From a bazinga-rich family member, the kind that likes to dangle money at the poors by making them try to jump through hoops and otherwise kiss his ass, and otherwise pretend to be a "philanthropist" while not actually giving any actual money to the poors:
"I hate how game companies pander to lazy people with shit hardware! I have a cutting edge battlestation in my man cave and almost no game comes close to using its full potential!" :wojak-nooo:
Someone in my family was dumbfounded by how I was skeptical of Uyghur Genocide accusations. This even after I mentioned that I wouldn't doubt if the Chinese government were using excessive force in some instances. He got red-faced about "literal genocide" and confided how he earnestly believes it because he saw a video one time of journalists being shoved out of a classroom with guards.
Normally, this wouldn't bother me much, but the fact that the person in question is a scientist and one of the most brilliant men I know is sobering. We have our work cut out for us.
Having worked with engineers, scientists, and other STEMlords: they're very smart in their relevant field and assume that they're smart about everything and don't have to do the same work that made them smart in their specialty in the first place. They just assume the propaganda that's been drilled into them their entire lives was true and they came to their mainstream opinion that upholds patriarchal-white supremacist-capitalism organically.
We do, indeed, have our work cut out for us.
Yes, agreed. I would say this applies to people who get enough degrees to feel special, in general. There's a mass academic psychology that thinks reading The New York Times is the height of culture and very few people are willing to be truly radical.
Was talking to a relative the other day and somehow Falun Gong came up, and I mentioned they were a cult and basically believed the Chinese government wanted to harvest their organs because their pratices made them pure. He was like "yeah haha, but they're not exactly wrong about the organ harvesting tho" and then started looking for some news article he remembered having read about organ harvesting of Uyghurs that he couldn't find in the end. I guess he was talking about Falun Gong's "independent tribunal?" Basically everyone around me seems to harbor some vague feeling that China is doing Bad Things far beyond what any other country does.
Even in the more leftist newspapers in my language there is zero pushback against the western imperialist narrative in general.
"I oppose all NATO actions while believing all NATO propoganda."