So they are... a liberal. A liberal who thinks that liberalism is socialism because it uses words like "freedom" some of the time.

But yeah, I had a phase something like that on my way to ML. Briefly thought of myself as a "libertarian socialist". Dialectical and historical materialism is the most foundation level cure, I think, but maybe not the easiest cure to disseminate because of how different it is as a paradigm compared to idealism. But I say that because with diamat in view, I think it's easier to understand why MLs are the way they are about authority; that forces are not cleanly split into control (bad) and freedom (good) but they are instead in contradiction and take on different forms based on the base (the societal relationship to the means of production and distribution) and the superstructure (the established belief systems, ideologies, etc.).

So Screenshot Person's simplistic thinking goes something like: History is based on people oppressing each other, so the more freedom you have, the better the ideology is.

Diamat goes more like: History is based on how society relates to production, what it believes, and what develops as a consequence (not as purely mechanical, but also through active effort, solo or organized). This involves a lot of exploitative class and caste dynamics since small communes because the new relations to production since them created contradictions that set the stage for exploitation to develop into one or more systematized forms. Resolving this is nowhere near as simple as freedom vs. control; in fact, there are cases where the right kind of control creates more freedoms (like communist vanguard control over the means of production enabling the enforcement of getting people's needs met through placing careful limits on the capitalists, which then gives most people more stability and more material freedoms through that stability). In contrast, liberalism's promises of freedom are often very abstract and don't pan out in material reality for a lot of people.

They're just politically and historically uneducated which results in an incoherent worldview. I passed through a phase like this myself when I was in the process of rejecting liberalism but my head was still swimming with red scare nonsense, which left me politically confused, wanting an idealistic equal and empathetic society but not yet understanding that these "authoritarian" aspects would (and are and were, historically) necessary to defend it. Part of that was because I had not yet understood the full extent of the barbarity of liberalism, even though I understood it in part. Parenti has a famous quote from one of his lectures that went something to the effect of, "If there was no NATO, there would've been no need for a Warsaw Pact. If there was no CIA, there would've been no need for a KGB." I think people in this stage of moving left (whether or not they eventually become communists) don't have a grasp on the enormity of the attacks, subversion, and siege levied against socialist states that can only be defended against with structures that are unfortunately capable of grave abuses. In the same lecture, Parenti uses the example of the Nicaraguan revolution, saying something like (not an exact quote), "They discovered a very terrible thing. They discovered they needed a secret police. They discovered they needed Instruments of coercion, and these instruments are capable of very serious crimes." Finally, though I don't necessarily see it in OOP, there can often be an element of racism as well. The Soviets and PRC will be seen as "authoritarian" while Cuba will be seen as okay, despite Cuba (until recently? I haven't kept up with the reforms over the past couple of decades) being a Marxist-Leninist state more or less identical to Soviet governance. This is exactly the goal of the red scare(s). It's not to outright prevent everyone from moving leftward, they'll never achieve that, but those that do so have been deliberately maleducated so that they do not align with the actually existing (and therefore working, and therefore threatening) socialist projects.

tl;dr, political and historical maleducation makes people say some stupid shit.

Competitive democracy means letting Nazis run and win because the Nazis in their district voted for them fair and square

"I'm a liberal trying to appropriate the increasingly popular socialist label."

Ideology: Child.

Bourgeois Democracy(tm)

Just sounds confused

"Democratic socialists" are basically just people who believe all the liberal propaganda that the liberal democratic political system is the only "true" form of democracy, but they're also a socialist, and so they try to reconcile these two contradictory positions by imagining that a socialist system will maintain a bourgeois political system with bourgeois parties running on a platform of abolishing the socialist state in opposition to the socialist party that wants to build one. They're convinced anything less than this is "authoritarianism" and bad because they genuinely cannot imagine anything outside of liberal democracy.

they either watch that one streamer or hate him

"oh, just the intersection of liberalism and socialism, of course."

lol

2nd sentence and you've lost me. BEGONE, redditor.

Read books, please.

Oh and it gets worse the more you read. I didn't even see their tag.

Citations required.... this just sounds like propaganda.

Vibes.

Strasserite, whether he knows it or not

That was painful.

Baby leftist