thanks AV

I was worried I might have gone too far off topic with my rant so I actually really appreciate the honest reply. I’m glad I wasn’t off base.

I just feel like the more nefarious thing to do is to silo people with bad ideas so they can reinforce each other out of sight of people who could reasonably talk them out of their spiral. Like you said, Im sure the .ml people are self selecting but there’s also an aspect of being defederated or ostracized for simply having an .ml username that makes them unable to get a reasoned debate out of people who claim to want a marketplace of ideas.

If they were truly so ideologically captured that they would kill you for saying Stalin was a bad leader they probably wouldn’t be on here defending it. They’d be doing whatever psychotic militant commune shit the patriot front is doing.

We all seem to agree that patriot front is worse than whatever .ml is doing but the fact that .ml is publicly available to be scrutinized, and there are entire pages dedicated to going in their comms explicitly to get banned for bad faith, means the size of the outrage is not commensurate with its output. Idk who on .ml is plotting a communist coup but unless that’s what they’re doing I see no reason to be planning on imprisoning anyone who defends china.

There’s real, material right wing threats in our country that have real power. Why are we on lemmy yelling at the weird kids table for playing their card game none of us care about? Like you said, even republicans who voted for this are just as much victims of propaganda as the best of us. We’d be better off pointing people towards the actual cause of our problems instead of trying to blame a fringe group for holding us back.

I’m saying we need everyone, and we can bicker about how much state intervention is too much once we no longer have to worry about concentration camps being filled with dissenters.

Thanks again for really putting thought into your reply and understanding where I’m coming from. Every time I mention .ml I’m worried that someone somewhere is gonna tag me and have me brigaded for “defending” them. I don’t care what they’re doing. I know its not nearly as destructive as what republicans have been doing and I don’t see anyone on lemmy posting trophies of the republicans they’ve caught detaining someone illegally. Let’s focus our energy on the real threats while we still have enough bodies to choke up the combine. I fear we are losing daylight fast.

As excessive as defederating an entire instance is, think about how insane banning anti-zionist speech across an entire instance is.

It’s not like its one gardening sublemmy or the diary of Anne frank guy, its an entire instance banning a specific form of antifascism. That’s unhinged and their justification is flimsy as hell.

If you wanna stay on that instance spam them with pictures of children in Gaza 24/7 until they ban you or reverse course on this decision.

It’s plainly an attempt at palestinian erasure. They decided to ban anti zionism the same week Israel announced they would be exporting 1 million Palestinians to Libya and occupying Gaza permanently. It’s not an accident, or for their safety, or German law, its genocide and feddit apparently wants to mandate it big brother style where you cant talk about eastasia.

It’s insane. Power tripping mods to a new stratosphere. Nobody should just be okay with this. Speaking for palestine without fear of being banned is one of the main reasons a lot of us left reddit in the first place. Don’t bring that shit here!

This I think goes to show how the mainstream obsession with “tankies” as an ideological group is no different than the people screaming about “libertarians” in the 2010s

The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.

Now, also just like the libertarians of the 2010, there are like five specific people who hold inconceivable sociopolitical and economic power who ARE in fact attempting to force reforms through governments, undemocratically, to achieve these undeniably horrific outcomes because it does in fact suit their personal ideological aims.

Those people have been privately or publicly working cooperatively with Russian information warfare (or just are GRU) in order to boost the perceived popularity of their agendas.

What you’re describing, the people saying “I hate putin, but Ukraine should lay over and give up” are probably the exact targets of this effort.

Those are liberals you’re talking to. Those are the people who read all the tankie stuff and read all the nazi propaganda on twitter and came to the manufactured “centrist” conclusion that Ukraine just doesn’t really matter and the real loss is the fact that fighting continues.

It’s why donald trump, every single time he mentions it, says

there are 5,000 soldiers dying a week, on both sides: RUSSIAN and Ukrainian

It’s a deliberate attempt to frame Russia as an equal in terms of tragedy. There is no tragedy for Russia outside of the fact they’ve sent a quarter of their working age population into a meat grinder for a dying psychopaths dreams of a greater Russia under his control. Ukraine is fighting a war to maintain their sovereignty.

There’s like 500 tankies online while donald trump is in the Oval Office repeating literal Kremlin talking points to the president of Ukraine and I have to get on here and read about how insufferable it is that anon said something defensive of china. Be so for real right now.

Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report. (For example climate deniers using oil lobby reports of climate change being “unsettled science” to defend their position that the climate data you’re showing them doesn’t prove anything)

These people online are not the enemy, they are the only people willing to fight with you against the forces that control every aspect of our lives. This is lemmy for Christ’s sake. The faster we all realize that and move past the sticking points of which genocidal empire deserves more support than criticism the sooner we can be rid of the brokers who sowed all these conflicting viewpoints in the first place.

So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.

There are networks that exist exclusively to push Russian and zionist viewpoints and defend them online as if they are “common sense.” It is our job to have the knowledge and courage to shout down incorrect and malicious interpretations of the world and bring forward a more nuanced and complete understanding of history and modern politics.

Attempting to exclude them entirely just offers the inexperienced a closed system to be inculcated with those beliefs without pushback. That’s why we got where we are in the first place. It’s good when Russian bots get outed in a public forum, it shows everyone there exactly what the shit looks like so they recognize it on the next Facebook post their uncle sends them. Fostering critical thought and media literacy is step one to dismantling this prison we all currently exist within.

(I’m not arguing with anything you said, your comment just gave me this train of thought and I don’t think it would make sense out of context as its own comment)

What an interesting and yet completely unsurprising thing to learn today. Thank you for taking the time to write this up!

Awh man…