I had a group of friends that I spent most my sophomore year with at a very liberal east-coast college. Most of the friends in the group studied international relations and we frequently discussed politics. As I got to know them, I realized that we differed on a lot of things. Two of them told me that they wanted to join the CIA as analysts. Now I'm not a poli-sci major, but I know enough about history to know that the CIA has done and continues to do some evil shit. Now I do have a bunch of moderate leaning friends, but it felt different talking with this group of friends they had good understand of history and political philosophy. One of these guys, let’s call him Matt, was a huge Aaron Sorkin fan and Blairite (weirdly obsessed with British politics for some reason). Matt also wanted to work in political finance. I thought we were bonding over are mutual interest in the space related stuff until he showed me a Aaron Sorkin mini-series on the Apollo Space Program. And then proceed to tell me that he like the Apollo Missions because of all the political wonkery involved. The tipping point in our friendship was when he told me, at a BLM protest, that he was happy to finally get his "liberal street cred". Liberal wonks are some of the worst people to be friends with if you genuine care about making life better for people.
My girlfriend at the time was a huge Joe Biden supporter, her mom worked at the World Bank. She would often jokingly say that I was a communist and would side with the group of friends on domestic and foreign policy issues. She started fighting with me when I explained to her that the public health think-tank that she was applying to was just a health care lobbying group. This hurt me because I was really in love with her at the time, but I could see that she wasn’t open to critically challenge the world around her. She also got upset that I owned a gun, as many people from the south do. And when I decided to switch my studies from finance to computers science, she wasn’t supportive. Anyway, I broke up with her later and stopped talking with group of friends.
Anyway, I really wish I could meet some cool people with socialist outlook that are down to crack a cold one and do some grilling.
white male here who’s pro-china views have cost him most of his friends. do you have any openings ?
Not that guy but the best (and usually only) thing you can do is smile (awkwardly, not smugly) and say that maybe that information should be taken with a grain of salt if it's coming from the US.
honestly, i would just avoid it. work as much as possible to center any political discussions on the bourgeoisie of your own country. that still ultimately fails because it gives the other people the opening of "well, i'm smart, and i can care about TWO things". but at least you don't have to entrench yourself in the position of being a china stan.
I've found it helps not to talk about China directly. If folks don't have a basic understanding of how much the US has fucked with every other country on Earth over the last century, it's hard for someone to make the leap that all the propaganda the US puts out about China is wrong. I often start with the Contras, because the US' involvement with them is just so abhorrent and shocking you really can't come to any conclusion other than Reagan was a very bad person, which is shocking to most Americans. And 99% of Americans have no clue why we got involved in Vietnam. They might spout the "to fight communism" line but you can just show folks how it was never really about that. I've worked on people that way. Once people understand America's foreign policy not in term of us trying to make the world a better place for freedom and democracy, but rather the exertion of power in order to preserve hegemony, THEN a proper view on China starts to make sense.
i am a china stan tho. more or less.
i wish i could be, but i don't know enough to actually critically support them. either way, if you happen to be in the west, i don't know if open support of the CCP is how you find more comrades. there's a lot of work that needs to be done before people can even handle that conversation like a mature adult.
I find that cynicism is the best approach.
“Yeah well their system works. What has democracy done for us?”
“No matter who we vote for, we get the same sorts of policies. May as well just look at who does it better.”
If they bring up human rights abuses, I just shrug and say the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world, the vast majority from ‘plea deals’, which in any other context would be called forced confessions. Human rights abuses don’t stop being abuses just because you slap a veneer of ‘due process’ on it, especially when only the rich can meaningfully access that due process.
Same approach for the Uighur issue. “Beats the US approach of bombing however many million’.
In this regard it’s actually easier to talk to libs than socialists. Socialists often expect socialist countries to be utopian paragons of morality. Libs on the other hand are used to shrugging and accepting the lesser of two evils.
exactly this. have had results, and at the minumum silence, when using this approach.
Also, freedom . "Are you saying that the popular government of a sovereign nation doesn't have the freedom to rule their country as they see fit?"
sovereign gets good results too for some reason.