Personally I'm not that good at countering liberal comments on our posts, which seems to be happening more and more frequently with any posts relating to China. It'd be a lot easier if we could have a big pinned post with all the materials we need so we can just link to it whenever we need to.
I’d say you probably shouldn’t try to counter them. Not often anyway. It’s mentally taxing and ultimately produces basically zero fruit. People grow up their entire lives, their nice comfy lives btw, being told “China bad! US good!” and although you obviously can’t just swap that moronic narrative and make it true… it’s much closer to the truth. They already believe insane bullshit, basically. Can you argue a fairly devout religious person down from their religion of choice? Of course not.
Leaving aside the religious stuff, they have to find a reason to change their minds within themselves. Everyone in “the west” who was born and raised within its culture by the average normie-brained neoliberals that have been dominant for the last 40ish years and ended up on this website is way outside of the norm. People like to say “I watched/read/heard X and it changed me!” No, it didn’t. You changed because things around you didn’t add up. You looked into it. You probably found a bunch of shit that you thought was insane conspiracy (not theories, but actual conspiracies). Maybe some is/was but a lot of the shit if we’re talking about reading into the history of western nations especially the US is true. The worst shit did happen. And it’s hard to come to grips, properly, with the reality that you are not living in the good nation. That China isn’t full of misguided fools, that the USSR often held a much higher moral ground on basically every discussion of everything… that much of what we were told about them is just straight up lies or exaggerated for propagandistic effect.
I think accepting China isn’t the absolute demonic evil of the world is probably damn near the last thing for westerners to break out of. Well, besides the monkey-brain shit which might be impossible to break for many people cough anarchists cough (reactionary tendencies towards individualism comes to mind).
If you throw out facts of how the US is objectively, absolutely no debate, insanely worse for the world including many of its own citizens you’re just gonna get CNN talking points, state dept lies, links to horribly written, poorly sourced bullshit about the billions of Muslims that China apparently liquidated last month. Only slight exaggeration. They don’t want to learn or hear the truth. They literally don’t care. It will take either time and circumstances unique to them to change their minds (after an academic journey of some sort, as all of us had to do) or… force. No one can do the first method and we obviously lack the power to do the second (for now…).
So, sure, post some links, point out the easiest most obvious hypocrisy (like people shitting over “China spying” meanwhile the NSA has exabytes of fucking data on the exact dimensions of your cock and asshole) but I wouldn’t engage too much. I try to limit myself to about once a day, and I don’t read the hog replies because what’s the point of the mental stress this would cause me?*
*I edited the last sentence from ending with “mental disease” to the above ending to clarify I did not mean that the senders of said annoying messages, liberals basically, are suffering from “liberal brain disease” but rather they are giving me brain disease by which I meant stress, annoyance, etc. It was a self-attack of sorts (I can’t handle too much uneducated/bad faith pushback), but I recognize the wording was poor. Hopefully this is better. Also as an excuse: I wrote this, and all of my comments basically, either on the shitter or in this case sitting on my bench press bench procrastinating from lifting.
Perhaps the wording could’ve been better, but I wasn’t referring to liberalism as a mental disease. It was meant to be a little callback to the beginning and referencing how mentally exhausting, draining, etc. it is for me to deal with the same baseless arguments over and over from bad faith people with zero knowledge or even beliefs.
If it was possible I’d have a little disclaimer next to my username that says like “I wrote this while shitting or while sitting on a bench wasting time between workout sets. It’s not refined and nearly zero effort went into this post.”
Well said. It's pointless to argue for 10 minutes to someone out of a position that they were incubated in for their entire lives. You can plant a seed and they can pursue that if they want, but it's internal work. Don't induce suffering on yourself by taking on their ignorance as your burden.
A fellow comrade once told me that you don't engage the liberals to win the argument against that particular person, you do it to convince the fencesitters lurking the comments. Ultimately, the more you make the Marxist viewpoint part of people's discourse, the more they'll question. Its how I became a Marxist, I'm sure there are others out there with a similar experience.
This has always been my position. There is a close to 0% chance you are going to change the mind of the person you are arguing with, with the rare exception of people who have only a surface-level understanding of the issues and are not yet emotinally or intellectually invested.
There are always bystanders though who will see what people are posting. The Marxist providing rational and well reasoned arguments is going to seem a lot more compelling to people who themselves aren't invested, especially compared to somebody verbally running around in circles making unfounded claims.
The danger to that is it adds to the "But lemmy is a tankie project that we should never use" narritive
Good point. Do you think it's better to look to the links themselves rather than the database or to try a different tactic, as @Justice@lemmygrad.ml suggests?
I fundamentally disagree with Justice, in the fact that if we do not engage, if we do not counter at all ever, if we sit in our corner and talk about it no liberal will ever learn, and while we might hang on talking too them for far longer than its worth, and that it is infuriating talking to a liberal, we do not get anywhere if we do not at least TRY to talk to them.
With that ramble out of the way, I would say if you are going to link and leave, I would sugest leaving the individual links, however I would recomend also leaving a little bit of a statement with it, as it is easy to just ignore a link with no context.
I'm not sure if I'm being pragmatic or bitter, but I'm of the view that they're not worth the effort. Liberals that are of the kind of mindset that would be willing to listen and reconsider their convictions won't be found amingst the types that come into these kinds of places swinging Xinjiang and Ukraine around like a hammer. The kinds of liberals that do that will dig in and be stubborn, and would rather double down and make asses of themselves than admit to any mistake. And more importantly, those kinds of liberals are in the imperial core, where they have no real political agency because they can't change the system from within and refuse to do it from without. Their opinions don't matter, there's no material difference to the work of AES states whether those liberals are class conscious or not. I mean it in the most pragmatic way possible when I say they aren't worth the effort. Education effort should be spent on people at the periphery, in Africa and South America, where the fronts of this ideological struggle are and where changing someone's mind could affect how they vote, and the cases they make in support at their local elections.
I understand where you are coming from, and I fully understand that we often spend too much time arguing long after the point where it is obvious the conversation is fruitless. That being said, the revolution is atleast one part education, and if I can find it agian, I will piput the Castro Quote here, but I feel we ought to engage, just a little. I would immagine most of us where at one point in time liberals, due to the society around us, but we changed we learned and we grew, and this is a fundamental part of the human condition. I am under no illussions of grandure here that arguing on the internet is the best way to educate, or that we touch many hearts, generally education, especially when dealing with adults and older children happens best when there is a rapport and trust with the teacher, but that being said, every so often maybe 1% of the time maybe a little more, something we say, some link we leave will get lodged into someone's head, and they will think about it, and they might just come around. I understand it isn't ideal, and it isnt "fun" and there are more effective manners of education but this is the what we we can do with the tools presented to us.
Now please dont read what I said as that somehow the liberals of the imperal core are the most important to educate, they are not, as you said pragmaticly the periphery is more fertile to this, but that being said, I dont think in my personal oppinion this means totally ignoring liberals from the imperial core.
Agree. I was a liberal once. Not just a pro-capitalist with shitty values. But someone who read the theory, did the homework, and accepted (a) the limits of human social possibility and (b) that capitalism was the only option to improve the world. But because I was so invested and so critical, I saw the flaws and the contradictions.
The problem is that liberalism offers zero tools to cope with or resolve those contradictions except for curious philosophical thought experiments. Then someone patiently explained a way of thinking that engages with and resolves those contradictions i.e. historical and dialectical materialism.
Another problem for western 'progressive' liberals is that they live in an echo chamber and have no awareness of it because they are convinced that freedom of expression is a thing capable of existing. It isn't, because the ruling class control intellectual production and distribution.
The thing with online discussion is that you don't have to convince the person you're talking to, or you don't have to convince them there and then. It creates a public record that others will see and come across. Simply by providing a counter narrative, the spell can be broken.
It's like when we try to engage with libs here or elsewhere and they all gang up on you with their ill-considered ideas. They don't make an argument because they think that everyone will agree that any unorthodox ideas will be treated with disdain ab initio. They can't make an argument because that requires logic and evidence, neither of which are on their side.
By providing a counter narrative, we highlight this and show to those who see the cracks in liberalism that there are sensible, reasonable, well-read, and rigorous thinkers who don't accept the liberal bullshit. By engaging with liberals, we create the possibility of escaping the liberal mind trap.
Agree. I think just 2-3 counter narratives with sources/etc are enough for those who don't want to engage with the libs any further.
Lurkers/Others will see it, and with enough time then subconsciously they should start to question things. Like cough propaganda.
but I feel we ought to engage, just a little.
I agree with pretty much everything you said; I think where we differ is in how engaging just a little should be done.
We each of us has a finite amount of effort to give, and in my view one of the biggest factors in how fruitful that effort will be is who you spend that effort on.
I think that Liberals who have taken it upon themselves to troll, sealion, castigate or enlighten us are one of the worst kinds of people you can spend that effort on. The Liberal mindset has a staggering amount of inherent arrogance, and when that's paired with a determination to either vex or 'save' you, you're better off sowing seeds on concrete than trying to turn them around. They already decided they were right long ago. And they're certainly not going to give any credence to a list of sources or an FAQ, if they even bother to look at it.
I don't disagree that we have a responsibility to educate, rather I think we have an additional responsibility to be discerning about who, when, and how to reach out with that education. It'd be interesting to see how many of us that converted from liberalism were set down that path by arguing with a Marxist compared to how many of us were prompted by questions, doubts and contradictions raised from reflecting on our material conditions.
Between the core and the periphery, each individual communist should work within where they can dialecticaly change things most effectively. The core needs to take the boot off the periphery, and the periphery needs to seize the means of production from the most exploitive industries of global capitalism (imperialism).