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Remember me comrades!
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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I experience the opposite. Whenever I criticise US government, I get attacked by hordes of cringy Americans.
I must say I had a pleasant conversation on workers’ rights in the US recently on c/technology (lemmy.world). By pleasant I mean "not being insulted because I live in France and workers do have rights so I’m a red commie" pleasant.
For the majority of Americans, as long as you are a pleasant person, you will have pleasant conversations, even if it’s about a disagreement.
A. This leads to politeness fetishists and tone policing. If someone says something offensive like "we should remove LGBT+ books from schools," I'd rather shoot myself than speak nicely to that person.
B. This has not been my experience with my fellow Americans at all. I even saw a mod from lemmy.world post mod-flaired horseshit in their politics community about how "The US is not a racist country." Fuck that.
Hi from the autistic guy that is physically unable to understand the rules of „politeness“ and burns out while pathetically trying to mimic them just to look like a creep anyway.
hello!
How can we have a pleasant conversation about the murders the American soldiers are committing in the Middle East? How does one be pleasant about murder?
That's weird considering America's favourite pass time is to bitch about how shitty our government is
Lol yeah, I'm confused by this. Our government is a fucking mess right now!
is there any chance you are doing it while spouting Kremlin propaganda? because then there is maybe a time to look in the mirror on this one
Anyone that disagrees with the US government is spouting Kremlin propaganda. Riiiiight....
You are a joke.
I mean, if you take what I said and completely change it, I can see why you might be upset at that. Though I would encourage you to reply to what I actually said.
I am indeed a very funny guy, it's a bit creepy that you know that though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
There should be a bot that posts this link whenever the phrase "kremlin propaganda" is mentioned. Maybe then you'll learn.
I merely posited that you might be getting into arguments because you have drank the Kremlin propaganda, but from your posts I see it's more that youblike to defend the Chinese government for some reason or at least like to do "a Whatabout the USA"
also I am not sure you ubderstand what ad hominem is, it's attacking the person saying it rather what the person is saying, if I were to say "you are spouting Kremlin propaganda" would be the exact opposite since I would be "attacking" what you are saying not who you are.
hope that helps
A lot of americans and some other westerners always assume that anyone who disagrees with them must be infected with Russian/Chinese/(insert bogeyman) propaganda.
Whereas the truth is that the Western civilization is on a murder spree and the rest of us who are not Westerners are disgusted by it.
:)
Is it wrong to engage in a conversation with people we disagree with?
Would you rather have us segregate based on our opinions?
Imagine living in the west and genuinely believing that it's Kremlin propaganda that's the problem.
More than one thing can be wrong at the same time. The constant whataboutism is exhausting...
whataboutism is what hypocrites say when challenged.
The only thing exhausting is people using whataboutism to make false equivalents and avoid genuine discussion. People are subjected to orders of magnitude more US propaganda than Russian propaganda, and it clearly has a much greater effect on public opinion. Thanks to people being indoctrinated into US propaganda, they dismiss legitimate problems as fictional Russian propaganda. The fact that you can't comprehend this illustrates the problem perfectly.
Oh it's this guy again.
Lol
cry ab it
I don't want to, I hate getting a runny nose :(
Imagine thinking any large state isn't constantly injecting propaganda into the Internet. Couldn't be me.
Not what I said though was it? What I said was that people in the west are subjected to orders of magnitude of western propaganda, and perhaps should worry about that first. Russian media is even banned in most of Europe at this point. Chomsky even pointed out recently that censorship in the west now is even worse than it was in USSR.
I'm capable of worrying about two things. Perhaps even three on a good day.
Media being bad because capitalism pushes them to do evil to further their own ends is not the same thing as censorship enforced with state violence. These are both bad things, but uniquely bad in their own ways. I'm sad that Chomsky's age has caught up to him and he can no longer distinguish the two.
press x to doubt
It's incredible that somebody could be so deplorably ignorant to think that US doesn't enforce censorship with state violence. US tortured Manning and is currently having UK torture Assange for revealing US war crimes. Chapter 10 in this book gives lots of examples of political repression in US where activists have been harassed, arrested, and even assassinated by the state https://archive.org/details/DemocracyForTheFew16147062951821
The only thing you should be sad about is your own ignorance. Maybe instead of claiming that Chomsky can't distinguish things you should learn about what your regime actually does. Just a thought.
When people talk about censorship, they usually mean of media. Yes, I'm aware that the US government is an evil institution that targets activists and whistleblowers. You'll never believe me, but I actually despise my government and nearly every person in it. However, authoritarian regimes also strike down those people, but additionally censor the media on top of it. So to say that state censorship is worse here and now is just asinine. There's no need to make things up to seem worse than they are when they're already very bad, it just leads to people swinging at ghosts.
Every government is authoritarian by its very nature. The government derives authority from having monopoly on legalized violence. The only reason there is the illusion of freedom of speech is due to the fact that mainstream views are carefully curated. Any ideas that are seen as a threat are eliminated just as ruthlessly in the west as anywhere else. Entire books have been written on this subject.
Nobody is making anything up here. The reality is that state censorship in the west is no different from the countries you consider authoritarian, the only difference is that it's dressed up in a way that's palatable to western public. In fact, it could be argued that governments in places like China are simply more honest with their public. They're explicit regarding what ideas they reject while the west uses sophistry to create an illusion of freedoms that don't translate into anything tangible.
For goodness' sake, can we not do this? I'm an anarchist, I know this. I oppose the state on a conceptual level for this very reason. I'm speaking to you like a normal person using language that I know you understood the intended meaning of. There's no need to engage in academic fartsniffery here. Just be normal.
The owners of our media have a vested interest in maintaining their own control. They are not compelled to act by outside force, they largely act of their own free will to maintain their position in our corrupt system. Understanding this distinction is crucial to being able to fix it. This is the true insidious nature of our system, at this point it is maintained by people pursuing their own interests rather than by an overarching plot. There's no need for one anymore, it is self-sustaining and perpetuating, like a cancer.
Meanwhile, I'm not an anarchist, and I do not oppose the state at a conceptual level. However, I do think that the state represents the interests of the class that controls power in society, and that western capitalist states fundamentally represent the interests of capitalists. So, when people talk about capitalist states having some sort of free speech for the oppressed working class, I find that surreal to be honest.
Any meaningful free speech translates into tangible action, and when that happens the state uses brutal methods to stomp it out. MLK and Fred Hampton are two prominent examples of what happens when people in US try to exercise freedom of expression in a meaningful way.
They are the capitalist class who built the system to serve their own interests. The owners of the media are not compelled by force because they are the people whom the state represents. The state is a management bureaucracy for resolving the differences between capitalists in a civilized way.
What's crucial for fixing anything is understanding the nature of the state and whom it serves. Your comment makes it pretty clear that you lacking this understanding.
Little do people know everyone is shit and your personality that is only based on ideologies makes you look like a moron. Yes we know there is unfairness in the world. But any “ism” won’t fix it.
Doomerism be like:
Least of all quietism like you display
Yeah you're right shits fucked so let's just accept the status quo, oh would you look at that you're just supporting the current oppressive system.
Being a centrist or "apolotical" is just being a conservative while still being able to fuck
People who say this think they're being world-wise when they're actually just putting out a general warning about themselves
"No Lives Matter" type beat
Just because you don’t care to look into it doesn’t mean you don’t prescribe to any ism
In fact, people who say shit like that most definitely do
autism will save the day
True statement, but wtf? I don't think you mean it in a positive way like I do.
I do mean it positively, but I can understand why you would get a negative reading. I was trying to illustrate how reducing words to their components and dismissing them like that is such a stupid thought terminating cliche. Botulism, anarchism, autism, midwesternism, descriptivism are all words ending in -ism but really do not refer to similar or comparable things. The deeper idea that subscribing to or employing an ideology inherently leads to failure, which the original comment asserted, has already been torn to shreds by others, so I targeted the less important but more annoying failure of thought. I should have more carefully selected my words, sorry.
Thank you for replying, and I'm sorry I read your comment in bad faith. I should know you better than that by now, and I apologize.
No worries. Like I said, I should have gone with botulism or descriptivism, to make sure there was no misreading.
"Yes we know absolute monarchs, unequal access to justice, oppression and the dumb wars they get us into are unfair, but no 'democracism' will fix it"
It takes a very basic knowledge of history to understand why this argument is shit.