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Politics - US Politics |OT| - View Post

sc94597 on 16 September 2025
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Shaunodon said:
sc94597 said:

You start your post here mischaracterizing the argument made. 

The argument wasn't words don't have meaning. It was the meaning of words are relational and inter-subjective. 

That's the basis of much of semiotics. 

We can literally measure this when we embed semantics in vector spaces. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity is a term coined by social scientists beginning around 1970[citation needed] to refer to a variety of types of human interaction. The term was introduced to psychoanalysis by George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow, who consider it a "meta-theory" of psychoanalysis.[1] For example, social psychologists Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish listed at least seven definitions of intersubjectivity (and other disciplines have additional definitions):

  • people's agreement on the shared definition of a concept;
  • people's mutual awareness of agreement or disagreement, or of understanding or misunderstanding each other;
  • people's attribution of intentionality, feelings, and beliefs to each other;
  • people's implicit or automatic behavioral orientations towards other people;
  • people's interactive performance within a situation;
  • people's shared and taken-for-granted background assumptions, whether consensual or contested; and
  • "the variety of possible relations between people's perspectives".[2]

Let me ask you something simple then. When did everyone suddenly agree to change the definition of these words? I sure as hell don't remember being invited.

Uncanny how the definition always gets changed by people who want to throw them around without consequence.

Now people who have infamously been labeled with 'extremist', 'far-right', 'fascist' and 'Nazi' are suddenly being mudered, and no one wants to take responsibility for these words anymore?

"When did everyone suddenly agree to change the definition of these words? I sure as hell don't remember being invited." 

Think of language like the market. There is no central authority that causes semantic shift to happen just like there is no central authority (outside of unique contexts) that sets the prices of goods. These arise through stigmergy or spontaneous order. 

Your "actual history of these words" is ridiculous. It is extremely telling that every right-leaning or right-wing person in this thread shares propagandized Youtube videos as their "sources of information." Do you guys read books or papers at all? Or is knowledge gathering through a rigorous process of validation just too "elitist" and "left-wing?" 

Socialism is a word that describes a wide-range of views and has always had nuance. So much so that you had people like G.D.H Cole write five volumes on the topic in works like A History of Socialist Thought. That was in 1953-1960. 

As for the Nazis, they quite explicitly aimed to carve out a new definition of socialism that fit their right-wing (hierarchy-oriented) view of class. In reality, they were about as socialist as the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is a democracy, or even really a republic, at this point.