As an European, I have never understood why so many American leftists don't see that, even by simply listening to what he is saying or looking at what he is doing. I mean he literally has a picture of Eugene Debs on his desk and mentions how he is this political role model and hero any chance he gets, that alone should tell you where he stands on an ideological or philosophical level..

And of course, he has been involved in various socialist groups his whole life and literally still calls himself a democratic socialist. Why would he do that if it wasn't true? To gain a political advantage, in America of all places, where calling yourself a socialist would have generally been political suicide?

And then are his policies, where many will focus on healthcare and say "he just wants healthcare" and ignore anything else. But of course, healthcare is a major issue because it makes the working class even more dependend on their employers because they lose tgeir healthcare if they get fired, so it makes sense for him to focus on tgat first. And of course, he also had other policy in his program, like transfering 20% of ownership over major corporations to their employees and having workers electing half of the board of directors.

You can call him a reformer, you can call his participation ineffective, but why deny his political believes?

He wasn't even a social democrat. At the time, social democrats were democratic socialists, the shift away from reformist socialism happened around the 80s (some social democratic parties still hang onto reformist socialism, at least in theory).

He was a smart liberal who realized that in order to save capitalism from collapsing again, some regulations are necessary. In Europe, similar policy was often pushed by social democrats, which sometimes leads to confusion. But actual social democrats at the time went (or at least wanted to go) further, like nationalization and socialization of major industry, worker representation at companies, and increasing worker and union power in general.

Social democrats stated endgoal was a socialist society. FDR's endgoal was to protect and maintain capitalism.

Edit: Also, Bernie is definitely a reformist socialist, I will never understand why people think otherwise. He literally mentions Eugen Debbs, one of the most influencial socialists in American history, as his role model and hero every chance he can.. And he praises the nordic model because the nordic model was literally pushed by reformist democratic socialists.. Here is Olaf Palme, one of the most important figures when it comes to the nordic model and prime minister of Sweden (until he was murdered), explaining why he is a democratic socialist:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7i2Ws1X5DSA

Just imagine a conservative politican, calling themselves a fascist, keeping a picture of Mussolini on their desk, saying he is their political role model. Would you claim that he isn't really a fascist? It's not even as if Bernie Sanders was dog whistling, he couldn't be any clearer about his believes.. Yet somehow, so many American leftists seem to sonehow doubt his intentions? Why? Because he isn't radical enough? Because he isn't throwing molotov coctails at the police? What does he have to gain from falsely calling himself a socialist??

The man's presidental campaign was giving 20% of major corporations to it's employees and having about half of the board of directors be elected by workers, among other stuff..

if you don't even want to acknowledge his values and his ideology simply because he is playing the politics game and is a reformist, send him to Europe, we would love a genuine leftist like him with so much charisma. I don't think you appreciate him..

Imagine dedicating your life to fight for a better life, involve yourself in the civil rights movement, work in various socialist groups, calling yourself a socialist and calling for major industry to be socialised, being constantly attacked by right wingers for your socialist believes, etc, only for fellow leftists denying that you are a "real socialist"..

Verstehe als Schweizer nicht ganz, wie genau das definiert wird. Ich dachte, "Linksextreme" wären Teile der radikalen Linken, welche Gewalt (ob gegen Sachen oder Menschen, defensiv oder offensiv) ausüben (bereits eine komische definition, aber naja).

Aber im Artikel steht, der Präsident vom Verfassungsschutz "gehe von rund 37.000 Menschen aus, von denen etwa 11.000 gewaltbereit seien". Also ist eine Mehrheit von "Linksextremen" gar nicht "gewaltbereit" laut Verfassungschutz? Woher wollen die das wissen? Und wer zählt alles denn als "Linksextrem"? Menschen, die das Kapitalistische Wirtschafssystem überwinden möchten? Dann wären ja alle Linken, oder zumindest die meisten, "Linksextrem". Selbst die Sozialdemorkatische Partei der Schweiz wäre dann ja, laut Ihrem Parteiprogram zumindest, "Linksextrem".. Und die ganzen Umweltaktivisten, welche einen "Systemwechsel" fordern, erst recht. Aber das ist ja auch nichts neues, also was genau hat sich denn geändert? Und wer sind denn genau die "zahlreichen Akteuren aus dem linksextremistischen Spektrum", zu welchen die Organisation angeblich Kontakte hat? Und natürlich geht es bei zivilem Ungehorsam darum, das Gesetz (vor allem sinnlose Gesetze) zu brechen.. Das ist ja der Sinn des ganzen.

Wirkt alles etwas willkürlich, oder sehe ich das falsch?

As far as I know this is standard at least in western Europe, I believe it is required by law, but it could also be defined in general contracts.

And it's not just for the employer, it's mostly for the worker since if you get fired, the employer needs a good reason (repeated or severe breach or contract) to immediately end the contract. So unless you fuck up severely, they still have to pay you for 3 months while you are looking for a job.

And in practice, most are aware that during this time period, they effectively can't really control you all that much. Sure, if you just don't show up for work at all or obviously breache the contract, they don't have to pay you, but otherwise, what are they gonna do, fire you?

In some jobs you can essentially get 3 additional months of paid vacation if they don't need you to teach the new guy or if they are scared that you could be a pain in the ass, so they just send you home while they pay you for 3 months.

Times are though, gotta bring home the bread somehow. It's your duty to click on the article and rage share it so that the economy doesn't collapse..

Well it's not bad in theory, it just runs like ass.. This version already runs 10 times faster than the real thing, sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on over at Microsoft.

You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you.

Many definitely do use it. But now that many have moved towards microsoft and/or google cloud services (mostly pushed by the private sector), people are indeed noticing that maybe, it's not the best idea for public institutions to be dependent on foreign corporations.

Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance.

Well because "cloud is the future" and hosting your own instances is not "cost effective".

For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.

Big tech companies have been fighting for the dependency of the private sector for decades. Even before the cloud, there was a dependency on windows, Microsoft office and exchange. Now big tech is selling the promise that "they will take care of everything, you don't need a ton of IT employees who administer everything, microsoft/google will take care of everything".

I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

So somebody would "start the browser" and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a "hacked version" of firefox..

If you seriously compare socialism with opensource then I’m sorry for you.

This is how big tech saw free software until quite recently. Microsoft used to call linux communist.

FOSS basically goes against the concept of private property of software and embraced common ownership of software. Without private property, there is no capitalism. I wouldn't call FOSS communism or socialism, but there are elements in it.

You wouldn’t have react.js without capitalism.

Ok, and what's your point? If you read Marx, one essential point he claims is that without capitalism, there cannot be socialism.

They could have used different library for js. one made totally by volunteers, but they haven’t. Why?

Probably because they saw no use in reinventing the wheel? And why should they?

It's as if you told a revolutionary during the French revolution "You used weapons that you looted from the Bastille, weapons that were produced by the king.". What exactly would be the argument here?

Yeah I'm not sure why it's nowadays common to simplify socialism as "workers owning the means of production". It's not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

A company being owned by it's employees is not necessarily "socialism". In today's global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don't orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

Traditionally, when socialists talk about "workers owning/seizing the means of production", they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

Workers means "the working class", which would be pretty much everyone ("the 99%"). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.

Completely agree, this whole entitled attitude about "we left reddit because censoreship hurr durr, now u do same thing, you have to do what we tell you" is really annoying..

Nobody is censoring you, you are free to join and visit whatever instances you want and watch their content.. You can even host your own instance where you federate with whoever you want, you have free access to the code.. But nobody is forced to host ANY content they don't want on the server THEY themselves pay for..

Duckduckgo as default. If I need location/region specific stuff, I will sometimes use google.