Every ISP I've seen that blocked port 25 did allow traffic to third party servers on 465 and 587.
Which "third party" servers do you recommend I use? Yours? For your proposal to be usable, I'd need to pay for a separate outgoing e-mail service — which RCN is supposed to provide already. And they do — except it is subtly broken...
Why are you so hung up on sending via unsecured SMTP?
What does "unsecured" have to do with this?
I've already explained the problem — twice — in this thread. If it still remains unclear to you, then you aren't fit to discuss it, frankly... Run along.
It is. Hence my raising awareness here in the hope, someone working for the RCN will read it and get sufficiently ashamed for the healing to begin...
Set up a MTA at another hosting service as a relay?
Well, yes, but that'd cost extra money... And not trivial money, because cheapo hosting providers have been abused by spammers long enough for their entire netblocks to now be blacklisted.
Last I spoke to them, RCN were willing to lift the port-25 restriction for me, but I'd need to get a static IP from them first — not a cheap option either...
Your first link times out, and the second is completely irrelevant — it talks of income inequality, rather than of rewarding the "not caring" for others. Fail
I don't have to demonstrate it. Many peer reviewed papers have already demonstrated it.
There is, I'm sure, a special place in Hell for people claiming there being "many" papers/articles supporting their point without citing any.
In fact, we reward the most sociopathic with the greatest rewards.
You keep calling them "sociopathic" despite my demonstrating already, that the term does no apply... Seems like you are suffering from certain pathologies yourself.
Just look at the fallout from the 2008 financial collapse. The only people that made out were the ones that caused the collapse.
I take it from your scare quotes that you strongly disagree
I do not. As I wrote at least twice, I don't know, what the truth is. Whatever my personal opinion, what I noted is that the two ideas:
Gays are born that way.
Sexuality is a social construct.
are mutually-exclusive. And yet, the same people tend to argue for both of them depending on the talking point du jour.
Perhaps you should read about some socially different societies, such as ancient Greece. The whole rather rigid spilt between "gay" and "straight" is a rather modern invention.
I have and you are wrong. Ancient Romans and Greeks both tended to ridicule homosexuals. Though a young boy had to be watched on the streets of Athens similarly to a young girl, men who were only interested in boys weren't deemed normal. One evidence of that is the praise the Macedonians lavished on their vanquished homosexual foes:
Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly.
Obviously, the idea that homosexuality is "unseemly", was alive and well in 4th century B.C. and is thus anything but "recent". It is likewise obvious, that the military unit in question consisted of homosexual men — ones "rigidly" defined as such.
3 centuries later Julius Caesar was ridiculed by political enemies for "being the husband of all wives and wife to all husbands" (emphasis mine)...
It seems clear, that your own classical education is rather selective...
We're talking about the post-Capitalist United States.
Despite the declines, contemporary United States is still reasonably well-governed.
Here's your evidence
The evidence you cited is that rich people don't care about others:
But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.
and
Rich People Just Care Less... Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.
However unpleasant the traits, that's not sociopathic... There is simply no pathology there...
And then you still need to demonstrate, that our society is particularly rewarding of such attitudes — a claim you made without substantiation earlier. And that we'd be better off electing the compassionate poor to run our affairs — despite their demonstrated inability to manage their own.
But I do agree, that control of government is dangerous. My solution to that is to limit the government's power to the bare-bone things, that can not be done outside of it: defense of borders and fighting crime. The fewer benefits there can be derived from being a politician, the lesser the danger of crooks running for and winning an office.
I don't think, you understood the conundrum I described. Using a port different from 25 for delivering mail works only with cooperating servers. I can, for example, do it to exchange mail between servers under my own control.
But this does not help send outgoing e-mail to the rest of the world — one must relay through RCN's own servers. Which are, unfortunately, subtly misconfigured...
It's not "automatically" a bad thing. It has just worked out that way.
Has it? Citations needed.
And, our society rewards people with lots of money for being sociopaths
People with money are "rewarded" in any (cash-using) society. A reasonably well-governed society rewards people for doing something other people want — not for being sociopaths.
I bet you can see how that might lead to problems if they gain political power.
A sociopath getting political power is a problem whether or not he has money. You haven't convinced me, rich people are disproportionally sociopathic. You did imply it, but offered no evidence.
why are you using your ISP's email in the first place
For some of us there is no choice. Although I host my own mail on my own server, RCN, for example, blocks outgoing e-mail (port 25), so I must relay through their servers.
And they are so zealous, the FreeBSD's daily (well, nightly rather) reports are regularly misclassified as "spam". After enough of such emails get "detected" for an account, RCN prevents any further e-mails until I call tech-support and go through the idiotic suggestions, that I "run an anti-virus software on my PC". Happens about twice a year...
Trying to email a miscategorized e-mail to RCN techs does not work either — obviously, and for the same reason. I once succeeded in getting a "supervisor" to download an example from my web-server and she even opened a ticket internally... Well, it is still open and the problem still exists.
The proposals boil down to supporting politicians with tax money.
A wet dream of Statists, this would a) force people disapproving of a candidate to support him anyway via the kind and gentle power of the IRS; b) open up wonderful opportunities for corruption and fraud among people deciding, whether a candidate has fulfilled the necessary requirements for receiving tax-money.
Can we, please, stop pushing this crap on Slashdot? Seriously...
Mayday PAC should support Bernie Sanders. He is very specifically for reform and even said if he wins the presidency he would require any potential supreme court nominee to be someone who openly wants to overturn Citizen's United.
Yes, nothing like an attempt to limit speech to win the votes for a Socialist politicians...
Money is speech. Any attempts to limit donations — or to ban anonymous ones — is tantamount to limiting speech or mandating, the speaker always identifies himself.
Whether donation is by a corporation, a labor union, or a person, it is still speech — if I can not donate $5000 to a candidate, then I shall not be allowed to talk on his behalf for more than 500 hours. And vice versa: if you can spend three months (roughly 500 work-hours) canvassing and otherwise promoting your candidate, then I must be allowed to donate the equivalent sum to mine. Allexisting limits are unconstitutional and must be abolished the soonest.
Yes, this means, that people with more money will have an advantage. No, I don't see, how this is automatically a bad thing.
Apple did not have the right to make that decision for the artists. If Amazon started to give away sellers' items for free for a while and not reimburse those sellers, they'd be pissed, and rightly so.
This is the crucial point in a discussion on this matter. Usually someone will noisily object — and be promptly moderated up — on the ground that physical items (such as those sold by Amazon's sellers) are different from the intangible ones (because the artists did retain their own copies of each song, didn't they?).
Though I agree, that the distinction is without difference, the majority of Slashdot — judging by consistentmoderation over the years — disagrees. Unless it is Apple, evidently.
This is the unfortunate incoherence I was lamenting. Your response — and the high moderation it received — further exemplifies the problem...
Because many people are in prison for non-violent offences.
First of all, like the GP above, you are making statements without citing evidence.
Second, "non-violent" does not mean anything — Mr. Madoff, however non-violent, is far more deserving of prison time, than some guy involved in a (violent) bar brawl, for example. That Madoff's will die in prison, while a brawler is unlikely to spend more than a few weeks in the lock-up, seems perfectly fine to me. In addition to embezzlers, other examples of (usually) non-violent crimes are drug-dealers and pedophiles — just to name a few.
The companies which make money from prisons, and the unions along side them
As I noted already, people and corporations profit from running prisons everywhere in the world — including countries much further down the list of incarcerations per-capita.
a sizeable portion are there for absolutely no good reason
Repeating this statement over and over again without citing statistics does not substantiate it.
I specifically asked for substantiation — why is the high rate of incarceration automatically deemed bad, rather than, for example, as proof of good work by our legal system. Your response makes the same unsubstantiated assertions without adding any clarity... Fail.
The information wants to be free, and the artists aren't any worse off for having their tunes downloadable by millions of people — they still have their own copies, so no theft has occurred, right? Right?
Intellectual property — as I read on this very site — is an artificial and oppressive construct and must be resisted!
I dare you to come up with a coherent explanation of why pirating music (or duplicating patented designs, whatever) is Ok for some people and corporations, but not for Apple...
You are wrong, the words "well and sincerely" are never mentioned anywhere in that blog post
This is stupid — the blog post does not quote precisely from any Scripture either — it offers no verbatim quotations, but paraphrases them.
The depth and sincerity of one's faith is always implied by various religious teachings as a precondition for achieving whatever enlightenment/salvation/nirvana the religion is offering.
Stereotypes exists because they reflect natural gender differences. Yes, boys and girls are different. All research show this.
"Research" means nothing to the folks, who confuse the Universe that is with the Universe that should be. And, unlike the former, the latter is malleable and subject to change without notice.
Remember the denunciations — both passionately angry and "scientific" — of people, who suggested, "homosexuality is a choice", for example? We were repeatedly told both in print and in schools, that "gays are born that way" and thus it is both stupid and cruel to blame them for their lifestyle.
And maybe it is — I do not know. But the The Current Truth is changing. And, unlike Ben Carson, nobody yells at Miley Cirus for "adopting a more fluid label to her sexuality". Sexuality, you see, is a "social construct" now (and since 2004!) — and whatever a human actually feels is simply a reflection of "stereotyping" to be broken, and "peer pressure" to be resisted. With pride.
Whichever is true, both can not be true at the same time, but the conflict of these two ideas does not bother their proponents whatsoever, such logical rational beings they are. "Research" my tail...
Nothing needs to do anything, but it's pretty clear that [slashdot.org] all significant religions do make falsifiable statements.
The journal-entry you linked to purports to list such falsifiable statements, but fails. The examples boil down to "if you do this well and sincerely, your life will improve". That's not falsifiable, because the "well and sincerely" part is too vague — you must not have followed the eight-fold path properly or your faith was not sufficiently deep causing you to die from poison, etc.
A church almost by definition cannot be truly pro-science.
It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak. It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
do not readily accept questioning of that faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence
The Lord's ways are neither known, nor even knowable — in the very principle, there can be no "evidence" supporting nor denying His existence and power. Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements. Some ancient bishop is on record with the famous "Credo quia absurdum" — whether the sentiment is beautiful or stupid in your opinion, it is decidedly not scientific, nor purports to be.
I think science and faith of the sort espoused by organized religion are irreconcilable to one another.
True that — in the way "yellow" is irreconcilable with "soft". The two are from completely orthogonal domains.
The interesting bit here — and what the down-modded OP was, probably, hinting at, is that "Climate Science" is, in fact, a religion now. Unable to come up with any materialized predictions, and all of their falsifiable statements ending up getting falsified indeed, the proponents of the idea, that humanity is guilty and must right its ways or be punished (with extinction) sound more and more like the preachers and less like scientists.
What "corruption and abuse"? Do you have citations?
the collusion between the prison industry, the unions, and the police
Police and prison guards are unionized everywhere — including countries much further down your list...
Per capita, America imprisons far more than other countries
You seem to imply, the higher incarceration rate is automatically bad — without offering any evidence or even arguments to support the implication.
Maybe, our police are just more effective at catching the criminals? Or, perhaps, our lifestyle gives more opportunities to screw-up — such as by stealing from a house left unlocked?
Note, that I don't know, why we lock so many people up, but if you want to claim, that it is some sort of "conspiracy" — I'd like to hear some arguments and see supporting numbers/statistics...
politicians promising to "get tough on crime" [...] Please vote for someone else
Why? Is crime too low in your opinion? Are there too many innocent behind bars?
Why not? Given this site's usual attitude towards hackers/crackers (like Mr. Mitnick, et al), I expected calls for the two escapees being offered a job securing prisons nation- and even world-wide.
Maybe, Slashdot still has enough intellectual capacity left to distinguish between murderers and pranksters... That'd be as reassuring as it is optimistic, though.
There is no difference. Communism is simply the "platonic ideal" of Socialism — that's what I was told every week in school for ten years, while growing up in the USSR.
capitalism [...] can be just as brutal as Communism if under a dictatorship
No, it can not be. Nowhere close. You are, obviously, hinting at Pinochet — just compare his death toll with that of Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile today's Chile is Latin America's TOP economy — thanks to Capitalism.
"Socialize" certainly sounds much nicer than "confiscate"... And it does not matter, whether you are confiscating the already existing cables from the companies (Verizon, Google, Comcast), that laid them, or the taxpayers' monies to lay them anew — by the same unionized public employees, of course, who require 5 workers to change a light bulb.
You need a citation for the value, to everyone including business, of public highways and streets?
Roads are useful, but they don't have to be government-owned. If Japan, which received Capitalism from us at the point of McArthur's guns, can have privately-owned railways and competing subway lines (ever been to Tokyo?), why can't we?
You said socialism failed and I gave you an example of where it had been an amazing success.
No, you haven't. Your examples aren't valid — you didn't identify comparable countries with and without Socialism nor demonstrated, how Capitalism causes people to die from whooping cough.
The Socialism's grotesque failure is obvious, when such examples are identified and, indeed, compared:
South Korea vs. the North;
West Germany vs. the East;
Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia vs. Finland
In all three examples above, the formerly identical peoples — with the same ethnicity, culture, religion, wealth — lived for several decades under Capitalism and Socialism. The results are screamingly obvious...
Do you think, Linux would've been written, had Finland become the 16th part of the USSR in 1939, when Stalin invaded the little Baltic countries? Would you ever even have heard of Nokia or Samsung, had your dear Socialism prevailed?
Socialism — a.k.a. "Communism-lite" — is the most murderous school of thought known to humanity so far. Even Hitler's peculiarly bloody strand of Fascism (a different side of the same Collectivist coin) is but a distant second. And what did the survivors get? Much lower standard of living and absence of human rights.
The latter is by design — once the Glorious Collective is deemed to trump the lowly, selfish, and cantankerous Individual (for the Greater Good), all sorts of things become possible — from taxing one's work to console another's idleness (such as. Welfare programs), to arbitrary business regulations (such as monopoly "licenses" for various services — just to bring us back on-topic), to others deciding one's maximum acceptable age, to the outright killing fields for the non-conforming. It is only a matter of degree.
Slashdot Mirror
Which "third party" servers do you recommend I use? Yours? For your proposal to be usable, I'd need to pay for a separate outgoing e-mail service — which RCN is supposed to provide already. And they do — except it is subtly broken...
What does "unsecured" have to do with this?
I've already explained the problem — twice — in this thread. If it still remains unclear to you, then you aren't fit to discuss it, frankly... Run along.
It is. Hence my raising awareness here in the hope, someone working for the RCN will read it and get sufficiently ashamed for the healing to begin...
Well, yes, but that'd cost extra money... And not trivial money, because cheapo hosting providers have been abused by spammers long enough for their entire netblocks to now be blacklisted.
Last I spoke to them, RCN were willing to lift the port-25 restriction for me, but I'd need to get a static IP from them first — not a cheap option either...
Your first link times out, and the second is completely irrelevant — it talks of income inequality, rather than of rewarding the "not caring" for others. Fail
There is, I'm sure, a special place in Hell for people claiming there being "many" papers/articles supporting their point without citing any.
You keep calling them "sociopathic" despite my demonstrating already, that the term does no apply... Seems like you are suffering from certain pathologies yourself.
The people that caused the collapse were the Democratic lawmakers, who pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into making it easier for people to take out loans they could not afford . The assholes didn't get any exceptional reward for their efforts and a more charitable person than myself may even claim, that they weren't assholes at all, but acted out of sheer (stupid) compassion towards the poor...
I do not. As I wrote at least twice, I don't know, what the truth is. Whatever my personal opinion, what I noted is that the two ideas:
are mutually-exclusive. And yet, the same people tend to argue for both of them depending on the talking point du jour.
I have and you are wrong. Ancient Romans and Greeks both tended to ridicule homosexuals. Though a young boy had to be watched on the streets of Athens similarly to a young girl, men who were only interested in boys weren't deemed normal. One evidence of that is the praise the Macedonians lavished on their vanquished homosexual foes:
Obviously, the idea that homosexuality is "unseemly", was alive and well in 4th century B.C. and is thus anything but "recent". It is likewise obvious, that the military unit in question consisted of homosexual men — ones "rigidly" defined as such.
3 centuries later Julius Caesar was ridiculed by political enemies for "being the husband of all wives and wife to all husbands" (emphasis mine)...
It seems clear, that your own classical education is rather selective...
Fail.
Despite the declines, contemporary United States is still reasonably well-governed.
The evidence you cited is that rich people don't care about others:
and
However unpleasant the traits, that's not sociopathic... There is simply no pathology there...
And then you still need to demonstrate, that our society is particularly rewarding of such attitudes — a claim you made without substantiation earlier. And that we'd be better off electing the compassionate poor to run our affairs — despite their demonstrated inability to manage their own.
But I do agree, that control of government is dangerous. My solution to that is to limit the government's power to the bare-bone things, that can not be done outside of it: defense of borders and fighting crime. The fewer benefits there can be derived from being a politician, the lesser the danger of crooks running for and winning an office.
I don't think, you understood the conundrum I described. Using a port different from 25 for delivering mail works only with cooperating servers. I can, for example, do it to exchange mail between servers under my own control.
But this does not help send outgoing e-mail to the rest of the world — one must relay through RCN's own servers. Which are, unfortunately, subtly misconfigured...
Has it? Citations needed.
People with money are "rewarded" in any (cash-using) society. A reasonably well-governed society rewards people for doing something other people want — not for being sociopaths.
A sociopath getting political power is a problem whether or not he has money. You haven't convinced me, rich people are disproportionally sociopathic. You did imply it, but offered no evidence.
Fail.
For some of us there is no choice. Although I host my own mail on my own server, RCN, for example, blocks outgoing e-mail (port 25), so I must relay through their servers.
And they are so zealous, the FreeBSD's daily (well, nightly rather) reports are regularly misclassified as "spam". After enough of such emails get "detected" for an account, RCN prevents any further e-mails until I call tech-support and go through the idiotic suggestions, that I "run an anti-virus software on my PC". Happens about twice a year...
Trying to email a miscategorized e-mail to RCN techs does not work either — obviously, and for the same reason. I once succeeded in getting a "supervisor" to download an example from my web-server and she even opened a ticket internally... Well, it is still open and the problem still exists.
The proposals boil down to supporting politicians with tax money.
A wet dream of Statists, this would a) force people disapproving of a candidate to support him anyway via the kind and gentle power of the IRS; b) open up wonderful opportunities for corruption and fraud among people deciding, whether a candidate has fulfilled the necessary requirements for receiving tax-money.
Can we, please, stop pushing this crap on Slashdot? Seriously...
Yes, nothing like an attempt to limit speech to win the votes for a Socialist politicians...
Money is speech. Any attempts to limit donations — or to ban anonymous ones — is tantamount to limiting speech or mandating, the speaker always identifies himself.
Whether donation is by a corporation, a labor union, or a person, it is still speech — if I can not donate $5000 to a candidate, then I shall not be allowed to talk on his behalf for more than 500 hours. And vice versa: if you can spend three months (roughly 500 work-hours) canvassing and otherwise promoting your candidate, then I must be allowed to donate the equivalent sum to mine. All existing limits are unconstitutional and must be abolished the soonest.
Yes, this means, that people with more money will have an advantage. No, I don't see, how this is automatically a bad thing.
This is the crucial point in a discussion on this matter. Usually someone will noisily object — and be promptly moderated up — on the ground that physical items (such as those sold by Amazon's sellers) are different from the intangible ones (because the artists did retain their own copies of each song, didn't they?).
Though I agree, that the distinction is without difference, the majority of Slashdot — judging by consistent moderation over the years — disagrees. Unless it is Apple, evidently.
This is the unfortunate incoherence I was lamenting. Your response — and the high moderation it received — further exemplifies the problem...
First of all, like the GP above, you are making statements without citing evidence.
Second, "non-violent" does not mean anything — Mr. Madoff, however non-violent, is far more deserving of prison time, than some guy involved in a (violent) bar brawl, for example. That Madoff's will die in prison, while a brawler is unlikely to spend more than a few weeks in the lock-up, seems perfectly fine to me. In addition to embezzlers, other examples of (usually) non-violent crimes are drug-dealers and pedophiles — just to name a few.
As I noted already, people and corporations profit from running prisons everywhere in the world — including countries much further down the list of incarcerations per-capita.
Repeating this statement over and over again without citing statistics does not substantiate it.
I specifically asked for substantiation — why is the high rate of incarceration automatically deemed bad, rather than, for example, as proof of good work by our legal system. Your response makes the same unsubstantiated assertions without adding any clarity... Fail.
The information wants to be free, and the artists aren't any worse off for having their tunes downloadable by millions of people — they still have their own copies, so no theft has occurred, right? Right?
Intellectual property — as I read on this very site — is an artificial and oppressive construct and must be resisted!
Troll my foot — do try to reconcile Slashdot's usual attitude towards rights of intellectual property owners with the celebratory attitude in reaction to TFA.
I dare you to come up with a coherent explanation of why pirating music (or duplicating patented designs, whatever) is Ok for some people and corporations, but not for Apple...
This is stupid — the blog post does not quote precisely from any Scripture either — it offers no verbatim quotations, but paraphrases them.
The depth and sincerity of one's faith is always implied by various religious teachings as a precondition for achieving whatever enlightenment/salvation/nirvana the religion is offering.
"Research" means nothing to the folks, who confuse the Universe that is with the Universe that should be. And, unlike the former, the latter is malleable and subject to change without notice.
Remember the denunciations — both passionately angry and "scientific" — of people, who suggested, "homosexuality is a choice", for example? We were repeatedly told both in print and in schools, that "gays are born that way" and thus it is both stupid and cruel to blame them for their lifestyle.
And maybe it is — I do not know. But the The Current Truth is changing. And, unlike Ben Carson, nobody yells at Miley Cirus for "adopting a more fluid label to her sexuality". Sexuality, you see, is a "social construct" now (and since 2004!) — and whatever a human actually feels is simply a reflection of "stereotyping" to be broken, and "peer pressure" to be resisted. With pride.
Whichever is true, both can not be true at the same time, but the conflict of these two ideas does not bother their proponents whatsoever, such logical rational beings they are. "Research" my tail...
Well, let's test this scientific theory of yours by asking for examples... Please, list such "intrusions"...
The laws and traditions deal with ethics and philosophy, not scientific discipline(s). I wonder, why you even brought these up.
Citations, please.
Citations, please.
The journal-entry you linked to purports to list such falsifiable statements, but fails. The examples boil down to "if you do this well and sincerely, your life will improve". That's not falsifiable, because the "well and sincerely" part is too vague — you must not have followed the eight-fold path properly or your faith was not sufficiently deep causing you to die from poison, etc.
It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak. It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
The Lord's ways are neither known, nor even knowable — in the very principle, there can be no "evidence" supporting nor denying His existence and power. Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements. Some ancient bishop is on record with the famous "Credo quia absurdum" — whether the sentiment is beautiful or stupid in your opinion, it is decidedly not scientific, nor purports to be.
True that — in the way "yellow" is irreconcilable with "soft". The two are from completely orthogonal domains.
The interesting bit here — and what the down-modded OP was, probably, hinting at, is that "Climate Science" is, in fact, a religion now. Unable to come up with any materialized predictions, and all of their falsifiable statements ending up getting falsified indeed, the proponents of the idea, that humanity is guilty and must right its ways or be punished (with extinction) sound more and more like the preachers and less like scientists.
What "corruption and abuse"? Do you have citations?
Police and prison guards are unionized everywhere — including countries much further down your list...
You seem to imply, the higher incarceration rate is automatically bad — without offering any evidence or even arguments to support the implication.
Maybe, our police are just more effective at catching the criminals? Or, perhaps, our lifestyle gives more opportunities to screw-up — such as by stealing from a house left unlocked?
Note, that I don't know, why we lock so many people up, but if you want to claim, that it is some sort of "conspiracy" — I'd like to hear some arguments and see supporting numbers/statistics...
Why? Is crime too low in your opinion? Are there too many innocent behind bars?
Why not? Given this site's usual attitude towards hackers/crackers (like Mr. Mitnick, et al), I expected calls for the two escapees being offered a job securing prisons nation- and even world-wide.
Maybe, Slashdot still has enough intellectual capacity left to distinguish between murderers and pranksters... That'd be as reassuring as it is optimistic, though.
There is no difference. Communism is simply the "platonic ideal" of Socialism — that's what I was told every week in school for ten years, while growing up in the USSR.
No, it can not be. Nowhere close. You are, obviously, hinting at Pinochet — just compare his death toll with that of Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile today's Chile is Latin America's TOP economy — thanks to Capitalism.
How about "because Venezuela"? Under the rule of Chavez — a guest of honor at "World Social Forum" — the murder rate quadrupled . You think, whooping cough prevention (even if it really did require Socialism) justifies that?
This statement is so infamously idiotic, entire articles have been written to debunk it. Fuck off, Commie.
"Socialize" certainly sounds much nicer than "confiscate"... And it does not matter, whether you are confiscating the already existing cables from the companies (Verizon, Google, Comcast), that laid them, or the taxpayers' monies to lay them anew — by the same unionized public employees, of course, who require 5 workers to change a light bulb.
Roads are useful, but they don't have to be government-owned. If Japan, which received Capitalism from us at the point of McArthur's guns, can have privately-owned railways and competing subway lines (ever been to Tokyo?), why can't we?
No, you haven't. Your examples aren't valid — you didn't identify comparable countries with and without Socialism nor demonstrated, how Capitalism causes people to die from whooping cough.
The Socialism's grotesque failure is obvious, when such examples are identified and, indeed, compared:
In all three examples above, the formerly identical peoples — with the same ethnicity, culture, religion, wealth — lived for several decades under Capitalism and Socialism. The results are screamingly obvious...
Do you think, Linux would've been written, had Finland become the 16th part of the USSR in 1939, when Stalin invaded the little Baltic countries? Would you ever even have heard of Nokia or Samsung, had your dear Socialism prevailed?
Socialism — a.k.a. "Communism-lite" — is the most murderous school of thought known to humanity so far. Even Hitler's peculiarly bloody strand of Fascism (a different side of the same Collectivist coin) is but a distant second. And what did the survivors get? Much lower standard of living and absence of human rights.
The latter is by design — once the Glorious Collective is deemed to trump the lowly, selfish, and cantankerous Individual (for the Greater Good), all sorts of things become possible — from taxing one's work to console another's idleness (such as. Welfare programs), to arbitrary business regulations (such as monopoly "licenses" for various services — just to bring us back on-topic), to others deciding one's maximum acceptable age, to the outright killing fields for the non-conforming. It is only a matter of degree.