Like, I've seen many smart people that are even, in theory, supporting of socialism and against imperialism who are well aware that there is a propaganda machine in the US and the west, who when it comes to anything about AES/past socialist states, they will just regurgitate state department propaganda without question.
Like, even if you bring up, for example, Xinjiang, and how virtually all evidence comes from some really bad research by a guy who clearly has an agenda, they will say something along the lines of "maybe that's true, but that doesn't disprove there's a genocide there". Which... is not how burden of proof works. Mind you, these are also people who clearly know about shifting of the burden of proof when it comes to climate change or evolution, but here? Then it's every logical fallacy, no critical thinking.
So what is it about these things that remove critical thinking from otherwise smart people?
There's a big difference between believing something and internalizing it. Someone can consciously believe in LGBT rights but still have internalized homophobia that comes out in knee-jerk reactions or unexamined attitudes, for example.
I think in the lib to left journey, people typically go through a stage that's basically just whining. We go around calling out contradictions and such but we haven't really internalized them ourselves. It is the classic lib thing of expecting teacher to listen and fix things. And so we'll talk about how our democratic process is gerrymandered and rigged but in the next sentence say that we need to pressure China to be more democratic, or talk about how important it is to :vote: After all, we already hit the "report" button about gerrymandering so that's been dealt with. At this stage we haven't followed through our criticisms to their natural conclusions, either. We might call out the media on one thing and then treat it as an unbiased source later on, because again, we already hit the report button so we already took care of that. It really is just the Report Button stage. And to be clear it's not like, the worst thing, it's often a step in the right direction, it's just not quite where it needs to be yet.
Imo part of why this happens is the excessive online focus on individual takes. "Look, bud, if it were up to me, we'd put a stop to gerrymandering right now." And that's all you need to think about with regards to gerrymandering. It's not based, it's cringe. Downvote. Done, next topic, new slop. "Yeah, I agree we should stop selling arms to the Saudis. If it were up to me, we wouldn't. But I do think we should sanction China over human rights." The first priority is showing that you're a good person with correct opinions, and having an accurate picture of reality or doing any sort of structural analysis is secondary to that.
yeah every individual person feels the need to have an exactly "correct" moral position on every issue even those they know barely anything about. part of that is for posting, you don't want to post cringe now do you? But it turns into people hearing on the TV "China bad and immoral" and then they think "oh shit, I need to remember that China bad or else I will be cringe"
I don't think anyone in the US really cares about China with everything going on, besides the ghouls at the top. Few people know enough about other countries to seriously analyze the so called evidence they see, so don't even worry about that if you are trying to deprogram. Honestly I think a simple anti-government message that talks about how the United States has an incentive to make up stuff about China because we are in competition works pretty well (for the lib at least, the crazy racist ones idk what to do)