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No true Scotsman fallacy

Are you saying that there's no distinction between local society and the entirety of the United States? That there's no concept of society at different levels?




Huh? This definitely has nothing to do to with the No True Scotsman fallacy. It’s closer to the sorites paradox, except that I’m not claiming that there’s a clean line that can be drawn between systems of common ownership broad enough to be called communism and systems of common ownership that are not. There can undoubtedly be grey areas in the middle where reasonable people can disagree. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be systems that clearly are communism and systems that clearly are not, and a small town that buys a grocery store is very clearly not communism by any remotely reasonable definition.


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Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, and please especially omit snarky swipes from your comments.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.


> not communism by any remotely reasonable definition.

> crudest imaginable definition of communism.

From the rules

> Please don't post shallow dismissals,

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

Why are you lurking in a comment chain nobody is going to see? You've already flagged the top level.

If someone is going to call me crude and unreasonable, I'm going to point out that they look illiterate.


Users who break the site guidelines tend to do it repeatedly until we ask them not to, so it's my job to ask them not to.


> You're saying this isn't communism because it's not at sufficient scale or depth.

No, communism simply isn’t an attribute that a small store has if it is owned by a local government. If 10,000 small town governments in the US start running their local grocery store that still has nothing to do with communism. Communism is an ideology and movement about establishing a society whose fundamental socioeconomic system is based on common ownership of production and distribution of goods and services.


You keep saying "this is not that, because this is not that" - which is fine and all, but it doesn't make it true.

Please keep telling us what communism is and is not. With how certain you seem to be, these comments will surely end up being cited by a PhD in politics and history


[flagged]


Please don't descend into flamewar, and please especially don't cross into personal attack.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.


Let me just point out that you think communism is an "attribute" that a shop could have, like OOP is your guiding philosophy for political structure. My gut tells me you aren't splitting hairs between, say, Marxism and positivism when you're spewing this shit from your mouth.

If the workers live in the town - which is highly likely - they can have (substantial, since the town is small) influence in city council.

City council manages the shop.

You could say, then, that the workers can have substantial influence over the management of this shop.

Note that this influence is much more direct than the worker -> shareholder line. Note that this influence is given as a matter of citizenship, rather than wealth.

Is this communism? Maybe not. After all, the goods that the workers stock aren't produced by them (after all, circles don't exist). Political and economic theory is far from solved. Again, if you think communism is an "attribute", I don't really want to engage in further discussion. Doubly so because of your latent assumption that the most widely used definition is the most correct one.


Just look at China. China is a communist country according to the billions of people living there. The word as evolved, but your biases haven't.

What does it take to establish an official definition of a word? An official dictionary, you, me? or billions of people living in a communist country?




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