I’m thoroughly convinced the entire tankie triad is a psyop to turn people off from socialism.
Defederation is of the utmost importance!
I feel like the world’s “two camps” really both just suck.
The capitalists, and these red fascists. Both claiming to be superior, but neither is actually good.
People really need independent thinking nowadays.
If you replace Maduro with Yanukovych and Machado with Poroshenko or Zelenskyy, I could almost mistake this for russian propaganda about Maidan
There’s a reason for that. Certain framings resonate well, and especially if they are synced up with how the target audience likes to view things anyway and who their “good guys” and “bad guys” tend to be. It’s just a matter of plugging the right people and situations into the powerful framings and then repeating the construction from a wide variety of sources. It’s like turnkey social engineering. It works incredibly well when it is done at a big scale.
Some examples:
- Maduro / Zelensky / etc as noted
- “You can’t criticize Israel / Democrats on lemmy.world, all the mods are zios”
- “AOC / Mamdani / Bernie betrayed Israel, she/he’s a genocide supporter and I feel so betrayed and she/he’s lost my vote forever, just another DNC faker”
- “The West pushed Russia into war with Ukraine, Russia didn’t want to do it but they just kept pushing and so Russia felt threatened and had no choice, it’s all NATO’s fault at the end of the day”
And so on. None of this has anything to do with reality. A person who was starting from first principles would never reach those conclusions, since they are precisely literally the opposite of what happened. And, if you press the people pushing them for details, they’ll always fall back on basically the exact same individual anecdote or thought-pattern to support the backwards-land conclusion and push really really hard on that one anecdote. They are always super confident and pushy about the conclusions.
Supporting anecdote examples:
- “Look at this time I called another user a pedophile fascist hacker furry porn bad faith Zionist and also said something pro-Palestinian, and my comment got deleted! Definitely because of the pro-Palestinian part which is super unpopular on lemmy.world which is definitely full of people supporting Israel and Hakeem Jeffries! So don’t go there and definitely don’t listen to what they have to say about Uyghurs!”
- “Remember that one individual time when AOC voted for that one amendment which stripped Israel of all its offensive weaponry which wasn’t going to pass anyway and was a waste of time but then also the amendment she voted for would have kept in place grants for some anti-missile systems which is the most important thing about AOC’s entire Israel history now going forward indefinitely and has now become all I want to talk about and let’s not talk about any other stuff about her!”
I can’t continue, I am getting genuinely annoyed lol. But anyway. There are other examples, they went all-out coming up with new ones of these leading up to the 2024 election and deployed a handful of pretty effective ones against Democrats. But those are the ones I currently see in active rotation.
This propaganda shit is getting too complicated
Honestly it’s kind of a good sign. I grew up pre-internet, where all you had to do was get the nightly news to report your version of reality and there was literally no other way that people could find out it was all gimmicks. A person could maybe run across Noam Chomsky or something, but they would be the only one (there was literally one person I knew in school, and one person at my office, who was a super-lefty person like me, and everyone else thought we were more or less terrorists at any point if we talked about it). Now with the internet it’s easy for people to run across criticisms of anything, so you can’t just report the bullshit and move on, so they have to get more sophisticated with it. It’s good that they are having to work and be creative.
The bad news is that they’ve worked at it and got creative. Like what I mean is Bernie Sanders would never have gotten near power in 1996. The system would have been able to shut him down way earlier, they still had to ratfuck him a little but he was (and still is) wildly popular in a way that Ron Paul never was outside of a select internet demographic. But of course along with that comes Trump. The information free-for-all is a mixed blessing.
“The fascist dictator goes into the square hole” type puzzle
Almost like the Kremlins and tankies share the same ideology 🤔
and quite possibly the same computer
Participatory democracy is flourishing! A focus on poverty eradication!
I do wonder if the poster genuinely beliin this or of they are just roleplaying online. It’s not as comical as “North Korea is a great place to live!”, but it’s up there.
I was literally, unironically told yesterday that Hitler rose to power because of democracy. So authoritarianism is good actually.
The instance is filled with CIA operatives LARPing as communists and mentally debilitated social rejects
Gets progressives fighting about stupid shit. Divide and conquer is too successful.
Often the more stupid the take the better, as long as it gets people thinking x/y group is stupid.
Im still convinced the atheism/feminism war was completely manufactured.
If an atheist needs to defend against the claim that they hate women for trying to get circumcision generally banned in the USA. Etc.
Not a reasonable claim, but within a couple years it was just blanket public opinion that associating with atheism or men’s rights meant you hate women.
Similarly, academic social studies got reframed and poluted with the notion that its all gobbledygook that isn’t respectable or important, because it won’t make you money, and then because SJW became the aesthetic.
I’m not arguing that there weren’t unreasonable incel and sjw types, but the idea that these groups can only be these things ensured that the original motivations and goals of the group no longer mattered in the greater social lens. Just the extremes of the binary drama, and if you associate with either movement, you are these things.
Also gets into progressives conceding spaces because society already decided those spaces can only be the bad people, and any progressives around those spaces must also be bad people.
At this point is becoming more clear how blatant it is that every progressive movement falls apart due to things entirely unrelated to the movement.
Anyone heard about hassans dog lately? Not a fan of him leaning into tankie shit sometimes, but he’s actually involved in social movements around important stuff like the Palestine genocide.
But now the majority of people learning about hassan are only learning about a rumourmill smear campaign.
Also not a Hillary fan, but same shit with the Hillary emails.
Also the general media on “BLM violence.”
All you need is someone starting fires and pointing at progressives. Tribal warring takes care of the rest, and it works every single time.
We need more robust communication and cooperation between progressive groups, allowing them to heal over the bad takes rather than spend all their energy on a poorly defined culture war. A good grounding for people to share would be surviving the global push for authoritarianism and fascism.
The social narrative is always conveniently the worst possible thing it could be for fighting the oligarchs.
Not a reasonable claim, but within a couple years it was just blanket public opinion that associating with atheism or men’s rights meant you hate women.
My observation is that there is a minority in the men’s rights movement that does hate women, and the movement is not great at making it clear that they do not represent the movement and fail to exclude them if necessary. Mind you, the same problem exists vice-versa within the feminism movement. Those movements then point at those extremist minorities in the “opposite” movement (if you remove the extremist elements they don’t even really oppose each other, but unfortunately the extremist elements are a part of the movements) and say “hey, they’re fighting against us!” as a kind of rallying cry. And it’s not exactly wrong - it’s almost similar to the Nazi bar analogy that if you don’t draw clear lines to keep those extremists out of your movement, well, then yeah, they’re part of your movement. And so things just get more and more extreme, with the social bubbles the internet creates just making things worse.
And honestly, it seems like every progressive social movement has this issue. Whether it’s anti-racism or awareness for sexual violence, there’s always that one extremist section the movement does not seem to be able to or want to exclude.
that’s the thing with complex diverse and ever-growing systems that are specializing towards their own salient eco-niche. which just means… it’s complex, and large populations get bubbles of dumb people using the words and thoughts of the bigger group for their own local opportunism.
i think most groups suck at identifying and policing such spinoffs, but i have witnessed many groups actively try, but ultimately when society calls them X/Y for identifying with a group, they will leave the group to not be associated, which clears out all of the people who were policing those people out of the group.
one of my common topics is how the spinoffs blindly lash out at [enemy tribe] and how that is used to re-define the original group, leading to some victims justifying blind attacks in the other direction. a self-fuelling reverberating snowball of dumb angry reactions that seem weirdly good at preventing solidarity and co-construction.
i absolutely agree with you that it’s an issue, and a universal one. possibly the most important issue. the building of solidarity and co-constructed understanding of the world that doesn’t fall for blind divisive traps.
