In case you are referring to me:
I feel like there is mome serious miscommunication gong on between us. Some of your recent posts made it clear to me that I had completely mistaken you on some issues (the abrasive communication style might have contributed) where we are actually much more in agreement than I thought. And I see that you keep completely misunderstanding what Virtual Ghost and I have been saying these last few years.
I'll get back to this in more detail when I can (it is 6 am and I will soon have to get up again to bring my kid to school and I have a tight schedule as I'm suppsed to have translated an entire book by the end of the month). For now let me just say that of course under current conditions it makes perfect sense for people who suffer the most from the current system to mistrust it the most. When I talk about trust and institutions, I don't mean what you seem to mean by these words. The cultural divide (and maybe different communication styles) makes this hard to bring across. You seem to think that i consider everything in the US to be just fine while I see the obvious need for profound reform. At the same time you recently got angry at me for supposedly being too critical of America and basically being an uppity foreigner who should better shut up.
I'm a working mum of two young children and barely get enough sleep. Calmly explaining something very abstract and complex (even if it has severe real life repercussions) takes a lot of time and I'm not even sure if you care to find out what I am actually on about and have been on about all this time.
Sorry, I'm a but frustrated right now and tired as hell. Will respond in a more composed, rational and structured way later on. Remind me to talk about Böckenförde.
Did you think I was a Trump guy, or that I was farther left than I actually was? I think I'm pretty far left in an American context so I will kind of jokingly call myself a commie since I might as well be to a lot of people. But then there are the folks that have this kind of theoretical purity about "real leftism" and we just need to stop wasting time with Bernie or AOC or Contrapoints or any of the other succdems. What they seem to mean by a "succdem" (I am aware there is some German history involved here, but I think any debate about whether or not Ebert was right or wrong is besides the point) is anyone who claims to be left but isn't working towards having the masses rise up in a Marxist-Leninist "revolution", unlike what they are doing with their Reddit comments. I guess I'm to the right of those people, who seem to mostly be about being a left-wing version of an edgelord.
I know you are going to write a longer response but I just thought I'd help clear up a few more things:
I do often use really abrasive sarcasm, and yes, I am quite frustrated and filled with rage about the current situation. I think perhaps part of the disconnect is that it se, ems that you are not as immersed in American corporate media I am, and are not frequently subject to the views of those who have been shaped with it. I think you wrote before that you saw an American news program and did not care for how sensationalistic and "shouty" it was. Whenever I visit my family, it's usually on and I often beg them to change it.
To be clear, my immediate family are all Democrats and they are not watching Fox News, but I think the alternatives are far from ideal. I frequently see, interspersed between the frequent editorializing against Republican politicians or in favor of Democratic ones, (which is bad enough; give me the information, and let me form my own opinion) a lot of obfuscation or encouragement of tendencies in American society that I'm not really comfortable with. (It seems like things were better in this regard in the 90s but I was a dumb kid and didn't pay any attention to current events until the 2000s.) Robert Mueller and the FBI were made into heroic figures, ignoring the role the FBI has had as a repressive force in American politics.
And then there is the coverage about Putin and Russia. Now, I'm not under any illusions about Russian imperialism or anything like that. Some I suppose hold that because they are against a lot of the things the US has done in the world recently, that this must make Russia good. I think that's pretty dumb. But there is often a kind of jingoistic attitude spreading these sort of naive falsehoods about America's role in the world and contrasting that with Russia. I find it really disturbingly reminiscent of the kind of talk that went on about the Middle East after 9/11. During the Trump years I feel Russia's role in 2016 was given much more weight than it deserved (I suspect this may be to prevent coming face to face with a full reckoning of all the factors that played into Hillary's loss; I did vote for her, by the way).
I sense a degree of pious moralizing about Russia coming from the news anchors and pundits that reminds me too much of the moralizing that happened around Iraq. That was a moralizing that cared nothing for facts and found being reminded of them outright offensive; at times it seems like something like that is taking root among folks. On Friday, I had a conflict with my sister because I complained about the way they were talking about the US vs. Russia with regards to Ukraine; it was apparently offensive that I entertained skepticism and doubts about any of it.
(And yes, I kind of wish other things would have been seen as being as important by the Biden administration as this, which is also playing into my anger.)
So that's kind of what's at play when I went after you with regards to the Ukraine situation. You aren't coming from the same context I'm used to, so I apologize for that.
I think what I would like is not having the people on the news constantly tell me that Putin is a bad man and US good, and I'd like more details and information from the news about what's actually going on than this kind of emotionalist moralizing which sounds a lot like propaganda.
Oh, I said that would be short. Whoops.