[deadairspace]

> You should never let your ideas become polluted by empirical evidence.

Maybe you should take a leaf out of your own book and revise what socialism actually is, and how the USSR wasn't that.

[mseebach]

No, it's not socialist, because the socialist nation is a utopia, and thus practically unreachable. The USSR (and DDR, Cuba, Zimbabwe, pre-Deng China and so on), however, is what you get when you make an attempt at reaching it.

[steveklabnik]

There are two major branches of socialism: utopian and scientific, actually.