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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Yep, the definition of fascist to someone without the needed context is basically "where everyone listens to that one guy in a military uniform". Which is why you can end up with someone legitimately believing stalin was fascist.
When talking about the Nordic model or really any kind of socdem, I think it's always good to break down what they think is good about the model, and then provide examples of the harm it can or has done. At the end you can split the good and bad, pretty much universally the benefits align with the ideas borrowed from socialism, and the harm from where it's deviated away from socialism.
Teaching anything requires patience. You wouldn't become antagonistic to a person you are teaching because they challenge your knowledge or want to make their ideas and experience fit within the lesson. Sure it's frustrating, but that's education for ya.
I actually think that's one of the biggest hurdles to introducing new people to socialism that people engage with after reading a bunch of theory. Using language that the unaware have no context for not only distracts from the points you are trying to make, but it makes everything seem either as a way to elevate yourself, or worse like a cult that has developed its own speech patterns. Speak simply, keep it broad and understandable, give real world examples. You might pull some ADHD/autism with language from theory, but they were prob going to end up here on their own eventually anyways.
Agreed, I always say that if you can't explain your thought to a 5 year old in some form, then you don't actually understand the thought. Now obviously this isn't a hard and fast rule, there are concepts that would be impossible to fully explain to a 5 year old. But I find when it comes to theory, that most of these ideas can be explained to children very easily. If you use communist jargon, you should instantly define the term, otherwise you're just using fancy language to hide your own lack of knowledge and seem smart.
Yeah, over the years I think I've gotten pretty decent at breaking down complex ideas into more manageable portions.
Part of my job is to teach residents at my hospital, even with students who have somewhat acclimated to using a new diction you still get more mileage by explaining things to them like they were five. Sometimes it helps actual knowledge and experience connect to some terminology they may have learned by rote.
Yeah, it's actually spreading information instead of ego boosting. I was really bad about it when I was in middle school, I was smart but I'd always purposefully go over people's heads to feed into the superiority complex I had at the time. Eventually I got over that and became a lot more humble, surprisingly by doing debate in high school. Also trained out a speech impediment in that class, it was cool
I always try and remind people that the very base of socialism is cooperation and community. I know a lot of people understandably get some joy from dunking on the libs, but every time that happens it pushes that person to entrench themselves in their own misbeliefs. We're not going to have any sort of successful revolution by erecting barred gates and denying access to people we think are irredeemable because they weren't exposed to the right information at the same age we were.
I also benefitted from taking debate in highschool, I did policy for about three years and then a few years in college. I think it helps your brain develop more plasticity. You kind of have to be able to really be empathetic to the other side's stance to be able to successfully argue against it.
When I was younger I was really into dunk culture. For me, that came with a superiority complex. It feels nice, but ultimately isn't good for the movement or even the person making the dunk in the long term
Yeah I also did policy debate, I was about to comment on it being a funny coincidence, but then I remembered that K debate exists so there's a pretty defined pipeline from policy debate to being a leftist. I actually ran the Mao K if that was a thing when you did it. I graduated in 2019 so that might be a policy meme of my time in debate
I'm quite a bit older than you, I graduated in the early 00s, people ran left leaning Kritiks, but I don't remember a specific one being centered around Mao being very popular at the time. I used to run a black flag based K, which was surprisingly effective, mainly because no one carried a lot of evidence to counter it.
Yeah that makes sense. My era of policy debate had a lot of hard leftists in it, maybe it's a response to the fact the city I live in is libertarian central so a lot of the basis of leftism are there in our population.
The Mao K was based on the famous "No investigation no right to speak" speech. Honestly, it's probably the most on point and effective K I've ever read. I started running it as a joke, but the more I read it over the more I realized Mao was 100 percent correct. Same thing with my spreading K, I started running it because I have a stutter and couldn't counter spreading any other way, but then I realized that spreading in policy debate was actually 100 percent albeist and I was right. What's the Black Flag K? Never heard of that
The most successful debators in my mostly rural state were very obvious leftists. They only made arguments they believed in regardless of what side they were on, they didn't wear suits, they wore hoodies and sweatpants, they ran Ks on rural lay judges and managed to win all the time. They were the prime example of "you don't understand something if you can't explain it to a 5 year old". They didn't use any jargon, everything was easily understandable by someone who had never read any theory in their entire life.
Haha, same. When I was in college Ron Paul was running for president and our state is basically the buckle of the Bible belt. There were definitely more leftist representation in debate than anywhere else, but we were still a small minority.
Yeah, that would have been tough to overcome. I remember kids sticking pencils in their mouths while practicing reading to try and up their speed and annunciation.
One of my policy partners was a really tall and kinda creepy looking guy who was openly gay. He would wear old dirty hoodies and sweats, all around do his best to look as disheveled as possible, and then meticulously paint his nails whenever we got to the school we were debating at. During rounds he would stand as close as the judge would let him and read over their cards over their shoulder. It was hilarious how much he could weaponize homophobia back in the day. He would literally cause seasoned debaters to stammer through their cards.
It was a blanket term for any anarchy based k. We wrote up a file based on social and environmental ecology. Basically, environmental problems are caused by social ecology and how messed up the environment is directly reflects just how hierarchical a society organizes itself. The point was arguing that to fix environmental problems you would first have to rearrange how society is organized. Most of the stuff we had was based on stuff written by Murray Bookchin.
I think we did so well because a lot of people at the time had a hard time distinguishing between anarchy and libertarianism, and it was right when a ton of news about global warming was hitting the mainstream. It was also an easy k to slap on just about anything because it mainly attacked the idea of hierarchal systems.
Good clarification of what I was trying to say in my post below.
I actually thought I was originally responding to your post, I guess I did it under the main post. But yeah, I totally agree with you. Especially about turning it into a teaching moment instead of a confrontation.