Defining socialism

[Poll #1860829]

Socialism poll

Since it's not convenient to do polls in two journals and most of my commenters are at livejournal, I put a poll about defining socialism over there

I meant to include a couple of videos about Israeli cats, but lj just wanted to post the poll, so here they are:

Cat interrupts Israeli basketball game.

Sand cats in Israeli zoo-- much cuter than political definitions.

ETA: Has anyone looked at the sand cats? They aren't just cuter than political definitions, they're cuter than just about anything.

Kickstarter to study socialism

It's titled How to Create a Liberal America, which I don't think is accurate, but it's raising money to do a detailed study of how strong-safety-net democracies actually raise and distribute money. Americans (whether they're for or against socialism) tend to get important aspects wrong.

The reason I don't think the title is accurate is that I doubt the book will have much about how to make changes in the author's preferred direction, but at least he's trying to supply some knowledge to leaven all the theory which tends to dominate political discussions.

ETA: It looks as though I got some details wrong. I'm not sure I can do an adequate job of summarizing, so I'm just quoting the comment from matgb:

Just to, y'know, clarify.

I am a liberal socialist. Tim is specifically and explicitly setting out to study liberalism in Sacndinavia, not socialism, you can be both, but his argument is those countries aren't.

He's, um, rather right wing for the tastes of a lot of liberals, let alone socialists-I get on with him fairly well, he helped me write a policy once, that the Govts actually bringing in, but he's definitely not a socialist, by any sane definition of what socialism is.