to anyone too lazy to watch the video:

he gets asked whether he’s a socialist. he says “idk what a socialist is but i support medical care for babies, sheltering homeless people, educating the population …”, he goes on for a minute, then the interviewer changes the topic and askes him “carl do you think that time travel is possible?”

They’ve just been brainwashed into thinking it just means authoritarianism.

Idk if I’d even call it “brainwashing” per say. A lot of it boils down to mass media exploiting ethnic and economic bigotries. Just stimulating the very human impulse to be afraid of other people - especially people who don’t look or speak or act like you. Then asserting that these Other People are trying to Take Over.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

For a lot of these core ideas, the very pitch-line for them is corrupted. Even removing the question of rich people having an edge, you have these core messages that only justify the status quo.

Democracy as a system of surveying the public mood and mapping policies is great. Democracy as a means of putting arbitrary lists of policies to a vote and then blithely executing the majoritarian opinion isn’t great. At some level, you have to recognize that “Two wolves and a sheep voting for dinner” isn’t going to end well for the minority, even if the proverbial Two Wolves are wearing different team jackets.

Similarly, Freedom v Tyranny is often couched within the (very deliberately mischaracterized) Ben Franklin quote “Those who value safety over liberty deserve neither”. But a better analysis might be “Freedom protects but does not bind, Tyranny binds but does not protect”. Because you need safety in order to be free. Freedom of choice is predicated on available choices not being harmful. All too often, policies that serve to protect the weakest members of society are pitched as somehow being tyrannical to the strongest, strictly because they prevent one group from bullying another.

Meritocracy is also larded up with an innate fondness for eugenics and other Social Darwinism. There’s this idea that a meritocratic society will subtly weed out the undesirables via a system that leaves no single individual culpable for social murder. “Hey, you’re homeless because you’re physically disabled or mentally ill? That’s not my fault, because I have proven myself to have merit and you clearly haven’t.” Again, even if we were rewarding hard work, we’d just be punishing the weak and promoting the strong in a Might Makes Right bureaucratic system.

So-called Innovation rewards growth at all costs. Exploitative change is championed purely on the basis that the “innovator” generates profit. Even as we do build things, we focus entirely on the upfront costs versus long-term revenues, without respect for the core function of the system or the long term sustainability of the project.

It’s just really hard to make the jump from having people agree with these things to realizing that the system itself is to blame

I think there is a general recognition that our economic system is broken. But time and again, we’re limited in the remedies we’re allowed to discuss by individuals invested in perpetuating fascist policies.

And when the contradictions of the system mount, we’re told that we must overlook them in order to defeat The Evil Outsiders - Russia, China, Mexico, Iran, Somalia… And that any effort to buck existing policies or curb fascist impulses is a tacit alliance with the Villainous Foreigners Who Want To Destroy Our Way of Life.

If this person doesn’t trust you, you probably can’t get deep-seated beliefs out of them.

If they trust you, you have to make the slowly nudge them towards making the conclusions themselves. Ask a lot of questions, talk about how reigning in the corporations rather than unshackling them would be better at ending corporatism, and over time move towards more fundamental questions.

The ability to persuade someone of a viewpoint depends on how many assumptions, previously arrived at conclusions, and morals you share.

How dare you. Haha.

Next thing they say, “and we want women and men contributing equally to our commune and have equal rights”

• “oh, so feminism?”

Feminism have suffered much of the same negative connotations, it’s ridiculous.

One million people died in soviet Gulags around the time of Nazi invasion. 25 million people died "altogether* in the USSR as a consequence of Nazi invasion.

Gulags weren’t particularly deadly, the whole country was because of fucking nazis

Dude, I’m not sure “ethnostate” isn’t some fucking used-car-lot buzzword like “the spend”, but I know Israel has done a lot of bad shit to everyone around them.

Maybe account for jargon?

I’m a socialist! I believe all the things that socialists believe. But with one tiny caveat…

I just think only people who serve a Nationalist interest should get Socialist benefits. I’m calling my philosophy National Socialism. Thinking about shortening it.

I don’t see anything in the socialist philosophy that precludes individuals in positions of leadership. And I certainly don’t see anything about excluding funds for capital improvements to the nation-state - or even the world as a whole.

The Soviets seemed to manage running a space program that routinely outpaced their American counterparts while still juggling tenants of socialist economics with a hierarchical leadership structure and significant investments in new productive output. That’s how they achieved Superpower Status in the midst of a World War while states like France, Japan, and Brazil languished for the rest of the century.

I’ll spot you that building a functional socialist system is difficult, especially when you’re battling hostile outside forces. Allende’s Cybersyn put a big fat nail through Mises’s Economic Calculation Problem shortly before Pinochet and his goons had the project terminated. We’ve had a parade of Iranian presidents attempt socialist internationalism across the Middle East, only to see their diplomats gunned down, blown up, and poisoned to death by the enemy intelligence services. Even when countries can move unfettered - as Raul Castro and Nicholas Maduro kinda-sorta did during the Obama administration - people regularly make mistakes and miscalculations, attempting to provide short term relief to an impoverished population at the expense of longer term economic development.

And then sometimes a system flat out fails - as pretty much the entire Warsaw Pact did during the 1990s - due to internal contradictions and external pressures.

Socialism isn’t infallible. Socialists aren’t immaculate. The experiment of Communism is ongoing, in the same way the experiment of American Liberalism and Saudi Monarchism and German Fascism continues apace. Part of the struggle is getting people to see enough merit in a blueprint to begin building. Nobody knows how to do anything until they try.