The comments under this post has made me completely lose whatever hope I had left for the US Americans.
This is the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/s/te63dh9qe4
These are the comments under it:
you can tell them "how maduro is a dictator but bukele doesn't?" the "good times" in capitalist venezuela were because a petrol bonanza, after that, the caracazo happened, chavez made the "misiones" and corina doesn't have anything to show except complaining about being persecuted because telling people "i want to gift the country to the us to be a rich comprador government" are bad PR
Please don't let redditors form your opinion on any group of people.
Most Americans are admittedly terrible but most Americans aren't redditors thankfully.
There are reasons why I refer to myself as Cascadian, despite being under US-American jurisdiction.
That's fair.
I don't really identify with the "American" label on a social or cultural level anymore. To me that's just what my citizenship is. These days I tend just call myself a Yankee more generally or a Hoosier if I need to be more specific. These are labels that in my perspective are tied more to regions and the people in them rather than the polities that occupy them.
Yeah. In my experience, people are more often plain ignorant on international issues than they are attentively wrong about them. Reddit is largely imperialist brain poison. It serves up imperialist distortions as casual fact and then cements it through a system of popular vote (which can easily be brigaded/botted, but that's not obvious to the casual user on the surface), to make it seem like a popular (and therefore more valid) view. Someone who is entering into these topics in total ignorance will get the completely wrong idea about them and come away with imperialist talking points in their head.
From my experience with reddit, it largely made my understanding of things worse at the time. And when I did know better later (no thanks to reddit) and tried to share that knowing better via reddit, it was usually downvoted to oblivion, if not getting me banned from a sub depending on the topic.
I understand there are the rare niche left subs (before they got "quarantined" or banned) that had some value. But the broader reddit experience is imperialist slop.
Pretty much, yeah. Imgur is the same (same community, even) but arguably worse since subreddits don't exist.
They don't even need to manufacture consent redditors just enthusiastically eat up the Aggression Of The Week with no critical thinking
Feel you. Average Westerners are the most indoctrinated people on the planet and incapable of critical thinking for a reason, like parrots for the US state department. Most of them have liberal ideology (which can turn to fascism unless they're educated) planted in their minds the moment they become able to absorb information beyond basic verbal protocols really, and it's all subconscious. They're not taught to question, they're not taught nuance, they're not taught analysis, instead they're taught dogma and adherence to the religion of market capitalism and neoliberalism. The objectively and scientifically superior alternative, socialism and its aim, communism, is smeared by their bourgeois propaganda education and media from which they absorb their entire worldview. They're not judging nor assessing a single thing on their own, they're regurgitating lies planted in their minds by media owned by a small handful of oligarchs who are all war profiteers and would rather die than see a threat to capitalism, and these people are unknowingly having this exact view forced upon them. And it isn't just media and education that shapes and maintains their liberal ideology, it's practically being reproduced pathologically in Western society because it has simply become the "default" despite being diametrically opposed to the interests of the working class.
It's what Louis Althusser calls "Ideological State Apparatus", which under capitalism includes practially every major institution that you can think of. Basically by simply living in Western liberal society you're eating out of the trash can of ideology without even knowing it, and it becomes part of their core identity - hence these people, when their internalized bullshit and ideological defense mechanisms their ruling class taught them are debunked, they shut down with cognitive dissonance. Capitalism today also uses mass consumer culture and comfort media to lull people as well which has a reproductive effect.
All these insufferable liberals get on my nerves too, and they might still remain a majority in the West for a long time and rather see the world in flames before waking up and finding out that every single thing they ever believed about their countries, governments, and societies were nothing but lies. But then again it's important to remember that there are people in the imperial core who ARE gaining class consciousness (even if bite-sized), who ARE aware that something is wrong (even if they don't attribute it to capitalism yet), who ARE aware that they were lied to about e.g. China with the clear evidence now, who ARE disillusioned with their facade of a "democracy", who even are beginning to pick up the works of Marx, etc. Think of all the activists on the Sumud flotilla, of all the Palestine protests, of the increasing amount of Americans who despise their government and imperialist foreign policy - and them even moreso than Europeans, those being even more hopeless despite also living lives in red tape bureaucracy and surveillance. The US is the heart of the beast, and its working class, were it class conscious and formed a vanguard, would alone be able to tip the global scale and bring imperialism and neoliberalism to their graves could they carry out a revolution. That's exactly why the US ruling class uses propaganda and indoctrination as a literal LIFELINE, producing all these liberals who all think the same like an assembly line.
They fear nothing more than an organized domestic working class - more than they fear China, Iran, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela. Outside of all these shitty cesspit platforms that are for example X, Reddit.. there are people educating themselves and people out in the streets right now, people seeing their material conditions worsen as all their country's wealth, surplus value that THEY produce, is being siphoned off to oligarchs and imperialist wars, and youths working 3 jobs and barely surviving. Those people are the West's future, not all these docile shitlibs - the multipolar world and revolutionary future will pass them by as if they never existed. It will remember them as docile and gullible fools.
before waking up and finding out that every single thing they ever believed about their countries, governments, and societies were nothing but lies.
I did that, and I don't know which steps to take first. I've gotten to making friends and then telling them about my ideology later, but I am very scared of the police and military. I hear all this new stuff they get--they have tools to hack into people's smartphones, they are well equipped, and they can just fucking shoot me if they want.
The problem seems to be protests, at least a little bit. My city in particular is a haven for dilettantes across Imperial countries who arrive, then move. This is not like immigrants coming from Mexico, this is like someone in New York deciding he wants to visit the petit-bourgeoise restaurants around town, show up for business meetings, deliver money and fill out paperwork, then leave for Dallas. It's a tide of people rich enough to love the United States and despise the homeless, yet poor enough to feel alienated and overworked. Like how pond life cannot develop in a river.
'Allende is pretty awful, I'll support his opposition' type beat
God, these people make me so angry.
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Typical lib behavior. Only after every invasion the US commits in its campaign for capital accumulation and resource exploitation, will they finally be against it; like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Lol