I hope the Moscone Center didn't have to ban all LGBTQ+ and/or 18+ events to get Visa to commit
NGram
joined 1 month ago
I don't. Personally I think it has led to more proxy wars, as the stability-instability paradox suggests. I think the amount of actual aggression went down after WWII, but has since recovered and surpassed pre-WWII levels. But now everyone is afraid of declaring war on nuclear powers, so they'll let the nuclear country get away with genocide or other atrocities instead. Look at Israel and Russia right now for easy examples. Seems like the winning strategy now is to convince your adversaries that you're crazy enough to launch your nukes and then you can do whatever you want without other countries taking a strong enough stance to stop you. That's not peace, that's nuclear intimidation. I don't even see a peaceful way out of it.
Technically free education and universal healthcare are more communist than socialist (as in, they achieve communal control/ownership over them instead of just social ownership). But broadly, communism is a form of socialism so...
And before anyone says that either of those examples aren't controlled/owned by the government, let me point out that having a monopoly on who pays for something is an awful lot of control over it. You even see this with (nongovernmental) health insurance; they exert a lot of control on what doctors do by saying what they will and won't pay for. Ownership is just the end game of control.