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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Hey, democratic socialist here, this does not sound good at all, nor does it sound remotely socialist to me.
That's because you're probably smart enough to hear what they're meaning and not take it at face value. Not everyone is, so we need to pick very careful words. Subsistence living is something that sounds nice to a lot of socialists, so we can't call our enemies policy subsistence living. We need to call it what it really is, isolationism. They didn't build the infrastructure required for subsistence living first
I've never seen subsistence living as a core belief of any large number of socialists. At least, no larger than the average amount of people in the general population that also find subsistence living to be a good idea.
Most socialists understand that many goods can't be fully produced by any one individual, and that we get a benefit from working together as a group. Hell, most of Socialist ideology revolves around groups of workers owning the means of production, and a government/society that shares resources between people to keep everyone as reasonably comfortable as possible.
The notion that subsistence living is something that more socialists would support than the average person isn't exactly something I've seen to be true in my personal experience. In fact, I see a lot more of that on the very much anti-socialist right, what with all the homesteading and "rugged independent man" stereotypes you'll see thrown about over there.
You're right, subsistence living in an individual level is impossible. There's a lot of Americans though, and they could do subsistence living if they worked together. Again, you and I aren't disagreeing. We just need to make sure to use the right words. Even if subsistence living isn't a commonly held thought, it's one with a more positive connotation than Isolationism. We should use words with negative connotations to describe negative bills
All right so you were just being pedantic.
Because my examples did not make it sound appealing lol
And I personally prefer to use neutral words, as folks have a lot of defense mechanisms toward words with negative connotations.
Meaning, they will just tune it out.
Yes, you're right. I'm being pedantic. I should have forewarned that, my bad.
And you're also right that people tend to tune out negative words. At first, sure. But, assuming you're American, I bet I could cause some cognitive dissonance in you if you I use the right ones. Isolationism isn't one of those yet, but in 30 years we need that word to sound the same as "Feudalism"