cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/766438
Some of the replies and reposts have me chuckling.
I’ve had conversations with ‘leftists’ who religiously ignore right wing literature and are shocked to hear me cite it after revealing that I’m a Marxist. Concrete analysis of concrete conditions and the ruthless criticism of all that exists mfs. That means you’ve got to learn to read things you disagree with.
You can’t treat it like a team sport where you assume that your side has a monopoly on knowledge (well, MLs do, but that’s different 😉) or as if contrary views are contagious. If you’re at risk of reading a biography of Reagan and becoming a neoliberal, perhaps you’re not as principled as you’d like to think.
You need to remind those people that we wouldn’t even have had Marxism if Marx had chosen to ignore everything Adam Smith had written in the way they choose to ignore everything that can be labeled “right wing”.
Part of being politically (and scientifically) literate is being able to treat sources critically.
Got to wonder how much of this is pushed by state security services. People are far less dangerous if they don’t know what’s really happening. Iirc @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml is regularly challenged e.g. for citing Rand. As if you can know what the right wing thinks by ignoring it’s bloody think tanks (which happen to be quite open about the horrors they want to unleash on the world and, lo and behold, whose policy papers often become policy a few months or years later).
It’s absolutely incredible how much of this stuff is right there in the open. The really sad part of all this is that even when this information is officially published and accessible, people will still refuse to acknowledge it. This is what we’re up against.
I personally think liberal media is extremely useful to be familiar with because they tip their own hand so often if you know how to spot it.
