Developing a mutually beneficial relationship with China will not be easy. But we can do better than a new Cold War.
There's some dumb stuff in this piece, but I'm glad SOMEONE in Washington with influence is speaking out against the emerging consensus. Hooray for Succdem Grampa
Imagine Bernie copy/pasted some Parenti and sent that in to Foreign Affairs. He's a senator, he could get that opinion out there. Which would be the more likely response:
People would read something diametrically opposed to everything they've ever heard about China and consider it.
People would read something diametrically opposed to everything they've ever heard about China and reject it.
If you challenge too much propaganda at once, most people will write you off as a crank. You accomplish nothing and maybe even hurt your cause. When you're working with entrenched beliefs, "forget everything you think you know" rarely works. You have to pick a vulnerable spot, move them on that one thing, then repeat.
Compounding that difficulty, foreign policy is something most Americans don't know or care about. It's extremely easy for them to backslide even if you make some headway on an entrenched piece of propaganda like Tibet. And because they don't really care, whatever you might gain from that bit of headway has no immediate use. If you hand most people that Parenti piece they're going to (1) think "wow, this is some crazy commie shit," (2) forget nearly everything but that impression a few months later, and (3) take no meaningful political action as a result.
I don't know what people are expecting of Bernie here, but I don't see a lot of consideration of how people actually change their minds, or of the position foreign policy has in American politics in the first place.
If a sitting U.S. senator who is also a recent presidential candidate and one of the most popular politicians in the country comes to Foreign Affairs and says "I want to submit an article that is going to drive a shitload of clicks to your magazine," they're going to print it. And while the editors in charge of the decision would be hostile to a Parenti-esque article on China, they're also hostile to Sanders, and would think that him publishing viewpoints that "extreme" would only hurt him.
The media won't even let Chomsky get 30 seconds on TV yet somehow Bernie will wake up enlightened one day and get a Parenti piece published. How is it lost on you that Parenti has written books about just this type of thing never being allowed to happen
I'm not saying this is going to happen. It's a counterfactual to show how saying "you're wrong about absolutely everything on this topic" wouldn't work. And if it wouldn't work, how much is there to criticize?
You may need to re-read those Parenti books, too. The emphasis is on ordinary journalists and editors -- people whose careers are threatened if they don't fit into a certain ideological mold. An incumbent senator is the definition of someone insulated from that type of threat. There's a reason the big push for Medicare for All came from Bernie, not from some talking head at MSNBC: it's easier to draw attention to issues outside of media orthodoxy if you have a position of state power.
It's not a counterfactual because you've basically admitted that Bernie is able to operate outside of the parameters set by media orthodoxy, which clearly isn't the case, and which is what you were arguing against to begin with
OK, so you really don't understand what a counterfactual is.
A counterfactual isn't a scenario that's impossible -- it's a thought experiment along the lines of "what if we had made some other choice?" It's a vehicle for thinking through the implications of that other choice and assessing whether it would have been a good one. If someone started working right after high school, they might think about the counterfactual of "what if I had gone to college?" That's a choice they could have made, but didn't. They think through what might have happened had they gone to college and assess whether they made a good choice.
Bernie could have sent Foreign Affairs some Parenti-esque article, but he didn't. My original comment was thinking through what would have happened had he sent in that type of article. It's not a question of whether he could have got that message out there or not -- he obviously could have -- it's a question of whether doing so would have been more effective than his actual article.
That's not remotely what I'm describing and you know it. You wrote a page-long screed about this elsewhere in this thread; put a fraction of that effort into considering another opinion.
C'mon really, what's more useful to open people's eyes?
Saying everything they think they know it's true
Saying they have been lied to, exactly like all the other times the WhiteHouse+CorporateMedia did
No matter who you are, repeating propaganda isn't helping.
Take, idk, Roger Waters, he is a very famous person who has nothing to lose and he just tells the people a lot of cool real things that goes against all the shit the US say [idk what did he say about China tho] and that's way more helpful than saying "oh yes, all the shit the TV say is true, but I disagree in a tiny detail".
Do I viscerally hate Bernie? No. Do I think he could be way more helpful than right now? Yes.
The main point is that there's a difference between being right and being persuasive. If you're right but not persuasive, nothing changes. Roger Waters can be right on all sorts of issues, but he's not persuading anyone of anything, so what has he really done? The goal isn't to simply be right; the goal is to change how the world works.
When people are dug in on an idea -- and most people are dug in on China due to the pervasiveness of anticommunist propaganda -- telling them they're wrong on all counts isn't persuasive. Think of a topic where you're really confident that you have the right take. If I tell you that everything you think you know about that topic is wrong, are you going to take that under serious consideration? Or are you going to hear two or three or four points that you strongly disagree with and write the whole thing off? Look at how you responded to my original comment.
Now think again about that topic where you're really confident you have the right take. If instead I tell you that I agree on X, Y, and Z, but that there's one point I think you have wrong, are you more likely to take that seriously? And if I manage to change your mind on that one point, would you be willing to listen to me about another?
Imagine Bernie copy/pasted some Parenti and sent that in to Foreign Affairs. He's a senator, he could get that opinion out there. Which would be the more likely response:
If you challenge too much propaganda at once, most people will write you off as a crank. You accomplish nothing and maybe even hurt your cause. When you're working with entrenched beliefs, "forget everything you think you know" rarely works. You have to pick a vulnerable spot, move them on that one thing, then repeat.
Compounding that difficulty, foreign policy is something most Americans don't know or care about. It's extremely easy for them to backslide even if you make some headway on an entrenched piece of propaganda like Tibet. And because they don't really care, whatever you might gain from that bit of headway has no immediate use. If you hand most people that Parenti piece they're going to (1) think "wow, this is some crazy commie shit," (2) forget nearly everything but that impression a few months later, and (3) take no meaningful political action as a result.
I don't know what people are expecting of Bernie here, but I don't see a lot of consideration of how people actually change their minds, or of the position foreign policy has in American politics in the first place.
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:doubt:
If a sitting U.S. senator who is also a recent presidential candidate and one of the most popular politicians in the country comes to Foreign Affairs and says "I want to submit an article that is going to drive a shitload of clicks to your magazine," they're going to print it. And while the editors in charge of the decision would be hostile to a Parenti-esque article on China, they're also hostile to Sanders, and would think that him publishing viewpoints that "extreme" would only hurt him.
The media won't even let Chomsky get 30 seconds on TV yet somehow Bernie will wake up enlightened one day and get a Parenti piece published. How is it lost on you that Parenti has written books about just this type of thing never being allowed to happen
I'm not saying this is going to happen. It's a counterfactual to show how saying "you're wrong about absolutely everything on this topic" wouldn't work. And if it wouldn't work, how much is there to criticize?
You may need to re-read those Parenti books, too. The emphasis is on ordinary journalists and editors -- people whose careers are threatened if they don't fit into a certain ideological mold. An incumbent senator is the definition of someone insulated from that type of threat. There's a reason the big push for Medicare for All came from Bernie, not from some talking head at MSNBC: it's easier to draw attention to issues outside of media orthodoxy if you have a position of state power.
This is just incoherent
I don't think you understand what a counterfactual is.
It's not a counterfactual because you've basically admitted that Bernie is able to operate outside of the parameters set by media orthodoxy, which clearly isn't the case, and which is what you were arguing against to begin with
OK, so you really don't understand what a counterfactual is.
A counterfactual isn't a scenario that's impossible -- it's a thought experiment along the lines of "what if we had made some other choice?" It's a vehicle for thinking through the implications of that other choice and assessing whether it would have been a good one. If someone started working right after high school, they might think about the counterfactual of "what if I had gone to college?" That's a choice they could have made, but didn't. They think through what might have happened had they gone to college and assess whether they made a good choice.
Bernie could have sent Foreign Affairs some Parenti-esque article, but he didn't. My original comment was thinking through what would have happened had he sent in that type of article. It's not a question of whether he could have got that message out there or not -- he obviously could have -- it's a question of whether doing so would have been more effective than his actual article.
This is reasonable
Fighting propaganda the incrementalist way: agreeing with 99% of it, and waiting
That's not remotely what I'm describing and you know it. You wrote a page-long screed about this elsewhere in this thread; put a fraction of that effort into considering another opinion.
No, I'm bussy being angry at things
Sounds productive
C'mon really, what's more useful to open people's eyes?
No matter who you are, repeating propaganda isn't helping.
Take, idk, Roger Waters, he is a very famous person who has nothing to lose and he just tells the people a lot of cool real things that goes against all the shit the US say [idk what did he say about China tho] and that's way more helpful than saying "oh yes, all the shit the TV say is true, but I disagree in a tiny detail".
Do I viscerally hate Bernie? No. Do I think he could be way more helpful than right now? Yes.
C'mon just look at this:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/727012094674731008/855828848145858580/x0q5ahrhl3671.png
Fucking WaPo rando has more balls than Bernie
The main point is that there's a difference between being right and being persuasive. If you're right but not persuasive, nothing changes. Roger Waters can be right on all sorts of issues, but he's not persuading anyone of anything, so what has he really done? The goal isn't to simply be right; the goal is to change how the world works.
When people are dug in on an idea -- and most people are dug in on China due to the pervasiveness of anticommunist propaganda -- telling them they're wrong on all counts isn't persuasive. Think of a topic where you're really confident that you have the right take. If I tell you that everything you think you know about that topic is wrong, are you going to take that under serious consideration? Or are you going to hear two or three or four points that you strongly disagree with and write the whole thing off? Look at how you responded to my original comment.
Now think again about that topic where you're really confident you have the right take. If instead I tell you that I agree on X, Y, and Z, but that there's one point I think you have wrong, are you more likely to take that seriously? And if I manage to change your mind on that one point, would you be willing to listen to me about another?