Jonathan Claybaugh

Nah, I hate the version of socialism that is explained to me by the socialists themselves. 1. They can't explain the most basic, core elements of how their economic system would actually function in a real-world setting. Their vision gets incredibly convoluted and foggy when you introduce anything beyond the purest form of industrial workplace co-ownership, like contracting temporary specialized labor. 2. Socialists handwave the obvious knock-on effects of their system, like lack of outside investment or fiduciary responsibility brutalizing a nation's ability to dynamically allocate resources or develop innovative technologies with large up-front costs and no guarantees of future profits. Oftentimes they will just end up re-inventing capitalism, but with extra steps, to solve these problems. 3. More often than not, socialist "ideas" or "policies" are just vague, meaningless truisms that literally anybody would agree with (everyone should be able to afford healthcare, housing, groceries etc.) while also claiming socialism is the only conceivable method of achieving these ends, despite zero real-world cases to support this claim (and countless cases to the contrary). 4. Socialists will openly own the fact that any "counter-revolutionaries" who don't buy into their ideology cannot be allowed to exist within their society and will either be forcibly re-educated, thrown in a gulag, or killed. They know their system can't even theoretically function in anything beyond a totalitarian, single-party state where adherence to their ideology is compulsary. Socialists have no real plans and no real solutions. Their ideology collapses under a feather's weight in scrutiny, and so they end up just avoiding any scrutiny at all, while forcefully encouraging their peers to do the same. Socialism/communism/leftism is nothing more than an idealistic aesthetic being sold to the politically illiterate, much like fascism. And, exactly like fascism, the ideology grants a false sense of moral superiority to those who buy into it, and anyone who falls short of total ideological alignment is viewed as a mortal enemy who must be destroyed at any cost to forward the mission. Of course, for most Americans who are warm on "socialism", their only concept of socialism is "free healthcare, reduced wealth disparity, cheaper housing" -- ideas that have nothing to do with socialism and which liberals in our capitalist society already unanimously support. They don't recognize they are being taken for fools by actual socialists who want to fundamentally restructure their society in the shittiest ways imaginable.