I find it so hard to understand the liberal viewpoint of things.
One minute the USA is fascist for overturning roe v wade and possible other amendments, the next minute the USA is the global defender of democracy. One minute the USA is facing the most social instability with gun violence, inflation, wage stagnation, over policing, the next minute we are the shining city on the hill that must set an example.
You’d think after Korea, Vietnam, and the war on terror we’d learn are lesson about exporting democracy and just mind our own business. But america is not in the business of learning lessons.
We care so much about Taiwanese independence but what of the indigenous people HERE? What of Hawaii? What of Puerto Rico?
Stay strong y’all. See through the contradictions and keep applying Marxism Leninism to the times! There is still hope yet!
Really depends on the type of people irl. The more typical working class people I know can’t be arsed to form an opinion it seems, but I’d bet money on it that they’d choose China if they had to.
But there is a very large, very smug ‘educated’ liberal and left wing group that think they know it all. And they tend to be the most vocal about these kind of things. Especially the so called radical left wingers in mainly The Netherlands, who think they have invented a superior form of socialism and every actual socialist state is not socialist and should be scrutinized. In Belgium, where I live, people so far seem to be more nuanced on the take.
Sounds about right.
There’s an argument that it’s the education process that creates the “very smug ‘…’ liberal and left wing group that think they know it all”.
I’ve got an educated liberal friend that I’m trying to work on radicalizing, but their education just makes it incredibly hard. They form opinions and just assume those opinions are right because they’ve been educated. They talk about decolonizing, but mean it in a figurative “reach enlightenment” kind of way instead of, ya know, actual decolonizing. When I said we needed actual decolonization and that it would require revolution, I was told that was a “colonizer mindset”. It’s horrible.
I was that person once 😕.
One thing that helped pull me towards Marxism was having a Marxist friend point out the contradictions in my liberal answers – and confirm that these contradictions were problematic because X,Y, Z.
One problem is that the better liberal thinkers tend to point out their own contradictions but they have ways of dismissing criticisms. It seems like intellectual honesty and high-minded reasonableness 🤮.
For example, they may conclude (without any strong evidence), that theirs (not necessarily your friend, but e.g. Berlin, Hayek, Rawls, etc) is the best answer because even though it has flaws, ‘there is no alternative’. You may have to do some work convincing your friend that there is an alternative way of thinking that resolves the contradictions rather than letting them just 'hang’in the air: i.e. Marxism.
As Mao said, liberals stand for unprincipled compromise. But (educated) liberals have been taught that this is good. Liberals can be stubborn even when we go softly softly!
A useful strategy may be to get your friend to draw some lines in the sand and say they would not compromise on A, B or C, then lead them to see that their liberal answer would mean compromising on exactly those points. Then let them stew with the cognitive dissonance. In a later conversation, bring it up again and propose a Marxist answer that would not compromise on A, B, or C.
A, B, or C being, say, easy and cheap access to e.g. housing, food, healthcare, etc. Maybe even torture, etc, depending on the topic.
That’s a good idea. I’ll try that. Thank you!