Words Matter

I’m starting to get annoyed with Republicans trying to redefine what Socialism is. Words fucking matter. I’m not a fan of Socialism, but I’m even less a fan of people trying to change what that term means simply to throw a negative label on something they don’t like. Socialism is state control of the means of production. Health insurance is a form of welfare. It is not Socialism. You know what’s socialist? Fire Departments, Police Departments, public schools, VA Hospitals, public transportation. Most of your weather forecasts come from the National Weather Service because the government is the only one that could afford to develop the science and pay to launch and maintain the satellites that are required. So that hurricane warning you get? That’s Socialism. Making sure a kid born with diabetes can get insulin when his single mother works 50 hrs a week at two part-time jobs and can still qualify for welfare because neither employer offers her health coverage or more than minimum wage even though they’re seeing record profits is NOT Socialism.

If it doesn’t involve the government nationalizing an industry to take over control of the means of production, it’s not Socialism. As an example, the US military – socialism. Blackwater – not socialism. PDVSA is the state-controlled oil production company of Venezuela. That’s socialism. BP doing a piss poor job of disaster planning and spilling a Venezuela’s worth of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and then doing just about fuck all to clean it up is not socialism. Both of those things are bad, but they are not both socialist. If there’s something you don’t like, it’s not automatically socialist. It might be stupid. It might be immoral. Or you might be stupid and immoral and incorrectly applying the term socialist to it.  To the best of my understanding, even AOC and her beer pong buddies aren’t advocating that we nationalize BP and Chevron.

And if you want to tell me that I’m quibbling over the definition of a word, that I’m missing the point in being so nitpicky, the point is that words fucking matter. I can prove it too. There’s a video of President Trump eating a bucket of fried chicken. I could say that President Trump likes eating fried chicken or I could say that Trump enjoys a mouthful of hot cock.