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These idiots are real and I encounter them in real life. What’s very common is nonsense about how the “West” and Nato blaa screwed over poor Vlad and so on.

You cannot put your phone down in real life.

If someone denies the existence of the WW2 Holocaust people come out of the woodworks to publicly tell them that they are wrong. At this point we collectively agree that believing that is idiotic.

The massacre on the Tiananmen Square, which my phone apparent doesn’t even have in its dictionary, is something being actively denied by a major world government. It’s a topic that the corporations that run a lot of or information exchange infrastructure are trying to avoid mentioning.

I think it’s that active avoidance of the topic that rubbs people the wrong way. And we all like to poke fun of people who are delusional.

Oh and also Holodomor. Until my old country started to roll tanks into Ukraine people on the internet kept telling me how I’m wrong and it didn’t happen. They they’d say that it was actually a logistics issue. How do you accidentally kill millions of people through starvation when it’s those same people that are producing the food to begin with? At least now we all agree that Holodonor existed.

We’re defederated from the worst offenders. Do you have an account on an instance that’s federated with Lemmygrad / Hexbear? Because it’s bad.

For what it’s worth, we have a local tankie group at one of our college campuses nearby that really sucks in a lot of people from the queer community. They’re pretty much all universally combative, dominate any political space they’re in with “Voting has no point, just stop voting (shockedpikachu.jpg when fascists take office, consolidate power, and make life hell for minorities)” or “I’d rather vote for Trump to accelerate the decline of the world so the revolution is easier / faster” or “The holodomor was a Ukrainian man-made disaster to make Russia look bad, therefore wasn’t a genocide, and you’re a racist for believing it was”. Fortunately once they get off campus and into the real world most of them chill out, but Eternal September means they’re a constant menace to our local queer community.

Are they as big of a problem in the US as conservatives? Not remotely, though there’s some surprising overlap in their support of Russia that might make them a scarier force than expected. They’re still worth bitching about and deriding though.

The rest of the world, though? Russia and China are literally committing genocide, right now, and these people are cheering that on. There’s some European parties who are gaining in power who align with pro-Russia, pro-China goals. They might not be the main threat, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat.

You weren’t wrong. The reason is because a unified left is an incredibly powerful and dangerous thing, so there is a ton of effort put into dividing the left, and since much of it is crafted to appeal to base moral superiority far too many on the left are happy to take the bait without hesitation.

I disagree with the “criticism is just giving them a platform” thing. It’s not giving them a platform. That would require allowing them to speak and letting their ideas go unchallenged. And there is a large leftist presence on here, which imo is a good thing. It provides an opportunity to combat misinformation. I will concede that online political shit slinging is often unproductive between the people commenting. But I’ve learned a lot as a lurker reading through these arguments. Reading arguments have given me things to read about and form my own opinion on. Perhaps the ones involved in the argument won’t have their minds changed but that doesn’t mean someone uninvolved reading it won’t be convinced or at least have their interest piqued.

A lot of mainstream political discourse excludes leftists. And I feel it’s a big reason people are dissatisfied with the state of modern politics (especially the US). When “both sides” are on the same side where it matters most, it’s obvious that neither of them have an interest in changing the trajectory the country/world is on. This leads to people looking for answers outside of the mainstream, because our states are failing and in denial. When you have an inherent distrust of the system and start looking for alternative perspectives and analysis, “stigmatized knowledge” becomes normal and informs a lot of your perspective. This creates a space for people acting in bad faith to take advantage of those who, through decades of concentrated effort by people (often within or adjacent to our own governments), have had their capacity for critical thinking and reasoning eroded. Leading to conspiratorial thinking.

Further complicating things, there are a lot of conspiracy theories that are correct and true. COINTELPRO and MKULTRA for example. They both sound like some tinfoil hat bullshit but the CIA has literally admitted to both and hundreds of documents on these programs have been declassified. When people are in the process of deconstructing the ideologies they’ve been raised on, these bad actors are in a perfect place to manipulate them. With these things in mind it’s easy to see how going from “capitalism is bad” and “western propaganda misrepresented daily life in post-revolution USSR” can be twisted into “tianamen square was a psyop” and “modern Russia is justified in their invasion of Ukraine”.

These things are further complicated by concepts like critical support and a vague, misguided sense of anti-imperialism, which are common in authoritarian left spaces. A sythesis of these two concepts leads to support of nations and parties that are objectively terrible in many areas that should not be ignored. When your ideology is twisted into “the west is bad and must be eliminated at any cost” you see countries like China and Russia as allies and as something to be replicated. It’s all very intentional.

Conspiracy theories and bad takes infect every ideology. Democrats, republicans, fascists, Marxists, anarchists and everyone else aren’t immune to conspiratorial thinking. It’s something that needs to be consistently combatted. And the best way to do that is by speaking the truth unapologetically. Consensus reality has been broken and there is a power struggle going on every day to win hearts and minds. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, the status quo is cruel and coercive. But it’s created a ripe space for those with bad intentions to steer the conversation towards areas that are favorable to them.

I’m not saying there aren’t Nazis, but at least the Nazis aren’t going around screaming about how right they are and denying the Holocaust. Those tankies were just going wild. So many pro-russia/China comments on everything. Calling the Ukrainian Nazis every chance they got.

Ok so we have to be federated to a nazi instance to talk shit about nazis? What’s your point?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre

“At the State Council press conference on 6 June, spokesman Yuan Mu said that “preliminary tallies” by the government showed that about 300 civilians and soldiers died, including 23 students from universities in Beijing, along with some people he described as “ruffians”.[229][238] Yuan also said some 5,000 soldiers and police were wounded, along with 2,000 civilians.”

300 dead and 7,000 wounded sure soundss like a massacre

In the US, tankies are usually the people who worship Soviet Russia and the USSR. In current politics, they often support Russia in the Ukraine conflict.

It’s simply communists who want communism not to make everybody equal, but because they want their turn at the top of the social hierarchy.

As someone who’s wondered this myself but only now found the enthusiasm to look it up because I can’t be arsed to do anything for myself but this is what Wikipedia says:

“Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist states that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical.”

Take it with a grain of salt tho people misuse labels like this all the time

There’s a theory that you guys don’t want to hear because it would disturb you 😏

Actually we do want to hear it

… no.

And where’s the disturbing part?

Well, let’s hear it

There were over a 100,000 people at the square protesting. There were priests in over 400 Chinese cities.

So instead of twisting the truth to fit a narrative, they just make shit up?

The irony of being a tankie and pretending the tanks weren’t there at one of the more notable moments of the CCP’s existence.

“I’m not sure if I believe”

There’s nothing to believe. Tankie lies are exactly that

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I’m unfamiliar with this one. Can you cite a source?

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They try to feel out what would annoy you more.

It didn’t happen, but I wish it did! /s

Wake up you shat yourself.

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This statement is a certified Balkans moment

Similar to the neo-nazi line: “The Holocaust never happened…but it should have!”

Speaking as a connoisseur of propaganda, of course both are true.

20 or 30 [certainly no more than 253] protesters, mostly drug addicts and mental defectives, were riled up by a vast CIA conspiracy to commit start a riot.

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Would you mind sharing a link to that thread?