The problem with the "just search" approach is that it creates "dark corners", that is clusters of documents/images ignored by the search engine for whatever reason. I guess it could be addressed with some kind of "what I've been missing" query executed once in a while.
It may be a property of (not only of?) humans that we can generate specialized inner processes. The hardcoded ones stay, the emergent ones come and go. Intelligence itself might be the ability to breed new specialized mental processes on demand.
"deeply stratified class hierarchy" - you have no idea how it was in the Soviet Union, it was nothing short of a cast system. It was so normalized you can see it clearly in the movies of that period.
Is every attempt at socialism the same to you? Do you not see a meaningful difference between Laos and the Soviet Union? Or China and the Soviet Union?
Are all they same to you? The Soviets were as close to socialism as it gets. It WAS the socialism in its purest possible form. This is what you get when you take the ideal marxist socialism AND mix in the actual human nature.
See, to you these things are some abstract ideas, a beautiful theory. To me it is practice - this is what I lived in and lived by. So yes, I can tell the difference between SU and Laos. Laos has never been even close.
The official position was that China (along with Yugoslavia) wasn't truly socialist (they were referred as "opportunists" - google that), a kind of socialist-capitalist-feudalist hybrid. Vietnam, Laos, and DDR were considered developing semi-socialist. Romania, Bulgaria and to some extent Albania were the "true" socialists though.
The arguments were pretty solid. I think it was a fairly correct classification as it was based on who owned and managed the means of production. Only USSR, Romania and Bulgaria (and Albania) had a nearly total ban on private ownership.
Again, it wasn't about who was "better" or "purer" in some superficial sense, but there was a formal criterion: who owns the means of production.
So, if I put on my old soviet socialist hat, I would describe Laos as developing socialist semi-feudal state transitioning from the military communism phase to some opportunistic mixed capitalist form, kind of like NEP. In short, it's not a question whether it is socialism or not, but rather where it fall on the spectrum, and more importantly - in what direction it is developing.
Sorry, I'm not a webdev so I'm not sure how to check this - but how large is the final downloaded page? (HTML+JS) The inspector in Firefox says it's 20MB, which seems large. But maybe I'm looking at it wrong