[ants_everywhere]

> I dislike any politics

TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political.

I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically.

But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content.

I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.

[tehjoker]

good, they should sprinkle socialist values in. what's the other option, passive acceptance of capitalist exploitation? people need to be educated.

[ants_everywhere]

You may want to do some basic background reading on what socialism actually is.

People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model.

Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure.

Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore.

But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.

[mrgoldenbrown]

>People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model...

Yes. This is what people in the US mean when they say socialism in general conversation. They don't mean pure Socialism as Marx talked about it. Similarly when people say the US is a democracy, we know they don't mean it's an actual pure Democracy where everyone votes on every issue.

[ants_everywhere]

Yes with the pedantic caveat that those aren't similar in the sense that one is a common confusion and the other is correct.

The Nordic model is the sort of economy and political structure that the 19th century socialists explicitly reacted against and rejected. It's a representation of mainstream liberal democratic theory not of socialism.

On the other hand democracy was always understood to be representative because you can't make every decision by plebiscite.

It has to do with being accurate rather than being "pure".

[TylerE]

Words evolve with time and usage. If someone said they were gonna send you a mail, would you expect an actual paper letter or an email?

[ants_everywhere]

These particular words haven't evolved in any meaningful way in the last century or so. If anything socialism now refers exclusively to revolutionary/militant utopian socialism whereas it had more varied meanings long ago. That's probably largely an artifact of the fact that socialism since the early 1900s has mainly been promoted by socialist countries after a revolution.

Go on a socialist forum and ask them what they think about markets or mixed economies. E.g.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/w03n2p/what_...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/19558...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/19ewm26/can_...

- https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+socialism+mixed+econo...

It's harder to search other socialist forums like the darknet ones, but you see the same patterns there

[tehjoker]

You talking to a member of the DSA buddy. I read about this shit all day. Also, whenever an american uses the word "authoritarian" it is extremely unclear what they mean, usually it means "bad" because they have no principled way to identifying democratic or undemocratic procedures. Most Americans have barely experienced any democracy in their lives at all, just voting every once in a while for canned choices.

[pastage]

> version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US

This oversells what China is. China is were government and oligarchy are in a strange symbiosis. Capitalism is worse in China in many ways. You are more free in China to exploit others on a large scale. H1B Visas seems to be an authorian idea to me and something that is heavily exploited in China.

What the US and China have in common is a strange kind of nationalism that I can not define, might be because I come from a smaller country.

[ants_everywhere]

You are maybe thinking of something called "Authoritarian Capitalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_capitalism

All socialist states have been functionally authoritarian oligarchies in practice. I'm unaware of an exception. Someone once claimed Yugoslavia was, but I'm not familiar enough with it to have an opinion.

It's also confusing because there's the notion of State Capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism#Maoists_and_a...) that I believe Marx also wrote about but I don't remember the details off hand. I think this may more or less be the same idea as authoritarian capitalism, but it's also what socialist regimes eventually look like when they realize they need to re-introduce markets to prevent economic collapse.

My take is that the idea of socialism, communism, and capitalism are deeply muddled in theory and even more muddled in practice. Muddled or not, we have people who consider themselves socialists and followers of Marx, their theory is incoherent, and in practice they try to spread violence and destroy any country they take over. We don't really have people clinging to capitalism in the same way, although some right wing factions in the US tried in the 70s during the cold war to make a capitalistic sort of political religion modeled after the success of socialism.

We'd be better off not having to deal with any of these concepts except for the fact that some people have a strong allegiance to these concepts and there's no changing that in the short term. To me it's a bit like when people killed each other over ideas like how to interpret the tripartite Christian God. Is the son a separate person or the same person, and how does the holy spirit fit in? You get an entire tree of ideas, most of which eventually became heresies punishable by death. None of them made any sense but that didn't stop it from being a motive historical force.