Ukraine-Russia Megathread 6
Being told this is fairly reliable for info on the situation in Ukraine. let me know if it isn’t. https://liveuamap.com/ https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine.svg?pictrs
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The amount of psyop going on right now is astounding. We have the US government sending millions in tax dollars to Ukraine, on top of what we already pay for the military. People are donating their Wendy's paychecks to crowdfund weapons and shit. It's not even humanitarian shit, just straight up "Let me buy rifles for you" from people who are definitely poor. Because the internet and they just want to help and be part of something. The MIC must be laughing their asses off right now.
The buttcoin people have to make this about them. I think there is some Langley fingerprints on that too. Seeing how money flows through these crypto networks into and out of the area. Meanwhile if you donate USD to the right leftist causes you can wind up on a list or worse. The exchange would be raided and shut down. But somehow US intelligence is looking the other way right now.
Reddit is showing it's full potential as a propaganda tool. You can't really see the lines between State Department shit and the average :so-true: There is zero skepticism about anything said. No "um actually" shit. Just pure acceptance. Any attempts to push back are instantly drowned out. Subs that have nothing to do with this shit are basically just freely posting news updates. You can't escape it. r/conspiracy, which for the past several years has criticized Russiagate and played down how bad they are is now saying Russia bad. Even that cesspool can't help but to fall in line.
I know this is mostly internet shit that I'm complaining about and there are actually people dying right now. I'm not trying to take away focus on that. In fact, the UAE are bombing people right now. Armenians are being targeted right now. Israel just did some crazy shit the other day if not continuing to do it It's all being drowned out by this shit. Because Ukraine is of interest to NATO and NATO is of interest to the US, everything must coalesce around it.
EDIT: also Western media begging Ukranians to make molotovs and throw them. They're literally just trying to get video/pictures for propaganda. They spent all of the Floyd Protest clutching pearls about fires. Even that Robert Fedvans fuck who did a whole podcast about how fire bombs are stupid is doing it.
I think this is the largest amount of disinformation and psyop I've seen on the internet in my lifetime. And that's largely a product of things like reddit and twitter not being around during e.g. the beginning of the Iraq War, but my god, the absolute tsunami of propaganda is astounding. Every social media website is unusable if you're discussing anything even vaguely related to politics, and even places that should be free of it have pro-Ukrainian, pro-Zelensky messages. If you even hint at the fact that NATO has not been given the almighty blessing of God himself to purge the infidels and create a human paradise on Earth then you're deemed a rabid pro-Putin anarchofascist marxist.
Above all else, it really puts the nail in the coffin of the idea that online arguments can achieve anything of real substance. Which isn't surprising necessarily, but I think there's a tendency to be like "Oh, my post saying that the United States is evil got upvotes on a mainstream subreddit! We're convincing the libs!", whereas in reality, any popular social media site is directly controlled by intelligence agencies that activate tens of thousands of bots to control the narrative, and there can never be victory there. We can convert a few people, sure, that's how many of us got here, but even for the ones we turn "anticapitalist", they immediately go off and watch weird streamers to form their ideology with zero information taken from literature or even foreign socialist/communist organizations or parties; it's just lib-brained American exceptionalism that completely corrupts any kind of laboratory messaging and turns it into reaction. In the last megathread, somebody was talking about how the anarchist subreddit was advocating for, rather than surrendering and preserving the lives and livelihoods of the working class of Ukraine and Russia, essentially scorched earth tactics for the Ukrainians against the Russians, rather than of the most fundamental, core concepts of anarchism which is to advocate for no wars between nations, only war between classes.
The most obvious thing to do instead is to go offline and volunteer for socialist causes in your free time or at least read theory if you're unable to do that, rather than doomscrolling and getting into arguments with libs, but I'm not sure what we do about the problem of the internet. I'm not claiming it particularly matters, but I can see no other way to end this situation than to somehow tear apart the big social media sites, and somehow massively discredit all western media at a minimum. But how can that be done? I don't know.
I've been on this tip for years because the internet is very much captured and controlled by capital. There isn't two-ways about it. The idea that we could ever federate websites and create a real challenge to the rest of the internet is laughable. Instead what we've done is create a little busybox for ourselves, a nice little roped-off area for us to hangout. They're happy to let us vent and criticize and dunk over here in our little bubble while the real business of propaganda is done everywhere else. They're glad we left reddit and will spend years trying to create a leftist alternative. Just like they were glad when the radicals of the 60s turned into a bunch of artists and writers. If the time comes that they are petty enough to wipe us off the internet, they will and they will have every resource available to do so.
That's why the only real option is to reject online. Still use the internet to communicate and stuff. But don't treat as anything other than that. Don't treat it as your home away from home. Don't treat it as your only means of socializing. Don't confuse building a website and patrolling it for good opinions as the only expression of your activism. Today being a radical is not having subversive takes online. It means realizing all this shit is a dead-end and moving everything back to the physical world. Then the idea isn't to get libs to accept leftist ideas online, but to get them to log-off too. Logging off is the pipeline to leftist politics. Not r/cth, not podcasts, not reddit, not the right twitter personalities. This is because the physical world is at the center of leftist politics. The science of revolution, the science of history, all are about what's real and how to change it.
That’s why the only real option is to reject online.
:monke-return:
Yes, and I'm sorry for shitting on this project. It's not that hexbear is useless in terms of comfort and helping people cope with their lives. I know the admin and mods feel generally the same way about doing stuff in person.
Don't be sorry, be proud for speaking truth to internet power
every local subreddit doing low rent ukraine agitprop is a good sign reddit is a psyop
It really is a confirmation of the worst paranoid fears about social media. The entirety of Silicon Valley is a fucking military intelligence weapon. The largest firms (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) operate in lockstep with the national security state, and they have been buying out all competing firms on an international scale and consolidating them under centralized control for decades. There were news reports over a decade ago about Facebook running experiments to manipulate the emotions of its users based on curated flows of information, and this has culminated today in a completely ubiquitous system of emotional manipulation and propaganda, with the levers of control in the hands of the highest echelons of the state.
I know it's been brought up before, but this is the newest (and perhaps final) iteration of the development of brainwashing by intelligence agencies. They didn't need to microdose people on LSD, they didn't need to stick electrodes in people's brains. They've managed to create a much more effective, and much more wide-ranging, form of human conditioning. They've perfected the art of propaganda to where it's almost 100% invisible and almost 100% efficient at turning people into zombies. That doesn't mean the work of the leftist in the western world is pointless, in fact it's more important than ever to form/join local support groups in the face of the climate apocalypse that is starting to wash over us, but if China and the developing world isn't able to form a counter-hegemon to bring the western world to heel then the only option left is to hope that the accelerationists are right.
but I’m not sure what we do about the problem of the internet. I’m not claiming it particularly matters, but I can see no other way to end this situation than to somehow tear apart the big social media sites, and somehow massively discredit all western media at a minimum. But how can that be done? I don’t know.
China had the right approach all along. Even I'm a little surprised.
r/conspiracy, which for the past several years has criticized Russiagate and played down how bad they are is now saying Russia bad. Even that cesspool can’t help but to fall in line.
This is what's wild to me. The right who are generally rather favorable to Putin and like Russia for their pseudo-nazbol like nationalist brainworms and conservatism are falling in line with supporting Ukraine.
