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  • This whole saga is hilarious. I wonder what this person's motivation for doing this is? What are they thinking will happen? Do they expect all the "tankies" will just go "Yes, I never thought of it like that before, this link to the CIA's website is very compelling evidence that I am completely wrong and will change my mind posthaste!"

    • I'm 99% sure that person was a paid propagandist. I don't make that claim lightly because I think quite often libs do state department work for free, but this one, well, they set off every one of my "this person is being paid to try to make communists look bad on the internet" alarm bells.

      • If they were, they probably wouldn't sound like a cliche teenage American "anarchist" though. Real feds are much harder to spot, and mostly lurk to keep tabs on people, this is far too incompetent for the feds.

  • @anarchost@lemm.ee

    I am going to argue that this narrative is nonsense. It tries to pass off as universal and eternal something that in reality is particular and ephemeral. In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits. [...]

    Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

  • Clearly my posting powers are inferior, for I have never once received a creepy DM from any liberals before

    • That anarchost person just dm'ed everyone they interacted with on that thread I'm pretty sure. I think maybe they switched to dm's after realizing their arguments weren't working because people weren't buying what they were selling

  • I miss getting libs in my inbox. Getting them always felt like a sign I was clearly doing something right.

63 comments