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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I wonder why extremists hate liberals so much. They all talk of liberals with such disdain.

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[-] [email protected] 39 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I don't think you convert people with facts and logic. It's the same way you don't make a lot of sales by telling people what offerings you have. "Hello, John Business? This is Sammy Stranger. I think you'll like using Sammy Software, we have 300 gigabytes of... Hello? Did you hang up on me?"

Some people need bad things to happen to them personally before they'll think about things. They might be immature, incurious people or simply willing to gamble. When your mom gets a 100k healthcare bill and then you're like "well then this whole system is fucked up!"

Some people have a troop dad and a cop cousin. It's really hard to disentangle their propagandized upbringing from their personal identity. They'd sooner empathize with the Israelis than the people they're genociding.

Some people study economics and get their news from mainstream sources. Fuck it, maybe they're familiar with first hand accounts of people treated poorly in AES. China really did have a famine made worse by their central planning.

You need to expand someone's horizons to get them to entertain socialism in the first place. You necessarily have to probe their sense of justice and empathy. If they're not down to care about the people they punch down on then there's not much use teaching them to care. You'll get into deep philosophical discussions like "would you be a valid target in a Native American rebellion?" and "what if you treated your tenants fairly?" You would probably need to know finer details about military interventions all across the world, the actions of the Soviet Union, and what happened during the Sino-Soviet split. It might not happen all at once. If they're serious about intellectual curiosity then they might give you a chance to prepare your case. But at the end of the day you'll probably have to demonstrate that your ultimate goal cares about the plight of the oppressed and demonstrate how it makes the world more prosperous. It probably happened to you if you're here - otherwise who debated you into socialism?

[-] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago

You can convince people with facts and logic but they have to be ready to have an open minded conversation and you have to talk on a subject where they can actually do so. If a topic is somehow precious to someone or they get easily frustrated, they can just talk themselves in circles indefinitely or get angry and leave. But you can find gaps by asking questions. For example, the lemmygrad poster that was screenshotted includes that they compared Marxism "in the real world" compared to capitalism, which already means they don't even know what Marxism is (it is not an economic system lol). I'd ask them to define Marxism and then start talking about its actual meaning from some other angle, e.g. ask them what they read. It definitely wasn't Capital.

this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
50 points (98.1% liked)

Slop.

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