In the past I’d try to read between the lines on their world reporting, and usually could get some useful information after filtering out the pro-US foreign policy tilt, but since the Ukraine war, the coverage is so disconnected from reality it just doesn’t feel useful anymore. Liberals live in a fantasyland mind palace as untethered as any QANON nut now. That transition started long before the war, but it feels like a major turning point to me…
Oh yeah I agree, I have a socdem friend that I’ve been trying to slowly convert, and basically every conversation ends with some sort of brainworms and everything gets derailed past that. Thankfully Ukraine hasn’t really come up yet, but I’m dreading having to talk about it lol.
I’ve really been appreciating @SeventyTwoTrillion’s news updates here lately though, I only noticed them about a week ago and they’ve already become my main source for basically everything but local news
I haven’t managed to convince anyone completely yet, though I think I’ve made progress, so perhaps take my advice with a grain of salt. But what I will say, is that I started out as a socdem once, and the communist arguments that were most convincing to me were those that stressed that AES is more democratic and less violent than Western imperialist countries. Dismantle Black Book bullshit, stress the unique extent of imperialist violence (relatively unknown events like the Indonesian mass murders work well because there aren’t readymade hegemonic narratives about them), and make convincing cases for democracy existing in China, Cuba, USSR, etc. Reference sources like that Harvard poll showing like 90% of Chinese people like the CPC and like 70% say China is democratic.
I also enjoy SeventyTwoTrillion’s updates; they’re a breath of fresh air from Western-brain unreality.
Yeah it’s a slow process, but I hope I’ve made a little progress at least. It doesn’t help that he’s in the military, so even when I get him to agree on points like the US not allowing any competing system to succeed or fail on it’s own terms, it doesn’t automatically follow that that’s a bad thing. I think the biggest sticking point is that he on some level feels like a change to socialism/communism would negatively impact his lifestyle, and he isn’t quite willing to hold the position that broad positive change would be worth it to him. I don’t even know that he consciously realizes that, but that’s more or less what it always ends up at. That and the incessant belief that any problems with capitalism can be fixed through reform.
I’m hoping I can get him there, but I feel like it won’t click for him until he realizes on his own that even if reform was hypothetically a path forward, our government is so broken and dysfunctional that not even milquetoast reform is foreseeable at this point. I’ll still be working on it though, however slow it is
