People in my circles are quite suspicious of me now due to my inability to be quiet.
It feels dumb to talk about and it's hard to even really find the words to what I want to say but I find it difficuilt to keep quiet sometimes, especially when someone says something very dumb about something I've been putting a lot of time into studying. There have been a couple times now where someone has said something dreadful about Palestinians and I've had to reprimand them. It's hard to keep quiet about things like this while also not going too far. Sometimes simply saying that you don't hate Chinese people for no reason at all is enough to make some people around you suspicious. One time someone raised their eyebrow just because I said I'd love to visit China some day. When someone for example makes a comment about Cuba that's clearly just wrong, I try to nudge them in the right direction subtly but it turns out not subtle enough. I need to learn to be quiet sometimes but even if I do stay quiet that also looks suspicious! I guess the only thing left to do is pretend to be a lib but it feels .. wrong. It feels like I'm encouraging those beliefs to the people around me. I think I just need to chill and let things be but it's hard sometimes. I try to surround myself with cool people but that's not always possible. It feels dumb to talk about but it's been bothering me a lot lately. Have any of you ever felt like this?
This is where asking questions can get you far and occasionally interjecting your own commentary if it seems like they're getting uncomfortable with too much focus being on them. Basically you can approach it similar to a small child asking "why" but with more adult nuance in your phrasing. Often people are happy to ramble on about where they're coming from. You can learn a lot about how a person thinks that way. Even if you don't change their mind, you might come away with a better understanding of how to approach it in the future.
I know I've had the experience, regardless of subject matter, where I assume what someone's point of view is based on little information and then try to argue with that, and it turns out I was off the mark in the first place.
Liberals do this, they won't listen to you anyways. They will laugh at you because what you're saying is against the ideas of the ruling class, which to them is the obvious dominant way of thinking in society.
You have to very calmly and succinctly utterly destroy every part of their argument, call them out on shifting goalposts and then, and this is the key part, they will try to lie to support their argument. If you catch them lying without getting mad you will have the upper hand.
One shortcut can be catching them being racist. Libs are racist, more so than right wingers in the sense that right wingers want to be racist to hurt people's feelings liberals don't even acknowledge that some people are human, and if you catch them in this act of dehumanization (eg: I don't hate the people, i just hate the government. Okay but why don't their people hate the government. Because they're all brainwashed. So you think their whole population is easily brainwashed and they need you to tell them the truth?) Sometimes that gets them to shut the fuck up and reflect a little bit.
I don't think this battle is worth it though, most of the time. Like you said it's exhausting. These people don't have any real friends anyway, have you noticed?
You could also just attack them personally for being a fascist.
Somewhat related; my friends condemned Stalin for, “being a pedophile” for marrying Nadezhda Alliluyeva when she was 15, (she was 17). When I pointed this out, she shifted the goalposts and said that it was still, “weird”.
One of them also said that nothing would change her mind about the DPRK after I showed her Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul and MillennialChaos dunking on a liberal on Radio Free America. (Not exaggerating this is actually what she said)
She called me brainwashed.
Yeah I mean nothing will change her mind. And that's why we need to give up on liberals. At some point the difference in thinking is that one person thinks that innocent people should suffer and die and the other person is saying that I would be a target and I don't want that. After all discourse fails we have to resort to using the final argument: the gun.
Yeah, I can relate to this. At one point I had about five liberals ganging up on me, and at another point, two history teachers. It was pain, but I held my own, somehow.