chapotraphouse

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

smartest cracker

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.

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.