come naturally and in a way for free to others.

I would argue that brushing your teeth certainly seems to be habitual for most people. It's something they'd do if they went through the bathroom routine in the morning while effectively still asleep. This person is saying that if they don't effectively stand in the bathroom and look at the brush and decide "I will now brush my teeth." they won't do it, where someone else had grabbed the brush while thinking about what they need to get done later in the day.

Depression on the other hand would more likely manifest in a disregard for the necessity of the activity. This person says they do brush their teeth, they want to brush their teeth and they are ready to spend their existing energy on it.

A depressed person often would not be convinced that it matters, nor that they could even make themselves do it if they felt like they had to. Though naturally depression is expressed in many ways, as is any type of neurodivergence. It's hard to put strong labels on these things. Nonetheless it seems sensible to differentiate on these things as most neurodivergence is simply a set of untypical phenomena and behaviour that have collected up enough to start becoming notable.

A person considered completely normal could suffer from the same but simply manage well enough for it to never stick out. No one is entirely normal.