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.
I always felt it was weird to insult the post war construction in the USSR. It’s the same problem liberals always have. When they see something they don’t like they never ask if there was even a reasonable alternative. In this case, they look at the successful Soviet effort to quickly rebuild all of the housing and civic buildings the west destroyed, get mad, and then never adk themselves if there was some better way to accomplish this urgent and vital task (there wasn’t).
It’s an incredibly asshole thing to do.
It’s like when people comment on those videos of the DPRK about how boring and sad it looks
I wonder why it’s so utilitarian and concrete
Many of the pictures of the DPRK are also made to show it in a bad light. Is this boring and sad? Is this random image I found “boring and sad”?
Honestly, there is little more frustrating than people from former AES countries talking that kind of nonsense.
My favorite similar interaction, [we were talking about the corrupt government privatizing public beaches to friendly oligarchs]:
They are just as bad as the commies! They sell everything to their friends on the cheap!
My brother in Brezhnev, who the fuck do you think built the public beach infrastructure?!
he watches SerpentZA and Laowhy86
You have my sympathy: regular American libs are smug and narrow-minded enough, but German and Scandanavian libs are fucking insufferable
As a norwegian, the libs in my country have developed a form of Russia Derangement Syndrome that makes most american libs look well adjusted.
The Ukraine war has turned my countrymen’s brains to mush.
I remember seeing a bus that said “Fuck Putin” on its headsign at some point in the months after the start of the war. I was at that point still a bit of an anarcho-bidenist thinking that the ebil poutin was attacking smolbean ukraine for no good reason… But the sheer tackiness of putting “Fuck Putin” on a bus’ headsign, the sheer empty gesturing of it, the fact that an already completely tired message about the leader of another country was now replacing the actually important information that’s supposed to go on a bus’ headsign; and most strikingly for me the fact that the text was in English, using a widdwe swearie that’s oh-so-taboo gosh oh gee you wouldn’t expect to see that on a bus would you… Yeah, it bothered me, I guess. Maybe that was one little moment of cognitive dissonance that helped push me towards the right position.
Anybody who speaks English but hasn’t been to the U.S. or England (and more specifically hasn’t lived and (this is the most important bit) worked in those countries) is usually going to be some kind of Ameriboo. Many times they will end up Ameriboos even if they do move there, especially if they stick to some of the nicer cities, but most of the time the flavor of America goes away very quickly after the college experience wears off.
Look, unless you are actually actively participating in politics, and you plan on doing some direct action that requires their support, you are of no moral obligation to argue with them. Most of Mao and Sankara’s stuff only makes sense in the context of an already widespread and militant political movement. Your ‘friend’ is an Ameriboo moron, but so are most Europeans, it’s why their economy can be lead by the nose by the U.S. They can’t even acknowledge that the problem exists, let alone begin to deal with it.
Anybody who speaks English but hasn’t been to the U.S. or England […] is usually going to be some kind of Ameriboo.
Ireland:
But yeah, it’s a shame things still are this way.
unless you are actually actively participating in politics,
I certainly try, but I also certainly don’t do nearly enough.
and you plan on doing some direct action that requires their support,
Well, I was originally just intending on asking his pronouns because I was going to mention him as an anecdote in a presentation I might hold for some event I was invited to. He asked what I was going to be talking about in the presentation, and that’s how this whole thing happened.
Your ‘friend’ is an Ameriboo moron,
Certainly not my friend now, I can say that much…
Most of Mao and Sankara’s stuff only makes sense in the context of an already widespread and militant political movement.
Well, what would you recommend instead, then? I certainly don’t like the thought of having to look at people being misled and acting foolish and just generally losing their dignity.
You need to find people who are like-minded and from there pursue and advocate for political action. This is the tough part. If there is someone within your active and engaged political group that is misleading people, then it is absolutely your moral obligation to never be exhausted in arguing with them. That being said, you should always try to be honest with your opinions towards third-parties, but never assume good-faith or that you can or should persuade them. You are under no moral obligation to consider their foolishness.
I literally live in the heart of it, the land of hundreds of flag-flying whiners. It is either figure out how to create distance and some boundaries or drive yourself insane with repetitive arguments that never will sink in because there is no material consequences to a fundamental rejection of moral reasoning.
The power of Hollywood is severely understated. People think that immigrants come to the US because they see it as the safest option for imperialism or whatever when most of the time it’s because they consume us media and think everybody lives like the people on tv.
You see this in every country where English isn’t the first language. The more fluent they are the bigger ameriboos they tend to be. I managed not to be one only because I was brought to the US against my own will and lived there for a decade.
Europeans are especially guilty of this. Funny how the people who colonized the world just roll over and allow the Americans to culturally colonize them via Netflix and YouTube
