ive been told every time that i even offer light pushback on criticsm against socialist countries in the global south that these are imperialist countries that commit atrocities and im being a total hypocrite by 'supporting' them and that most socialists in global south actually oppose and hate these countries.

is this just bad-faith liberal bullshit? how would one even respond to that?

  • redthebaron [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    it really depends on which person you are talking to like the latin american left is a bit more of not complaining about latin american government as we know what happens if the americans get an excuse to do their dirty deeds, but venezuela has had a space on the brazilian cultural mind for a long time like before i heard any american claim "THE US WILL BECOME VENEZUELA" this has always been a thing the right says here it is one of their favorite, so like it is complicated but people are not on the mood of going after venezuela since the whole morales coup thing happened as it was SO OBVIOUS THEY WERE FULL OF SHIT and also we have to deal with our president going into our cities without a mask and telling kids they don't need to use it anymore which has really just occupied our minds too much for foreign affairs

      • redthebaron [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        like to be fair, i am aware that brazil has a weird relationship with the rest of the south america both because we are kinda the us of south american like just a huge economy that breaks all the neighbours around and a lot of weird christian stuff and cultural stuff like the not speaking the same language makes us a bit distant from the rest of latin america and really reliant on media for foreign news. My friend once argued "it is a bit dumb to care about foreign affairs in the global south, they will either kill you or not" and like he is not wrong, but on your point yeah our takes generally are just basic normal stuff like "why are you guys still talking about venezuela isn't your whole society colapsing" and "hey stay on your fucking hemisphere anglo", also any latin american who gets into foreign affairs ends up being forced to look at the us as they are the main player and feel absolute dread after staring at the abyss

          • redthebaron [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            no you are correct they are really similar, like they are the most alike in any of the latin languages, it is just brazillians will not read in spanish because we are luso boys like we get to understand each other fine enough there is just this weird divide due to weird cultural stuff like as if we were paying homage to the portuguese spanish rivalry

          • Owl [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            I studied Spanish and Latin in high school and for a long time I was able to understand every written Latin-derived language except Portuguese.

            That could just be my experience though.

            • redthebaron [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              that is a bit weird because i think that italian is one i find the furtherst one from spanish and portuguese but i imagine it is probably the one most rooted on latin so that makes sense, like portuguese seems to be just the wildest of the latin languages, because if you want to you can do whatever like the grammar is so big that you can just make wild shit like you can reduce the sentence "eu fiz isso porque eu queria" (i did this because i wanted it) to "Fi-lo porque qui-lo" but like brazilllian portuguese tends to be really simple like most people will not talk like a crazy person

              • Owl [he/him]
                ·
                4 years ago

                In retrospect, I think most of the Portuguese I was exposed to at the time was Brazilian teenagers with very casual relationships to spelling and grammar. Proooobably didn't help.

                And as you guessed, yeah, I found Italian pretty easy to understand.

                • redthebaron [he/him]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  like portuguese speakers have a complicated relantionship with the grammar stuff because it kinda is an actual class struggle on this language, like poor people receive worse educations and portuguese is a hard language to speak correctly like i still don't understand accentuation at all and i had a pretty good education, so poor people on brazil tend to be the people who speak in the non formal way with simpler grammar and this has been a thing for so long that in the 20s there is actual poetry from people discussing whether the true language is the one on the books or the one spoken by most people

                  • Owl [he/him]
                    ·
                    4 years ago

                    I'll happily give that one to the language spoken by most people.

                    But yeah, the stuff I learned in a dead language that's kept around for its prestige did not help with it lol.