this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Right, the entire point is that democracy is when you have real conversations about issues . Not when you call them brainwashed and ignore them.
Your truth seeking methodology is "US bad." I am skeptical of that methodology. If you want to realistically engage with that, then I am fully there. But until then, "you are brainwashed and I am enlightened" just isn't a super interesting conversation
You have no fucking idea what my "truth seeking methodology" is. I studied history. You should too.
That you have to believe I'm so moronic as to start from the assumption that "USA bad" shows how weak your position is. I already told you, I was born and raised here. I was indoctrinated like you were. My truth seeking led me to the realization that the US is doing worse than what it lies about other countries doing.
Also, if you have to keep redefining democracy to make your point, try examining that.
Also, get some reading comprehension. I never called you brainwashed not did I say I was enlightened. I said I used to believe what you believe because I was raised in the USA and educated the same way everyone else was. But I spent a lot of time and effort studying and fighting against my indoctrination and now I believe the opposite of what you believe.
You have not gone through that. You believe the same things you believed when you were in high school. And you think other people are being influenced by some strange and powerful external force but that the force is weak and terrible and obviously evil but some people are weaker than you and succumb to their influence?
Just seriously engage with history. Your indoctrination won't survive the encounter.
I don't think you believe the opposite of what I believe. I don't think you can articulate any criticism of China, no matter how inconsequential. The opposite of what I believe would be if you could not muster any criticism of both the US and China.
I understand the criticisms you levy against China and could articulate them, because, again, your criticisms are predominantly Western talking points. I just don't agree with them.
As for your criticisms of the US, it's clear that you don't understand the depth of the criticisms levied against the US (and Europe) or you wouldn't be adopting the positions you take nor make the comparisons you make.
See it really feels like we are finding common ground. The US, as the defacto leader of the world in the past century, deserves a considerable amount of criticism. The US model is a tested hypothesis, as such it should endure the highest level of scrutiny. At times it has been barbaric and cruel, and autocratic and it enslaved entire generations.
The thing is that we hope to avoid making these mistakes again by talking about them. If you don't talk about your mistakes, how can you ever learn?
You really gotta stop putting words in my mouth. The US is actively engaged in an ongoing genocide of the native peoples of both the North and South America. The US is not unique in this regard, as Canada and Australia are also doing this. If the US was concerned about genocide, inuding cultural genocide, it would marshall it's forces to stop itself and its own people from the currently active ongoing process happening on its own soil.
Instead it marshalls it's forces to commit global atrocities, every single year. It never stops. No amount of conversing is stopping it. Because they aren't mistakes. They've never been mistakes. Even saying that they are mistakes demonstrates how much of an orientalist you are. White Europeans make mistakes but the Asiatic hordes are evil? Seriously, fuck off.
The US model is a tested hypothesis for what? Mass murder, genocide, apartheid, oppression, environmental devastation, global domination, enslavement, capitalist hegemony, selective law enforcement at the global level, working class oppression?
It's certainly not a tested model of democracy, Princeton University showed us that.
No. The US is just the continued evolution of violent white cis het patriarchal capitalist supremacy that started in Europe 600 years ago and hasn't stopped. The US is the most powerful for a very specific reason - land. If the North America continent didn't exist, the US system could never have emerged on mainland Europe nor on Africa. It required a completely defensible content with no competitive neighbors and a massive amount of natural resources and slave labor to create. But the US political system? The US political system literally inspired Hitler to build the Third Reich and strike out to enslave the Slavs. He literally wrote about it in his book.
The US system inherited all of the deliberate oppression from the European project. It IS the European project, which is founded on might makes right. When the US demonstrated it could manage colonial holding better, and could defeat Europe militarily, Europe realigned it's project with the US at helm, just like they had countless times before when Spain, France, or England at various times were the mightiest.
The evidence of all this is so ponderously big that you have to be willfully ignorant and resistant to information to believe the alternatives. Consider the opium wars.
Europeans sold opium to China as the best way to make a profit. England forced India to produce opium so they could sell it to China. 40% of China's population became addicted. When China outlawed opium, the European merchants, who owned newspapers back home, made up stories to push the English crown to launch a war against China. They did. The Chinese had not yet had an industrial revolution, so the British gun boats easily dominated China. The English forces the Chinese government to legalize opium. Then, they carved up Shanghai and established total immunity to Chinese law for Europeans. Each portion of Shanghai was governed by the laws of a different European colonizer.
The money that was made from the opium trade made it's way back to the US. The Forbes fortune started from the opium trade. That money was invested in the rail roads.
Decades later, the Obama administration pushes the TPP. One of the main parts of that treaty establishes an arbitration board of corporate governors. The treaty gives this boars the power to sue any country (party to the treaty) that has a law that has an effect of hurting profits or potential profits. Literally the same model as the British invading China for banning opium.
It's never been a mistake. It's never been something that requires dialog. The US is the current torchbearer of the longest running and most violent social phenomena ever in human history - Eurocentric white supremacy.
You and I only have a sliver of common ground in that you see evidence for some US atrocities. And that's it. Everything beyond that we are still in contention about. Like I said, I used to hold your position. I abandoned it in the face of overwhelming evidence.