this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
1680 points (100.0% liked)
Leopards Ate My Face
6395 readers
38 users here now
Rules:
- If you don't already have some understanding of what this is, try reading this post. Off-topic posts will be removed.
- Please use a high-quality source to explain why your post fits if you think it might not be common knowledge and isn't explained within the post itself.
- Links to articles should be high-quality sources – for example, not the Daily Mail, the New York Post, Newsweek, etc. For a rough idea, check out this list. If it's marked in red, it probably isn't allowed; if it's yellow, exercise caution.
- The mods are fallible; if you've been banned or had a comment removed, you're encouraged to appeal it.
- For accessibility reasons, an image of text must either have alt text or a transcription in the comments.
- All Lemmy.World Terms of Service apply.
Also feel free to check out [email protected] (also active).
Icon credit C. Brück on Wikimedia Commons.
_portrait.jpg){kind=link}
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not that simple and presenting it as such is disingenuous. Your fellow employee asked an important question, why cant we produce our own stuff? Relying on a frienemy to manufacture what your country needs to function is an extreme oversight of national security. Europe is experiencing that lesson as we speak.
I don't disagree with your point but I think this argument could have been more compelling. The way you've phrase it here almost makes these tariffs sound good to a socialist and we don't want to accidentally push people to the other side. Basically, your intentions are great but execution could have been just a hair better if you don't mind a bit of pedantry from someone who has studied debate for a few years:
A lot of us want to be producing everything we need and giving away/trading what we can. That sounds ideal. We need to be certain how how we do it though. Tariffs are a bandaid to a bigger, more systematic issue. We need to build up the infrastructure required to take care of our people, create the systems to ensure our people are taken care, and export every bit of excess. We also need to make sure people don't say they're going to do that (Like the orange and the melon did) and then turn around and do the opposite (like the orange and the melon did).
If you'd like, I can give you a some more specific pointers on what to say to be more effective as well (bring solutions along with problems)
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
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"
I can't say for sure how much indoctrination has happened, but I remember hearing "isolationism" as a sort of bogeyman in history classes. So there's at least that for some people
You don't have to trust the education system. Pay attention to the words that media outlets use to scare people. Use those words against the enemies, because that's what scares them