I wonder why extremists hate liberals so much. They all talk of liberals with such disdain.
The lack of any cohesion or basic agreement on terms on MWoG posts is always a bit funny to me. You get a few confused progressives, staunch defenders of liberalism, and the regular conservatives, all in one place bound by the core of “Marxism bad.” The ones who have dipped thier toes into Marxist theory but still believe everything the US State Department tells them about AES end up fighting the ones that could not care less about either, the posts become more about fighting each other than what they are supposedly trying to talk about.
I know that last bit on confrontation in the comments isn’t unique to MWoG by any stretch, but the utter lack of coherent understanding of Marxism means every conversation is utterly surface level and devoid of meaningful conversation. It’s the blind leading the blind.
It’s pretty interesting reading a bunch of people at completely different stages of their political journey argue against each other. Their one commonality is mostly completely making up what we believe in and not liking China and the USSR.
Tankies just means whatever they currently arent. Its not about us but about what they are not.
Just like orientalism isnt about the people of the orient, but about what the west wants itself not to be.
Ask ten anti-communists what a tankie is, and you’ll get at least twelve different answers lol
Exactly! There are those that fully support bog-standard liberalism side by side with people who have moved beyond that, but only just. It’s one of those cases where they are often both wrong, or one is right for the wrong reasons, etc.
What is MWoG
Meanwhile On Grad, an anticommunist drama community. It’s not worth visiting.
Ohhhhh, I remember that place. Blocked them long ago
Autoblocked on Lemmy.ml, haha.
I don’t think you convert people with facts and logic. It’s the same way you don’t make a lot of sales by telling people what offerings you have. “Hello, John Business? This is Sammy Stranger. I think you’ll like using Sammy Software, we have 300 gigabytes of… Hello? Did you hang up on me?”
Some people need bad things to happen to them personally before they’ll think about things. They might be immature, incurious people or simply willing to gamble. When your mom gets a 100k healthcare bill and then you’re like “well then this whole system is fucked up!”
Some people have a troop dad and a cop cousin. It’s really hard to disentangle their propagandized upbringing from their personal identity. They’d sooner empathize with the Israelis than the people they’re genociding.
Some people study economics and get their news from mainstream sources. Fuck it, maybe they’re familiar with first hand accounts of people treated poorly in AES. China really did have a famine made worse by their central planning.
You need to expand someone’s horizons to get them to entertain socialism in the first place. You necessarily have to probe their sense of justice and empathy. If they’re not down to care about the people they punch down on then there’s not much use teaching them to care. You’ll get into deep philosophical discussions like “would you be a valid target in a Native American rebellion?” and “what if you treated your tenants fairly?” You would probably need to know finer details about military interventions all across the world, the actions of the Soviet Union, and what happened during the Sino-Soviet split. It might not happen all at once. If they’re serious about intellectual curiosity then they might give you a chance to prepare your case. But at the end of the day you’ll probably have to demonstrate that your ultimate goal cares about the plight of the oppressed and demonstrate how it makes the world more prosperous. It probably happened to you if you’re here - otherwise who debated you into socialism?
You can convince people with facts and logic but they have to be ready to have an open minded conversation and you have to talk on a subject where they can actually do so. If a topic is somehow precious to someone or they get easily frustrated, they can just talk themselves in circles indefinitely or get angry and leave. But you can find gaps by asking questions. For example, the lemmygrad poster that was screenshotted includes that they compared Marxism “in the real world” compared to capitalism, which already means they don’t even know what Marxism is (it is not an economic system lol). I’d ask them to define Marxism and then start talking about its actual meaning from some other angle, e.g. ask them what they read. It definitely wasn’t Capital.
ugh a sh.itjust.works thread lol! grab your BINGO cards and be ready for a blackout round
The guy from the post made himself an easy target since he assumed he had some superiority over the person he was “converting” because he’s a marxist. Ive read and researched alot and even i dont think im superior than liberal (in terms of knowledge, morally is a different question) since there is alot i dont know.
Ive also hated the fallback of “i have direct experience so i am right and you are wrong” because i also have direct experience in certain things, and i am open to being challenged on them and even being wrong. I never lived in the Soviet Union or China, but if youre going to dismiss what I say by saying your uncle or dog lived in those countries and so you know more than me, i dont give a fuck. You can tell me the facts though, what did your uncle say about it? He didnt like it, ok why? Lets get down to the actual facts instead of some bullshit “you need to have lived in x in order to have an opinion”
Direct experience can also be very narrow and not really useful for a holistic overview of for example the soviet union.
What “more direct experience” is the person implied to have? Chinese immigrant parents from the Hong Kong region? That’s their parents’ direct experience, maybe.
MWoG can’t help but be orientalist.
who is also a coder
Big mistake, all computer science majors are either incoherent libertarians or liberal treatlers it is known.
Dessalines that entire time:
tankies seem wildly unaware of deng xiaoping’s purge of maoism and leftism in China
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHbreathHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The only places where it’s possible to have any kind of informed, intelligent, and nuanced discussion of Deng’s reforms are Hexbear and Lemmygrad, where they are frequently discussed and debated. I’ve posed questions about it to people on other servers, and the only responses I ever get are people attacking me as a tankie for even considering the question of whether China was better off before or after Deng’s reforms, or what should’ve been done differently, regardless of which position I take - assuming they don’t just ignore it or give a “tl;dr” for having the audacity to ask them a question that requires them to actually engage their brains instead of mindlessly reciting their preferred bumper sticker ideology.
