my co-worker, a british woman who moved here (USA) with her husband, is a perfectly nice person. i have no problems with her, but talking to her opened my eyes to how insanely ignorant and brainwashed your average person is
she’s the definition of just a normal ass regular ass type of person. progressive but not overtly political and just kinda floating through existence. which is fine.
we were talking and she was saying all of this negative stuff about china. i of course told her my point of view which is that im very very pro china and don’t think anything she was saying was actually proven. she then went on to say maybe im right and that she doesnt get why china is bad but japan is our ally “because its the same country isnt it?” so this tells me many normal people are walking around with negative opinions about china meanwhile they literally dont even know china isnt a part of japan.
she then went on to clarify, “wait maybe im thinking of korea. which is the bad one again?” IF YOU THINK SOMETHING IS SUPPOSEDLY BAD, SHOULDNT YOU KNOW WHAT THE BAD THING IS? how is that not a light that goes off for her and makes her consider “how tf do i think a place is bad when i literally don’t even know what place im talking about?”
i just said “well it depends on your perspective” and then changed the conversation to be about the tv show Tulsa King lmao
Those people look like they wouldn't hurt a fly, so innocent and ignorant. And then go to work for the military industrial complex, the mass media business and other big corpos (pharmaceutical, high-tech, oil, etc.) without even knowing the damage they are doing and the responsibility they have in the destruction of whole countries and the planet itself. It's a classic example of the "banality of evil", working as perfect cogs for the empire's machine.
Personally I have conflicted thoughts about them. I feel sorry for them but at the same time I wouldn't care at all if a bomb exploded over their heads if that means saving innocent people from their wretched acts. I don't tolerate ignorance and stupidity when the consequences are serious.
she then went on to clarify, “wait maybe im thinking of korea. which is the bad one again?”
Should have immediately said South Korea in a completely sober voice. Missed opportunity.
They really had the perfect chance to talk about the virtues of Juche and they fumbled it
My dad said the same thing about Korea. It was a little more painful considering we have Korean relatives.
When having political conversations with burgers, you have to ask for details, and really pry for them. I have so many friends who will look at any american-opposed leader past or present and be like "he is/was a monster, right?" But then I ask what they did and you just get vague statements about freedom and human rights violations. Then you really peel back, and get something straight from a work of fiction (especially true with Stalin and anything depicted in Enemy At The Gates)
Forgive me for posting about streamers but I literally saw this happen in real time when Northernlion was confidently saying Gaddafi was in hell, then when asked why he believed that he couldn't really elaborate, then his friend HCJustin came in and said that Gaddafi was only ever demonized by the Clintons.
My friend group did literally the same thing. I mentioned something about Clinton's role in creating slave markets and a friend pipes in with "yeah, but wasn't Gaddafi a monster?"
I ask what he did to deserve that and nobody actually knew anything about him. But even that wasn't enough, because he "probably" did some awful things.
Genocide and slavery are probably the worst two things a leader/government can do. Even if he was a total piece of shit who embezzled tax dollars and murdered his political rivals, that's still infinitely less bad than open air slave markets.
It's just willful ignorance at that point. They're comfortable in the Imperial Core and don't give a shit about anyone else. Anything that justifies the empire will be touted out, then they will change the topic to something else when contradicted.
she then went on to clarify, “wait maybe im thinking of korea. which is the bad one again?
A conversation point I hear way to often, even moreso being Korean and getting the "hohohoho north or south Korean?" Beaten-into-hamburger-meat-dead-horse joke question every single time I tell anyone I'm Korean.
Dunno how to broach this subject without sounding too ableist...but a lot of North Americans are just not very smart and kind of coasted through life without thinking and in turn take their marching orders from the tv who tells them what to think.
I don't really think this has to be an ableist thing at all. Americans are kept ignorant, plain and simple. They aren't dumber people inherently, but they live in a country that has absolutely 0 incentive to train a talented workforce when all the crap they consume is imported from places where hard workers are paid two orders of magnitude less. There is no consequence for the imperialist class if most Americans can't read above a 5th grade level or point to Paris on a map. They can just get engineers from abroad, and clerical workers in the PMC are drawn from the upper class to become a richer consumer base to keep those cheap imports circulating. Hell, even the arms or pharmaceutical industries which has a lot of tricky clearance requirements makes extensive use of cheaply educated Puerto Rican engineers.
The average American now has a 6th grade level of literacy.
That's 50% of Americans that read and write at a 6th grade level or worse.
And that's by design. Can't have a well educated population capable of critical thought like Carlin said. ofc reactionaries will just say it's because the Jews are doing this to white people.
In I assume 2015 my mom decided she wanted to be a politics enjoyer and made a FB post about how socialism is bad, when I asked her to elaborate she said it just was.
made a FB post about how socialism is bad, when I asked her to elaborate she said it just was.
Show
My mom says she really doesn't like socialism, but when we talk about it, she ends up agreeing with most aspects of it. Usually she'll just admit she is familiar with how to deal under capitalism, and she worries socialism (and/or the transition to it) will be rough. We're a working-class family, but since dad destroys his body for the overlords we make a comfortable amount of money, and they worry we won't be as comfortable. I think being allowed to live despite my limited working capacity would be an upgrade.
Mine has just kind of adopted being a MAGA boomer because the last couple guys she's dated were chuds and she has the tendency to chameleon whatever opinions her current partner has.
the kind of person with right of abode in the UK or EU who moves to the US is the kind of mushy pea head who believes what the TV says and has internalized the hype or is another rise and grind psycho here thinking they're gonna get the bag because they want it.
only the most unreasonable of people do this and you should be very suspicious of them until it becomes clear which sort of maniac they are.
Sometimes we like to think we arrive at all our beliefs through reasoning, but the truth is we've come to believe most of what we believe because someone we trusted told us so. TV man says China's bad? He probably knows what he's talking about. If it reinforces something we already believe (racist conceptions of Asian people as mindless drones) then it's even easier to accept it without critically evaluating it. If it gets repeated again and again in different ways it's even easier to accept it. I think it's pretty likely that for someone who hasn't had a good reason to question everything, their reasoning skills are probably pretty atrophied and they'd rely on trusting others even more. But ultimately it's important to remember that there is no such thing as an independent thinker, and objective truth is an elusive thing that's always clouded in the subjectivities of social realities.
It's nice to have dialectical materialism as a way to be able to derive things for yourself from first principles, though. Maybe it would be good to try to explain how it works in simple terms to people like this? You know, teach a man to fish etc. etc. so they have a tool that can help them break down propaganda instead of just debunking an individual instance of it.
I would have pulled out a map and explained to her where each country was tbh
You can't argue with these people with facts, the only way I've found to change their mind has been to find something they already agree with deep down
I've had some success with arguing for the nationalization of the privatized electrical network, especially in the middle of winter when the electricity prices peak
And don't bring ideology or politics into the discussion, just ask why we should have a middleman for basic infrastructure
Where does this come from? Propaganda? Where you confidentiality spew uninformed opinions you couldn't even bother to verify.
I feel like an ass when I know someone doesn't know something and I have to correct them, like with social credit in China. It happens so often I just change strategy and bring it back to the US crediting/monitoring system. They tend to agree it's fucked up but I don't know if they can draw the line to what's occurring to them vs. what they're imagining is occurring to others in a country they haven't visited and know no resident's of.
yea its propaganda
the point of propaganda is to not only distill an idea, but make it seem like "common sense". the idea that china has social credit is so common place it's become common sense to know among americans, and anyone who disputes this idea is seen as an idiot. the point of stating these sort of things is more of a social ritual to inform everyone around you that you're one of the good ones who knows who the bad guys are than it is to have actual conversation
and this is why a lot of people on the autism spectrum are communists, lol
It's kind of a good thing that people tend to blindly accept "bad country = bad" without knowing jack shit about what they're talking about, because the second you start to teach them stuff that propaganda-brain loses a LOT of ground.
in my experience, they've been conditioned to think something is bad without having any verifiable reason to think so, so they're not really logical (god forgive me
for using the L word) and many times will flat out refuse any of the information you give them because they already 'know' the place is bad and that's that. many of them will even call you brainwashed for suggesting something other than what they've been told, which is pretty funny lolThere's definitely a tactic to it, you can't just blast them with the really hard stuff upfront.
Sometimes people can't be reached, but it's crucial not to just write off anyone who seems to just be ignorant. Not that you personally need to be responsible for undoing their propaganda brain, but it's important that in general we don't just give up on people who feel like they can be at least nudged in a better direction.
