I just had an almost really good moment with a group of students where the main guy that was arguing against me was going to have to make some pretty big admissions (he was defending trickle down economics and he was going with the old reliable"if you don't earn enough just work hard and come up with a better product so you can get rich"). However, a few people quickly started to say "well if Socialism is so good how come vuvuzuela cuba etc. etc." and this was a really tough point, because this is in Puerto Rico so one of them has been to Cuba, and he said something about how he couldn't believe the conditions they lived in. Funny enough, he just meant most people didn't own cars. But I really, really didn't want to risk saying that Cuba's conditions are actually great, or that Castro was a good leader, because that would just make me look like I'm insane to a crowd of young people who've heard nothing but "Cuba bad" their whole lives. I kind of lost control of the conversation at that point and I didn't get much progress; I'm afraid I may have even poisoned the well since I'm now kinda the Cuba Stan in a lot of their minds.
So yeah, how do you avoid this? I want to get some people to recognize that capitalism doesn't work, but it's really hard to do that when they're been brainwashed this badly. I don't want to do the "you could just be a demsoc" routine, but is that my only option? I'd prefer not to have to tell half truths about reformism being viable, but I also don't want to be the guy telling people to buy guns.
I will always have one answer to this kind of question. He says it so much better than I could.
Thank you! Parenti's lectures are definitely powerful. I also thought about dropping some quotes from Why Socialism, it's a STEM chat so it might be kind of surprising for some of them to hear about Einstein's politics.
I tried linking a lib to a transcript of this and his response was "How do we know those Cubans aren't like North Koreans who say they love their leader but keep trying to escape to South Korea?"
Ugh. Like he’s literally talking about medical and literacy programs, not some cult of personality shit.
But that’s when the libs say “they only teach people to read so they can brainwash them with communist propaganda“ which is such a galaxy brain idea
Well that clinic is actually there, right? Those people can actually read. Those are objective things that are true regardless of what people have to say about it.
Those darn propaganda clinics, healing people just so that they worship the party.
This is so good. I've used the "compare to what it was before, not to a nation that has gotten rich through colonialism" argument quite e few times and it mostly seems to work, provided it's a good faith conversion.