He said that the United States has “toned down its bullying of other countries”, and that people learn English “because of American culture like Hollywood” rather than because there is legitimately an unequal and domineering dynamic between the United States and other countries. And I was just thinking, “Do you literally live under a rock‽”

He also said that he watches SerpentZA and Laowhy86, that he used to be “pro-China” because he believed that “it was in western countries’ interests to give China a bad rap”, but that because these YouTubers became so vocally anti-China that he’s followed their lead — because after all, they used to live in China, they speak Chinese, and they use “Chinese sources”, so surely they know what they’re talking about, right? And I had frankly never heard of these YouTubers before, so I looked them up, and my immediate thought was, “Holy shit, how gullible do you have to be, to take these titles and thumbnails with any amount of seriousness‽”

And of course I also thought, “The only way you could lose the thread on how the West pushes anti-China rhetoric is if you don’t have any clue what ‘the West’ is or what it means to ‘push rhetoric’, because holy shit you’re falling for a trap that you yourself identified”

He also also said that he believed that until we’ve built a “marxist utopia” that intellectual property is a “necessary evil”, because it incentivizes corporations to invest into yadda yadda yadda, and I was just thinking, “Why the fuck do you care about what corporations think‽ Are you also opposed to squatting because the housing market is a ‘necessary evil’, too‽”

But I remain a pushover so instead of arguing I just kept saying “I don’t want to start an argument, but I really don’t agree with you.” or “I expected your politics to be very different.” (because he is a furry and has social anxiety and a fucky gender), or at most I said, “YouTubers with flashy thumbnails are generally not a good source of news. I have personally experienced getting tricked by anti-China YouTubers before, so I want you to be very skeptical of these people you’re watching.”

And now instead of just outright saying what I feel to him, I’m complaining here, because I just don’t think he’s willing to listen to anything I might say. Because you know how libs are, they always think they know better than anyone else, everything you say will be dismissed in one way or another, but I know that I should argue regardless of that because that’s what Sankara would want, isn’t it? I mean, I think it can be good sometimes to just listen to people talk a load of bullshit because that can be good intel on the way someone thinks, that it can help one identify the flaws in someone’s reasoning to make a more effective argument, or that’s at least what I tell myself when I act like such a pushover — but truth be told there’s only so much libness I can take at a time, especially when I’m not getting into a conversation expecting it to become political.

One more personal bit of insult in this conversation I had, in fact it was the thing that got the whole spiel about China and IP and Usonian imperialism started, was that I had said to this fellow that I feel “protective” of the English language because it’s my native language — which is to say, that I want people in my country to stop speaking English to the extent that they do, and for English to instead be equal in status to languages like Portuguese or Russian or Arabic. And he called my position “weird”, because English is “too ubiquitous to be protective of” and “it’s handy to have an international language”… And, like, Hell, maybe I am weird, but I just took offense to that, because it felt like he was saying “your language doesn’t belong to you”. I tried to rephrase myself to say that “OK, maybe what I mean to say is that I want to be able to be protective of the language, but I feel like I’m denied that opportunity.”, and I tried to explain how in my future fiction stuff I’m writing, International Sign eventually overtakes English as the international lingua franca of the future, after the collapse of Usonian imperialism.

But he just wouldn’t understand why I hate the role that English plays in society. And I’m sure that nobody else would understand, either, because it feels like a fairly unique position I’m in that led me to forming my beliefs.

This experience, the way he basically called me a weirdo for having these feelings towards my own first language, together with his outright denial of the mere existence of American imperialism — it just felt like a real moment of two radically different perspectives meeting, you know? Because of course the existence of American imperialism is obvious to me, since I’m an American born and raised outside the United States — I’m the one who ends up the fetish of the dynamic between the United States and Norway, I’m the one who tries to express pride in my immigrant background like any other immigrant’s child should, only to find that anything I could call my own has already been forcefully imposed on the rest of my country. — But for this person I was chatting with, on the other hand… My whole motivation for chatting with him was because when we went to school together, he spoke English so frequently and so proficiently that I thought it was his native language, until he told me it wasn’t. And as I see it now, the type of person who grows up consuming so much Seppo bullshit that he could pass for literally being an American, is a person who accepts cultural imperialism and treats it as natural to such a degree that he ends up just completely taking on the worldview of the Great Shaitan.

So I dunno, it’s just… I keep getting disappointed by how there are so many people who are so clearly marginalized in so many different ways, and yet time and time again, labor aristocracy seems to trump over all else. And I might know how I myself fortunately got out of that type of thinking, but the fact of the matter is that I cannot fix everyone I know all by myself. Like, at least I got to grow up with this lived personal perception of US imperialism — but for someone who isn’t even able to acknowledge the existence of American imperialism, for someone who is that much of an idealist, where on Earth do you even begin‽

Sigh. Could’ve gone worse, though.