I want to start this post with the caveat that I have a wonderful partner and good leftist support system in general. And I’m also lucky that I don’t have to deal with many chuds.
But, outside my own bubble or when meeting acquaintances and friends of friends in general it’s shocking how quickly liberals manage to show their ass in conversation and it makes me just not want to engage with them. I don’t want to not socialize with people who I meet, but it’s incredibly frustrating when these fucking shitstains revert to North Korea jokes in 2025. We’re melting the planet and live streaming a genocide, but it doesn’t make you the life of the party reminding people of that.
Any tips for dealing with these smug liberals without embarrassing yourself?
I’ve lost my patience a handful of times, so I relate, but I think it goes a long way to calmly state why you believe their views are regressive in much the same way they already identify the chuds views as regressive. Libs define their political identity as the inverse of chuds, so the quickest way to get them to, at the very least, shut up is to point out all the ways in which they’re still similar, but with a calm tone so they don’t feel like you’re one of the many chuds they’ve previously encountered. If you have good rapport and good rheroric they may even be turned away from liberalism.
This is the answer. It’s often tougher in practice than theory, but that’s probably just a matter of having to get used to talking to more libs.
I am completely and brutally honest with the non-participating liberals in my life who only participate via elections every few years. I hold back nothing. Most of them have slowly radicalised. They’re not full blown communists but they can’t fucking stand everything the liberal ideologues believe.
As for the true believers that are active politically? I fucking avoid them. I would get myself in trouble and converting anyone that is still a Starmerite at this point in time in Britain is not possible.
As for the conservative liberals (tories) I avoid them mostly but give them complete honesty too if I have to.
The farage voting reform liberals are a mess, I have time for some of them because they’re just being duped. There is a considerable section of people that sincerely believe he wants to help people. They’re fools but they’re not bad people in a lot of cases, just going with the crowd and do not know better. The real fascist true believers deserve the wall though and I don’t engage them if I can avoid it.
Never give the impression that you take their political views seriously. The smug ones have created a false self-identity around politics. False because they think the height of understanding is reading the New York Times sometimes and listening to “the experts”, meaning think tanks and academics cozy with journalists.
Liberals just trust “institutions” and anything that has existed long enough to have “prestige” that grants it credibility. Credibility is acquired through how many other liberal institutions grant it credibility. This allows them to outsource all political thinking to “experts” from these extremely trustable sources that all gained their own “prestige” and “credibility” through exactly the same thing.
It’s an Ouroboros and one of the first things that has to be broken to pull a liberal out of it. The minds of liberals are colonised, there is no cognitive sovereignty in their heads because they give away that sovereignty to others in all of these institutions.
I tend to just rub their nose in the Iraq WMD propaganda campaign and similar complete fabrications until they shut up.
Gotta love the WMDs smell in everything bad libs believe about China despite the mountains of evidence China is doing pretty well and getting better and the US is nosediving vs the mountains of trust-me-bros about China’s crimes against humanity.
Turning a little bit of that casual smugness back around is always an option, and if you couch it in a chuckle and a very casual tone of “we’re joking about silly shit together” you can turn it into a situation where they’re hoisted by their own joking tone and can’t really press further without seeming like the weird one. Something like “Ha, yeah. Like (Saddam’s nukes or the satanic panic or something), right?”
If you’re any good at wielding “normality” in social situations, that’s what works best for me. Basically the internet thing of poking and prodding the other person into the position of “one who cares too much and seems to be getting heated, you ok man? It’s all just jokes, you know?”
Basically if you know anything at all about the dprk, you’re at an advantage in an open argument. So I join in their jokes, but redirect it in a way that makes western ignorance the punchline. “Haha yeah, can you believe some people think that stuff is real?” (Implication: Fools think this is real. You’re not a fool, are you?). Then their options are to pivot to making fun of fools with you, get openly defensive and start an argument they’re not equipped for, or just kind of let the topic fizzle out. I realize I’m basically describing joke brinksmanship: first one to drop the easy smile loses.
just realized i do basically the same thing but with “north korea? you mean best korea right? haha!” and then stare them right in the eye while smiling warmly
i simply don’t put up with their smug bullshit. We’re past that
I mean I’ve kinda learned lately not to really argue about the absolute overall state of countries neither of us have been to, but I do sow distrust in the US gov’t and NATO and highlight irrefutable positives of other countries’ revolutions. All my IRL friends are libs or anarchists. I’m not trying to die on a hill. It’s a give and take thing. Local progress won’t come from painting by the numbers of other movements far away in time and location, IMHO. Be cool, be charming, be graceful. I know it’s hard, I blow my top sometimes too.
Be like water, flow around jabs, seep into cracks.
My elder sibling told me how they canvassed and phonebanked for Biden in 2019 and I haven’t spoken to them since.
Just tell them they are being rasicst to belive fox news about china. Their noodles will cook
they don’t mask so i don’t have anything to do with them
You could watch how Sammy Obeid deals with hecklers. Listening and humor is pretty powerful.
I ask probing questions that gets them to either show their ignorance or bring them around to my point of view.
Ngl it’s easier to hold a conversation about politics with conservatives than it is with liberals.
Agreed. Liberals still lie to themselves that Kamala lost because she was a woman, and not the 10000 other reasons.
My conservative coworker agrees with me on like 80% of issues (the 20% are reactionary identity politics). They usually understand billionaires are pieces of shit, while liberals love platforming taylor swift and beyonce.
Same way I deal with all socializing. Don’t.
