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thomblake comments on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey - Less Wrong
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One problem with the political question: Socialism is not what they have in Scandinavia. That would be social democracy (technically a form of government that's supposed to evolve towards full socialism, but they don't seem to have done that). It's unclear what option one is supposed to choose to mean "What they have in Scandinavia" rather than actual socialism.
political words like "socialism" mean very different things in different places, so a description like "what they have in Scandinavia" is supposed to pin down the extension enough for you to work out the intension.
I don't know anyone in Denmark or the US who calls Scandinavian governments "socialist". Is that a common way to describe Scandinavian governments in some other country?
Usually the primary word I hear used to describe governments in Scandinavia is "socialist". See (from the front page of Google hits for the words Scandinavia and socialism):
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/business/worldbusiness/13iht-compete.html
http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/5616.aspx
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081016132725AAoGdNo
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2213173/posts
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/scandinavian-irony-socialism-meets-liberalization/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
In the US, I mostly hear the word "socialism" used as an umbrella term for any governmental economic redistribution.
Point taken. I will point out, though, that most of those links point out that socialism per se does not exist in Scandinavia, but rather democratic socialism/social democracy.
Here they are called "social democrats".
To me socialism is supposed to mean collective ownership of means of production (through cooperatives, government or any other mean), not "just" wealth distribution within a globally capitalist economy.
Put then, the "parti socialiste" in France is social-democrat, not wanting socialism...
Even when there is no will to make things actually fuzzy, words are sometimes treachery. When in a field like politics, they are abused from in various ways... and when you add cultural differences and lossy process like translation on top of all that... welcome to the joy of not understanding each other at all.
I guess that's what he put the details about what he meant for each word. We may not agree on the labels, but we understand from the description in which category we fit the best.