this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Good, because that's wrong, social democracy and regulated capitalism is not socialism.
Think about it: obviously I don't mean in relation to actual socialist countries today, but rather "fairly socialist" = more along the scale of socialism than the USA is currently. For instance even before there were 50 United States that joined together, the postal service allowed people to send mail to one another across vast distances of thousands of miles, from east to west coast and back again.
While today... well technically it still exists, but it's slower and less reliable than ever before, and conservatives are talking about dropping a lot of "last-mile" delivery options, in states such as Idaho where population density is much lower. This is funded by taxpayer dollars, where the government completely owns and operates the means of production of this enterprise (though capitalist alternatives such as FedEx also exist beside it). Or at least used to in the past, but this is becoming increasingly less so over time, in a variety of ways.
Or we could look at public schools, which especially with No Child Left Behind and the like, is beholden to capitalist interests that provide e.g. the standardized testing services that suck off the teat of taxpayer dollars, siphoning away much-needed funds for such things as food (nobody can learn who is hungry, most especially children - not that conservatives care about that, either the "learning", or taking care of living humans once we leave the womb, very much in direct opposition to the name of the program that I just said).
Back then, more American services were owned and operated by the government, as compared to today. So yeah, in relative terms, we were "fairly socialist" by our own internal metric. Moreover, my point was that we were so socialist (how socialist were we?:-) we were so socialist, that it rose to a degree that many Americans would consider to be outright shocking. If they could read that is (or rather, they can, they just won't).
Tl;Dr Words have meaning and the systemic attempt of liberalism and fascism to obfuscate the meaning of socialism out of fear of loss of privilege is irrelevant to what it actually means.
It would be extremely juvenile of either of us to presume that only purist extremes are allowed to exist, with literally nothing else capable of doing so i.e. in the middle.
However, irl is the precise opposite: there is absolutely nothing that exists that conforms to those particular purely theoretical terms - i.e. you cannot point to any irl so-called "socialist" nation that actually conforms to the pure theoretical principles of socialism, nor btw is the USA purely capitalist, and it is especially not purely a democracy either (yes we go through the farce of voting, but then regardless of who wins we do not get what we want - e.g. school shootings continue - and instead monied interests control all, a better term would be a plutocracy, though we are not "purely" that either).
If you didn't know, then now you do. While if you were trolling, please block me and move on. I know what I said, and I know what I meant, and those words you tried to put into my mouth are neither of those.