Personally I’m not that good at countering liberal comments on our posts, which seems to be happening more and more frequently with any posts relating to China. It’d be a lot easier if we could have a big pinned post with all the materials we need so we can just link to it whenever we need to.
I think prolewiki can fill some of that role.
The link to Dessalines’ GitHub page in the side bar is good for this.
The danger to that is it adds to the “But lemmy is a tankie project that we should never use” narritive
Good point. Do you think it’s better to look to the links themselves rather than the database or to try a different tactic, as @Justice@lemmygrad.ml suggests?
I fundamentally disagree with Justice, in the fact that if we do not engage, if we do not counter at all ever, if we sit in our corner and talk about it no liberal will ever learn, and while we might hang on talking too them for far longer than its worth, and that it is infuriating talking to a liberal, we do not get anywhere if we do not at least TRY to talk to them.
With that ramble out of the way, I would say if you are going to link and leave, I would sugest leaving the individual links, however I would recomend also leaving a little bit of a statement with it, as it is easy to just ignore a link with no context.
I’d say you probably shouldn’t try to counter them. Not often anyway. It’s mentally taxing and ultimately produces basically zero fruit. People grow up their entire lives, their nice comfy lives btw, being told “China bad! US good!” and although you obviously can’t just swap that moronic narrative and make it true… it’s much closer to the truth. They already believe insane bullshit, basically. Can you argue a fairly devout religious person down from their religion of choice? Of course not. And leaving aside the religious stuff, they have to find a reason to change their minds within themselves. Everyone in “the west” who was born and raised within its culture by the average normie-brained neoliberals that have been dominant for the last 40ish years and ended up on this website is way outside of the norm. People like to say “I watched/read/heard X and it changed me!” No, it didn’t. You changed because things around you didn’t add up. You looked into it. You probably found a bunch of shit that you thought was insane conspiracy (not theories, but actual conspiracies). Maybe some is/was but a lot of the shit if we’re talking about reading into the history of western nations especially the US is true. The worst shit did happen. And it’s hard to come to grips, properly, with the reality that you are not living in the good nation. That China isn’t full of misguided fools, that the USSR often held a much higher moral ground on basically every discussion of everything… that much of what we were told about them is just straight up lies or exaggerated for propagandistic effect. I think accepting China isn’t the absolute demonic evil of the world is probably damn near the last thing for westerners to break out of. Well, besides the monkey-brain shit which might be impossible to break for many people cough anarchists cough (reactionary tendencies towards individualism comes to mind). If you throw out facts of how the US is objectively, absolutely no debate, insanely worse for the world including many of its own citizens you’re just gonna get CNN talking points, state dept lies, links to horribly written, poorly sourced bullshit about the billions of Muslims that China apparently liquidated last month. Only slight exaggeration. They don’t want to learn or hear the truth. They literally don’t care. It will take either time and circumstances unique to them to change their minds (after an academic journey of some sort, as all of us had to do) or… force. No one can do the first method and we obviously lack the power to do the second (for now…). So, sure, post some links, point out the easiest most obvious hypocrisy (like people shitting over “China spying” meanwhile the NSA has exabytes of fucking data on the exact dimensions of your cock and asshole) but I wouldn’t engage too much. I try to limit myself to about once a day, and I don’t read the hog replies because what’s the point of the mental disease?
Well said. It’s pointless to argue for 10 minutes to someone out of a position that they were incubated in for their entire lives. You can plant a seed and they can pursue that if they want, but it’s internal work. Don’t induce suffering on yourself by taking on their ignorance as your burden.
Perhaps the wording could’ve been better, but I wasn’t referring to liberalism as a mental disease. It was meant to be a little callback to the beginning and referencing how mentally exhausting, draining, etc. it is for me to deal with the same baseless arguments over and over from bad faith people with zero knowledge or even beliefs.
If it was possible I’d have a little disclaimer next to my username that says like “I wrote this while shitting or while sitting on a bench wasting time between workout sets. It’s not refined and nearly zero effort went into this post.”
A fellow comrade once told me that you don’t engage the liberals to win the argument against that particular person, you do it to convince the fencesitters lurking the comments. Ultimately, the more you make the Marxist viewpoint part of people’s discourse, the more they’ll question. Its how I became a Marxist, I’m sure there are others out there with a similar experience.
This has always been my position. There is a close to 0% chance you are going to change the mind of the person you are arguing with, with the rare exception of people who have only a surface-level understanding of the issues and are not yet emotinally or intellectually invested.
There are always bystanders though who will see what people are posting. The Marxist providing rational and well reasoned arguments is going to seem a lot more compelling to people who themselves aren’t invested, especially compared to somebody verbally running around in circles making unfounded claims.
