This is my entire fucking point. Literally it's a "leftistgamermeme" page from instagram that posts misquoted scenes from games. It is a form of basic agitprop that plays on nostalgia for those who grew up or played these games. Not only is this the form of context you're missing, but i'll gladly continue.

None of this has yet justified the particular thing written.

Fuck no. The benefits that most veterans, despite what your "revisionist" ideals consist of is a plethora of government subsidies and benefits that you get. I don't know where the fuck this idea comes from that every baby-killer is some down-on-luck homeless veteran that lives in a fucking box. They and their children get free education, free healthcare. They get pensions, benefits; sure they suffer for it but that is one of the things they pay for in exchange for servicing the will of capital.

All of those benefits, all of those things can be offered to all of us and our government is capable of demonstrating that despite being capitalist under a socialist governance. Regardless of the fact that it should be destroyed.

You are decades out of touch on the state of VA bullshit if you think you can simply say they get free healthcare, but even if they got free healthcare they would still not have democratic control of the government and of the means of production and would still, on average, be in the underclass, which sort of undermines the pitch of what socialism is.

Except that's not at all what this saying. The context is the other posts and various content that the page has made. Soldiers are offered the benefits that would be offered to all the workers under a socialist governance but instead are offered those “socialist” benefits in exchange for service to enforcing the will of capital.

I think you just misread what I said here. My point is that, besides debt forgiveness (which I left out before, my bad), the various benefits are mostly relevant after someone has already served in the military, making it clumsy to say that they enable the soldier to be a soldier.

If your agitprop "meme" requires reference to other agitprop "memes" from your Instagram page, it might not be good agitprop or a good "meme", or else the way that you're presenting something out of context is doing a complete disservice to the project. That said, I don't think the other content on the page would especially change things here.

That isn’t wrong, it isn’t “incorrect” to say that it is “socialism” even if it isn’t scientifically accurate to the word or our niche/specific political definitions. This would matter more on say, my home-instance Lemmygrad then a left-unity board especially when a lot of newer folks are on here. Words can have multiple meanings and those inflections can shift based on the context they’re being used.

It seems to me to be the most important thing to have even basic heuristic definitions for socialism for newer people (though I don't think that many newer people are on HB, it's a very insular board). Something extremely basic like "economic democracy" is a much better framework to present people to not just generate confusion as to what you're even talking about.

"Government does stuff" has meaning based on the fucking context.

"Socialism is when the government does stuff" does have a meaning, in fact it has several, and the pertinent meaning that I was hoping to draw your attention to is that when you let socialism become a floating signifier or let it become slurred into some bullshit that we already have another word for, it gets in the way of people understanding socialism and even understanding capitalism! We should be helping people to understand rather than being weird intellectual tailists who pander to misconceptions that are literally the most core reason for people not understanding our position. It's literally one of the biggest problems for socialism in America (for example) that no one knows what the fuck it is, and even our "left" (like Bernie) seems intent on promoting confusion. We've seen over and over in spaces like antiwork that vague and overly-negatively-oriented "anti-capitalism" is a failure of ideological framing that is instantly just co-opted by liberals, but what framework do you even have for saying that such a thing is bad? If the liberals get more updoots to the left, then aren't they doing the work while we should sit our asses down and listen to their insight? People liking red flags is not productive if the flags don't mean anything, and in fact it is counter-productive because it muddles communication and gets in the way of education.

I half-remembered before, but now I actually remembered the breadtube comparison that I wanted, which was Contra going "[tankies] only want to critique power, rather than gain power". Congrats Contra, you gained power, or at least fame and riches, and you did it by avoiding leftist critique like the plague and being a slay queen neoliberal slimeball. Nothing gets better if you capitulate on ideological engagement while farming post engagement. You become unable to win any sort of victory for progressivism, and instead are just winning victories for your own career as a phrase-monger.