First off, I just want to thank you for your thoughtful response. One of the reasons I continue to use Lemmy or Mastodon is because of the actual thoughtful human beings like yourself.

words evolve over time

Absolutely so we shouldn’t have to stay married to older definitions.

I’m primarily writing this comment because I abhor the idea that an idea – it could be anything, from rocket science to theorrtical mathematics – is perceived as being an arena where everyone is just making up stuff, and if that should lead to people becoming turned off the idea of studying it for themselves, that’s a net-negative. No doubt, some countries, politicians, and agencies want to denigrate or prop up their own definitions, but that just makes it easier to identify fake socialists and “communists in name only”.

Part of my motivation for looking into a more precise definition was the desire to truly understand the debate around socialism. And in order to have a proper debate, we need to be able to explain that we mean by certain terms. I think the modern medias failure to properly define these terms for everyone is an intentional strategy to obscure the conversation around socialism and communism.

The merits and failures of socialism and communism deserve to be comprehensively hashed out in the public mind, and it only serves the status quo that this not happen.

Exactly. The way our society is structured is to prevent having a real conversation. Tho obviously we both know the reason why they don’t want precise definitions floating around in the public consciousness.