Technology

Glorifying a system can never be the answer.

Systems and institutions are what we rely on to provide a secure future for ourselves and our loved ones. You don't need to glorify them, but you do need to value them on their merits.

Keeping a critical eye on the status quo is the only way to develop a better future in any system.

There is a huge difference between being critical and being cynical, particularly when it comes to domestic reporting of "enemy" nation-states. What we have in the US rhetoric directed towards China (and Iran and Cuba and North Korea and now increasingly Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil) is best described by the historical scholar Michael Parenti describing the US attitude towards the USSR.

The anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Criticism of these foreign - often significantly more stable, free, and prosperous - nations is nonfalsifiable orthodoxy. They are always simultaneously engaged in crushing authoritarianism and riddled with legions of angry insurgents. It somehow manifests all the worst aspects of capitalism because its state orthodoxy is socialist.

Until you actually fucking go there and talk to people and realize this isn't a nation of Machiavellian lies and Potemkin villages. It's just a place where a larger number of people have found a better way to live, absent an American telling them how to do it.