Classic r*dditor bullshit.

They take "A simple rule that most often turns out to put you on the right side of history is to take the opposite position of what the US government is telling you" and they turn that into "They're just a contrarian who is politically illiterate".

Bruh. They're not telling you that every single thing the government tells you is wrong by virtue of the fact that it comes from the mouth of the government; seatbelts do save lives, vaccines are critical to public health. They're telling you that the US government has a very extensive and well-documented history of lying through its teeth on matters of foreign policy and by extension that fact, if you reject and invert the message of the US propaganda apparatus then you're probably going to be on the right side of history.

That's not saying the same thing as "you will be correct" or "don't learn about history" or "my entire political orientation is anti-Americanism".

That's saying that you are exposed to an astonishing amount of propaganda and you need to critically engage with the world around you instead of reflexively swallowing up the convenient narratives and the absolute glut of propaganda that you consume on a regular basis, willingly or otherwise. That old Cold War era joke about propaganda comes to mind.

The person in the video, Madeline Pendleton, appears to be quite well-versed in history and theory. Enough that I'd take them seriously. Enough that they have to hide their power level on social media.

This is in opposition to the geopolitics expert Va*sh who recently discovered that Cyprus is an actual country that exists, while skim-reading the Wikipedia entry on livestream no less, and then proceeded to opine about a country whose demonym he failed to pronounce correctly multiple times (I guess he didn't bother to skim read the IPA entry for the word "Cypriot"...) and someone who studied sociology at university who, again live on stream, expounded upon Durkheim's concept of anomie (which is sociology 101 stuff) as "being like nihilism and whatever...", completely divorced from the other three parts of the axis that anomie is situated within which is crucial to understanding the concept. Look, I get it - I have ADHD. I forget conceptual shit all the time and I have to look up dates and all of that stuff. I didn't have the expectation that Vaush could just rattle off the whole axis of Durkheim's from the top of his head. (I know I can't - I always forget one.) But the point is that I can look up the image of that axis and then describe what each part represents and I can give examples of each which are easy to grasp. Because I know the concept.

Va*sh, on the other hand, clearly got introduced to the concept and did the classic middle class whiteboy manoeuvre and decided that he actually understood it before he even encountered it and so he just presumed that his towering intellect put him far above starting from a place of earnest ignorance that is accounted for and he just inferred backwards from there.

If you've ever done tertiary study then you know of the "that guy" in class. The one who always speaks up and argues with the professor. The one who has an opinion about everything and, at least in classes like philosophy or sociology, they get their question answered with another question and it goes on and on until they manage to paint themselves into a corner with their answers while completely failing to realise it and everyone else is either completely checked out by that point or they are audibly groaning at their lack of insight.

As an example:

"But the second Iraq War was justified"

"Why is that?"

"Because we needed to stop the terrorist threat from Saddam Hussein"

"What credible terrorist threat did Saddam Hussein pose to the US?"

"Well it's not like the WMDs existed but he was terrorizing his own people and he was a threat to the region"

"Would you say that when a country terrorizes its own people and poses a threat to the region that it's justifiable to invade them and overthrow their government?"

"Of course. We couldn't just stand by and do nothing."

"Would you say that Mexico had a just cause to invade the United States for its campaign of terrorism against native Americans, black people, and Mexican people who found themselves on the other side of the shifting border between it and the US? For posing the most serious threat to the region? And that this would have even been a moral imperative?"

"No, that's different because the United States wasn't actively terrorizing its people like Saddam Hussein was"

"So if a country imprisons its political dissidents indefinitely and engages in systematic torture and that sort of thing then it's justified?"

"Yeah"

"So would it be right for Mexico to invade the US because of the documented cases of indefinite imprisonment and systematic torture in CIA black sites around the world, of Guantanamo bay prison, and while the US occupied Iraq in Abu Ghraib prison for example?"

"No, that's different because it's counterterrorism"

"So it's okay to do these things as long as the government labels its prisoners as terrorists first?"

"Well no, but I'm saying that it's necessary to do these things as a part of counterterrorism"

"What makes you certain that the people who Saddam Hussein terrorized weren't themselves terrorists and that his actions were not a program of counterterrorism?"

...aaaand the next 20 minutes or so gets pissed up a wall on this sort of back-and-forth as one pigheaded idiot is so lacking in insight that they don't realise that all of their arguments are a variation of "But it's okay if we do it because we're the good guys so if we do something bad it's an accident but the other side are the bad guys so when they do it, it's intentional" and they aren't willing to even acknowledge the abject inconsistency in their own position as they proceed to double and triple down.

Va*sh typifies this attitude and the thing that really pisses me off about it isn't that he's wrong or that he lacks credibility but that he actively promotes disinfo (not like "his politics are opposed to mine" sort of disinfo either) it's that he encourages his audience to adopt the same attitude of arrogance he has while sneering with derision at them book-lernin' types.

The marsh is Va*sh's rightful place and I don't care about that, but what I do care about all the people who he is leading into the marsh with him.

I didn't finish the video, but I just - we're gonna see leftists support Hitler, aren't we. Like, it's only a matter of time before "America bad, therefore America's enemy good" leads these people to supporting the Axis. I'm sure some of them already support Imperial Japan.

These V*ush libs aren't self-aware at all. These idiots defend Azov and the other fascists in Ukraine, and now they accuse other leftists of being pro-nazi? You can't make this stuff up.

That’s not true. You can literally go to China and then fly to North Korea. Otto Warmbier did it, look how it turned out for him

Warmbier's death is what precipitated the ban you fucking moron!

All these people have no fucking idea what she is even referring to with the "can't travel to NK" thing, like they won't even Google it. If you travel there without special permission from the US government, it will invalidate your passport and then you're fucking stuck because you are outside of your country with no passport. The US says only special cases like "journalists" (subject to its approval) can go, which is why she's talking about RFA ghouls having much better access than any normal citizen.

Complete aside, Warmbier probably should have thought twice before committing multiple crimes as basically an act of hooliganism. It's a shame he got botulism, but there's no reason to expect that the DPRK did that on purpose, and they devoted a lot of attention to taking care of him in his reduced state.

uncritical support for the DPRK in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire

Love the mentions of Otto Warmbier. No evidence to contradict the DPRK's medical analysis, 17 months of high quality medical care, returned to his parents to make the decision on whether to pull the plug - Sounds like they're pretty cool guys, really.

Oh, thank God! I thought it was about juggalos. Phew!

Maybe one day westoid leftists will understand that the most powerful nation / government on earth being a largely malicious actor has major implications for the rest of geopolitics, but until then, fuck all of these people.

75%

rookie numbers

see a lot of complaints about "leftists and 'young people' not educated in foreign policy" comments as a way to dismiss the tiktoker's claims, and not a lot of what I'd call "actually looking into foreign policy and history to understand the dprk." Just a lot of acceptance at face value of state dept talking points.

these people are not as smart as they think they are

People like this make me afraid that the best leftism in north america can look like is a more disorganized, more right-wing version of the SPD. The best these people could do is get decent people killed for nothing.

lol look at those libs go

They are incapable of intellectual nuance. People are either good or bad because ifvtheir good or bad thoughts. Like they can't conceive that someone may look at the DPRK and go "Yeah everything about their society isn't ideal, but it is the way it is fir real historical reasons. Largely crimes committed by the usa. And si we probably shouldn't kill them all." Like saying that to one of these people is the equivalent of saying "I support 1984, gulagarchipalago, kill all the queers."