Man, unironically, I do believe you. I don’t think you’re some fuckwad who uses ‘anti-imperialism’ as an excuse to play apologist for other imperialists. I’ve seen you around. I could be wrong, but you don’t seem like the type.
But at the same time, you do have to understand how it looks when someone says “America supporting oppressors is bad, and Russia supporting oppressors is bad”, and your response is to bring out the list of grudges on America, and then to say that it’s justified because there aren’t many supporters of Russia and China ‘on here’ (when both on the source of the original pic and on this site itself, there very much are), looks more like an attempt to focus the discussion on ‘bad camp’.
When the discussion is started based on “Bad Camp being Bad does NOT justify supporting other shitheads”, can you see how an immediate response of “I want to emphasize that Bad Camp is REALLY bad!” comes off as grating?
And yes, you need to extra proactively reject the camp you were born in, because the default is to assume you support where you’re from out of tribalism and selfish self-interest overriding moral consistancy.
You need to be extra proactive in watching for unintended campism in yourself and in your statements. Not extra proactive in the sense of disproportionate focus or changing every discussion to how the camp you were born in is Really Bad. Otherwise you’re just replacing the standard of beating the drum of “My camp is bad, but THEIR camp is worse!” with “Their camp is bad, but MY camp is worse!” in practical effect.
Man, unironically, I do believe you. I don’t think you’re some fuckwad who uses ‘anti-imperialism’ as an excuse to play apologist for other imperialists. I’ve seen you around. I could be wrong, but you don’t seem like the type.
But at the same time, you do have to understand how it looks when someone says “America supporting oppressors is bad, and Russia supporting oppressors is bad”, and your response is to bring out the list of grudges on America, and then to say that it’s justified because there aren’t many supporters of Russia and China ‘on here’ (when both on the source of the original pic and on this site itself, there very much are), looks more like an attempt to focus the discussion on ‘bad camp’.
When the discussion is started based on “Bad Camp being Bad does NOT justify supporting other shitheads”, can you see how an immediate response of “I want to emphasize that Bad Camp is REALLY bad!” comes off as grating?
You need to be extra proactive in watching for unintended campism in yourself and in your statements. Not extra proactive in the sense of disproportionate focus or changing every discussion to how the camp you were born in is Really Bad. Otherwise you’re just replacing the standard of beating the drum of “My camp is bad, but THEIR camp is worse!” with “Their camp is bad, but MY camp is worse!” in practical effect.