redtea comments on Uncritical support for Ben Norton against the LaRouchite cranks at The Grayzone (like Max Blumenthal).

[–] redtea@lemmygrad.ml 20 points 3 years ago* (9 children)

I've had conversations with 'leftists' who religiously ignore right wing literature and are shocked to hear me cite it after revealing that I'm a Marxist. Concrete analysis of concrete conditions and the ruthless criticism of all that exists mfs. That means you've got to learn to read things you disagree with.

You can't treat it like a team sport where you assume that your side has a monopoly on knowledge (well, MLs do, but that's different 😉) or as if contrary views are contagious. If you're at risk of reading a biography of Reagan and becoming a neoliberal, perhaps you're not as principled as you'd like to think.

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[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 3 years ago* (6 children)

You need to remind those people that we wouldn't even have had Marxism if Marx had chosen to ignore everything Adam Smith had written in the way they choose to ignore everything that can be labeled "right wing".

Part of being politically (and scientifically) literate is being able to treat sources critically.

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[–] redtea@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 3 years ago (5 children)

Got to wonder how much of this is pushed by state security services. People are far less dangerous if they don't know what's really happening. Iirc @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml is regularly challenged e.g. for citing Rand. As if you can know what the right wing thinks by ignoring it's bloody think tanks (which happen to be quite open about the horrors they want to unleash on the world and, lo and behold, whose policy papers often become policy a few months or years later).

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[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 3 years ago (3 children)

It's absolutely incredible how much of this stuff is right there in the open. The really sad part of all this is that even when this information is officially published and accessible, people will still refuse to acknowledge it. This is what we're up against.

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[–] redtea@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 3 years ago (2 children)

About ten seconds after I posted this I saw that you'd been heavily down voted for saying that China has long term economic plans. It's misplaced but I can understand libs being mad at praise for China. But mad at basic facts? Come on now.

It's no coincidence that you find agreement over basic facts in the kinds of sources we're talking about. Not always. And it can be spun in different ways. But, yeah, it's just… yeah… I'm lost for words when I come across it. Online anti-communists are deeply unserious yet entirely unaware of it, apparently. They can have strong and what they think are rigorous viewpoints without ever really having delved into the topic.

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[–] QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 3 years ago

Online anti-communists are deeply unserious yet entirely unaware of it, apparently.

I met one that didn’t know didn’t know Africa and South America weren’t countries until yesterday. It astounds me they can know so little when we are the same age (granted we’re 15, but still).

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[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 3 years ago

I think that's exactly it. Liberalism has effectively become a religion for these people and they just filter out any information that contradicts what their ideology preaches. There is a positive aspect to this however because it makes it impossible for the west to make coherent plans to advance western hegemony. The political class is an echo chamber that's completely disengaged from reality at this point, and the policies they pass continue to fail in a spectacular fashion.

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