Welcome ex-Redditors!
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I'm curious where a lot of those folks come from/what their backgrounds are. I assume like 50% are Russian bots, but of those who are real people, how'd they end up where they are in life/their opinions? I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.
:::spoiler Glad you asked, more than happy to talk about it.
I was born in '91 in a conservative family, and I grew up with the naive vision that international conflicts were a thing of the past and we could put politics aside and work on developing science and technology for the good of all humankind. Then, when I was 10 years old, I watched as every adult in the country lost their fucking minds over a couple buildings falling down. I watched our civil liberties get stripped away while we started stupid pointless wars that accomplished nothing and left far more people dead, with complete bipartisan support. In high school, I leaned Libertarian because Ron Paul was a thing and basically the only antiwar voice in politics, though I grew out of that once I no longer had teachers and parents bossing me around lol.
I had hope for Obama, though I was still young and not politically engaged. He was going to shut down Guantanamo and hold the Bush administration accountable for their blatant war crimes and disregard for both international law and the constitution - or so I hoped. But he didn't. He kept the illegal mass surveillance going and, contrary to his promise to protect whistleblowers, hunted Snowden to the ends of the earth for revealing the government's crimes.
As for my personal life at this time, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I studied physics, thinking of it as a sort of "study of everything." But even that wasn't broad enough for me, I wanted to expand my cultural horizons as well, so I studied abroad in Japan for a year, which opened my mind to a more global perspective and reaffirmed my ideal of being a global citizen.
At this point, I was a liberal, skeptical of both parties, and politically disengaged. Watched The Daily Show and would probably fit in just fine with .world. But then 2016 happened.
I honestly didn't jump on the Bernie train at first, because I subscribed to the "conventional wisdom" of moving to the center to win over moderate republicans. As the republicans went more and more extreme, the democrats would achieve total political dominance as the "party of reason," Trump would lose in a landslide. Then he won. I was extremely furious and disappointed, I couldn't believe it! How could this happen?
In my personal life, I had entered the workforce. In spite of graduating with a B.S. in physics, my focus had been on studying things that were interesting to me, without regard to practical matters like my career. I'm probably somewhat autistic, I've always done very well on tests and grasped concepts quickly, but I got poor grades on account of neglecting homework. It wasn't until upper division physics classes that I found myself actually having to study. I was also privileged enough to not be concerned about practical matters growing up. After graduating, I've worked menial jobs, including warehouse work at Amazon, which gave me plenty of time to think. Since I started having a boss and a landlord, my politics improved. I also had a traumatic experience with my brother who came back from the Middle East, "self medicated" with meth, and almost became a mass shooter, but that's a story for another day.
In order to figure things out, I tried to find a place to debate politics online, and wound up in the cesspool of r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created by An-Caps. Freshly radical, I was of course more attracted to libertarian socialism, rejecting authoritarianism, though the term "tankie" was not popularized at the time. I saw right-libertarians as the more "reasonable" people on the right, an idea which I eventually became disavowed of by actually talking to them. Eventually, I realized that their whole ideology is based on wordplay, and that they, along with the right in general, have absolutely nothing of value to offer whatsoever, and their nonsense simply dragged down the level of debate, preventing anything of actual substance from being discussed.
Leaving that behind, I looked for a left-wing space, and found many of them to be clownish. I was turned off of r/socialism from the "Catgirl fiasco," and I was too skeptical of the democrats to fit into purely liberal spaces - both of which lacked the bluntness and diversity of thought I was looking for. As a last resort, I checked r/ChapoTrapHouse, which I had heard all sorts of nasty rumors about - but instead, it was exactly what I was looking for: a non-sectarian leftist space that didn't have a stick up its ass and wasn't afraid to tell off both right-wingers and crybullies, which made it reviled because the crybullies would run off and whine and make up rumors (just like .worlders do).
During this time, I also did a good bit of reading. Progress and Poverty by Henry George helped me get a basic grasp of political economy, while All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer taught me about Iran's historical attempts to reclaim their resources through a popular, liberal democratic movement, which was crushed by the CIA (similar stories can be found in many countries around the world).
When I was banned I migrated to Hexbear (yes, I'm from there). I was still very skeptical of states like China and the USSR, but my opinion of America had plummetted in 2016, and I saw them as acting as a counterbalance to US hegemony. I took a perspective of being system-agnostic, that non-aligned nations ought to have as much flexibility as possible in regards to their economic situation so that they can experiment and get it right, and then that system can spread out of that. When there's just a single hegemon, it can exert too much control, but in a multipolar world there are more options. I was reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and watching his lectures, as well as some snippets of theory.
But probably the thing that really pushed me beyond that was Covid-19. In the US, they lied to us, telling us masks don't work, and then sent us all back to work with no protections. Up until that point, I at least had trust in US scientific institutions, but that lie completely broke my trust, and it really sank in as real that the government does not give a single shit about protecting the people, and that my interests are completely in conflict with those of the state. Meanwhile, China actually listened to the science, they never told people not to wear masks, they did lockdowns, I even saw in Vietnam where the government delivered groceries right to people's homes so they'd stay inside, while in the US everyone was scrambling over each other to buy toilet paper. I had to quit my job because the situation was so bad, I lived in the south and we had no protections at all.
And yet, as usual, nobody was held accountable for the failure, and the government's mistakes were swept under the rug while the media blamed China and spread rumors that it was some sort of bioweapon. Naturally, anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed because of that bullshit. You can actually see very clearly where most people were fairly ambivalent to China before 2019, and then there was a major shift, coinciding with a propaganda campaign. The goal, of course, is to sow fears of China in order to justify more funding to the military. It's no coincidence that China suddenly became a military threat the moment the war in Afghanistan started to wind down, always gotta have an enemy to justify why we're building bombs instead of healthcare. And if some random people get hate crimed, the government doesn't give a shit.
Ultimately, I'd love to return to my initial dream of setting aside politics and pursuing science to build a better world for all. But how can I do that when you have cases like Jane Y. Wu, a distinguished neuroscientist who committed suicide after the US government shut down her lab for the sin of being born Chinese? How can I pretend that I'm a global citizen when the government shuts down innocent intercultural programs like the Confucious Institutes? I never signed up for this shit. I'm in this for humanity, not the United States, and the United States government is making it increasingly clear that it's an enemy to the common cause of humanity.
So there's my life story. None of us are "Russian bots," we're mostly just downwardly-mobile disillusioned intellectuals.
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I'm curious where a lot of those folks come from/what their backgrounds are. I assume like 50% are Russian bots, but of those who are real people, how'd they end up where they are in life/their opinions? I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.
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No, we're still federated with them. I'm not sure which comments you can't see. I've personally blocked a few of the most insufferable users for my blood pressures sake. You will see weekly (or more frequent) posts like this on .world where they complain about leftist instances and the comments are full of exhortations to block or defederate from lemmygrad, .ml and hexbear.
For example, this comment, i can only see one of the replies from the lemy.lol user.
Looking in to it deeper it seems like my assumption of lemmy.world being defederated is incorrect.
The 1st and 2nd screenshots are from lemmy.ml, and the 3rd is from lemm.ee.
From the Voyager app, showing replies but I can't expand the replies.
From lemmy.ml directly in a browser.
From lemm.ee directly in a browser.
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I'm curious where a lot of those folks come from/what their backgrounds are. I assume like 50% are Russian bots, but of those who are real people, how'd they end up where they are in life/their opinions? I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.
Extremism, whatever route it takes, is a byproduct of social isolation. And extremist groups, whether they are nazis, religious fundamentalists, incels, etc., feed upon the people who are marginalized by a conformist society giving them a fictional explanation on "why society hates them": the white genocide, infedels, women are like animals.
I don't think that "tankies" are as extreme as the other I mentioned but I believe the base mechanism is the same. -
No, we're still federated with them. I'm not sure which comments you can't see. I've personally blocked a few of the most insufferable users for my blood pressures sake. You will see weekly (or more frequent) posts like this on .world where they complain about leftist instances and the comments are full of exhortations to block or defederate from lemmygrad, .ml and hexbear.
Yea, i created an account over on hexbear and then this one on lemmy.ml as my alt as a more federated instance
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:::spoiler Glad you asked, more than happy to talk about it.
I was born in '91 in a conservative family, and I grew up with the naive vision that international conflicts were a thing of the past and we could put politics aside and work on developing science and technology for the good of all humankind. Then, when I was 10 years old, I watched as every adult in the country lost their fucking minds over a couple buildings falling down. I watched our civil liberties get stripped away while we started stupid pointless wars that accomplished nothing and left far more people dead, with complete bipartisan support. In high school, I leaned Libertarian because Ron Paul was a thing and basically the only antiwar voice in politics, though I grew out of that once I no longer had teachers and parents bossing me around lol.
I had hope for Obama, though I was still young and not politically engaged. He was going to shut down Guantanamo and hold the Bush administration accountable for their blatant war crimes and disregard for both international law and the constitution - or so I hoped. But he didn't. He kept the illegal mass surveillance going and, contrary to his promise to protect whistleblowers, hunted Snowden to the ends of the earth for revealing the government's crimes.
As for my personal life at this time, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I studied physics, thinking of it as a sort of "study of everything." But even that wasn't broad enough for me, I wanted to expand my cultural horizons as well, so I studied abroad in Japan for a year, which opened my mind to a more global perspective and reaffirmed my ideal of being a global citizen.
At this point, I was a liberal, skeptical of both parties, and politically disengaged. Watched The Daily Show and would probably fit in just fine with .world. But then 2016 happened.
I honestly didn't jump on the Bernie train at first, because I subscribed to the "conventional wisdom" of moving to the center to win over moderate republicans. As the republicans went more and more extreme, the democrats would achieve total political dominance as the "party of reason," Trump would lose in a landslide. Then he won. I was extremely furious and disappointed, I couldn't believe it! How could this happen?
In my personal life, I had entered the workforce. In spite of graduating with a B.S. in physics, my focus had been on studying things that were interesting to me, without regard to practical matters like my career. I'm probably somewhat autistic, I've always done very well on tests and grasped concepts quickly, but I got poor grades on account of neglecting homework. It wasn't until upper division physics classes that I found myself actually having to study. I was also privileged enough to not be concerned about practical matters growing up. After graduating, I've worked menial jobs, including warehouse work at Amazon, which gave me plenty of time to think. Since I started having a boss and a landlord, my politics improved. I also had a traumatic experience with my brother who came back from the Middle East, "self medicated" with meth, and almost became a mass shooter, but that's a story for another day.
In order to figure things out, I tried to find a place to debate politics online, and wound up in the cesspool of r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created by An-Caps. Freshly radical, I was of course more attracted to libertarian socialism, rejecting authoritarianism, though the term "tankie" was not popularized at the time. I saw right-libertarians as the more "reasonable" people on the right, an idea which I eventually became disavowed of by actually talking to them. Eventually, I realized that their whole ideology is based on wordplay, and that they, along with the right in general, have absolutely nothing of value to offer whatsoever, and their nonsense simply dragged down the level of debate, preventing anything of actual substance from being discussed.
Leaving that behind, I looked for a left-wing space, and found many of them to be clownish. I was turned off of r/socialism from the "Catgirl fiasco," and I was too skeptical of the democrats to fit into purely liberal spaces - both of which lacked the bluntness and diversity of thought I was looking for. As a last resort, I checked r/ChapoTrapHouse, which I had heard all sorts of nasty rumors about - but instead, it was exactly what I was looking for: a non-sectarian leftist space that didn't have a stick up its ass and wasn't afraid to tell off both right-wingers and crybullies, which made it reviled because the crybullies would run off and whine and make up rumors (just like .worlders do).
During this time, I also did a good bit of reading. Progress and Poverty by Henry George helped me get a basic grasp of political economy, while All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer taught me about Iran's historical attempts to reclaim their resources through a popular, liberal democratic movement, which was crushed by the CIA (similar stories can be found in many countries around the world).
When I was banned I migrated to Hexbear (yes, I'm from there). I was still very skeptical of states like China and the USSR, but my opinion of America had plummetted in 2016, and I saw them as acting as a counterbalance to US hegemony. I took a perspective of being system-agnostic, that non-aligned nations ought to have as much flexibility as possible in regards to their economic situation so that they can experiment and get it right, and then that system can spread out of that. When there's just a single hegemon, it can exert too much control, but in a multipolar world there are more options. I was reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and watching his lectures, as well as some snippets of theory.
But probably the thing that really pushed me beyond that was Covid-19. In the US, they lied to us, telling us masks don't work, and then sent us all back to work with no protections. Up until that point, I at least had trust in US scientific institutions, but that lie completely broke my trust, and it really sank in as real that the government does not give a single shit about protecting the people, and that my interests are completely in conflict with those of the state. Meanwhile, China actually listened to the science, they never told people not to wear masks, they did lockdowns, I even saw in Vietnam where the government delivered groceries right to people's homes so they'd stay inside, while in the US everyone was scrambling over each other to buy toilet paper. I had to quit my job because the situation was so bad, I lived in the south and we had no protections at all.
And yet, as usual, nobody was held accountable for the failure, and the government's mistakes were swept under the rug while the media blamed China and spread rumors that it was some sort of bioweapon. Naturally, anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed because of that bullshit. You can actually see very clearly where most people were fairly ambivalent to China before 2019, and then there was a major shift, coinciding with a propaganda campaign. The goal, of course, is to sow fears of China in order to justify more funding to the military. It's no coincidence that China suddenly became a military threat the moment the war in Afghanistan started to wind down, always gotta have an enemy to justify why we're building bombs instead of healthcare. And if some random people get hate crimed, the government doesn't give a shit.
Ultimately, I'd love to return to my initial dream of setting aside politics and pursuing science to build a better world for all. But how can I do that when you have cases like Jane Y. Wu, a distinguished neuroscientist who committed suicide after the US government shut down her lab for the sin of being born Chinese? How can I pretend that I'm a global citizen when the government shuts down innocent intercultural programs like the Confucious Institutes? I never signed up for this shit. I'm in this for humanity, not the United States, and the United States government is making it increasingly clear that it's an enemy to the common cause of humanity.
So there's my life story. None of us are "Russian bots," we're mostly just downwardly-mobile disillusioned intellectuals.
Thanks, this was a great answer. I really enjoyed reading it. I was dead serious about wondering about how you all got to where you are. It wasn't just a glib statement. I'll look into those books, thanks.
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FOSS isn't Soviet style state capitalism / socialism either.
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lemm.ee federates with all three of the mentioned instances.
I've seen a few. They are mostly just anti American (fair enough). They often miss the point that something being anti American doesn't mean they are not their own empire with its own problematic takes.
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First time reading the original statement, and this actually makes me less concerned. It isn't secret knowledge that the capital has worked hard to reframe being left from wanting anti capitalist economic policies to mostly social issues without consequence such as inclusive language and skin color quotas. None of that addresses the real problem that is the capitalist system driving us all into servitude and the planet towards collapse.
This is also why the left is generally not considered attractive to the average voter. They don't care about any of that social crap, they care about their own situation and how to improve that. And while inclusivity is important and a just cause it is entirely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things and not a valid agenda to run a political movement on.
The lives of every marginalized group of people will improve a hundred times more by toppling the system that keeps us all oppressed and unhappy, than by having the government use their preferred pronouns when letting them know they have to make do with less, again.
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I’m quite left of center myself
lol, every time.
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normal (white, western, neoliberal) political spectrum.
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If Harris was gonna be swayed by public opinion, it would have happened after the massive protest vote in Michigan. It didn't. It could have happened after polling showed how incredibly unpopular her Gaza policy was with her party base. It didn't. And it didn't change when she actually needed votes, it's safe to say it never would have changed.
If Harris has been elected, a huge number of Democrats would be more than happy to sweep current events in Gaza under the rug, because now our person is in charge, and they can do no wrong.
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What's your point here?
Then why choose to believe what those same human rights abusers tell you is true about another country?
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Denying propaganda the CIA is selling you about China is not the same thing as denying everything the CCP has ever done wrong. Especially when even the CIA has backtracked their claims, and you religiously stick to it.
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Okay, what about Pol Pot?
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No, I mean it's the new / local meme word to shut off conversation. And apparently used pretty much the same way right-wingers use it.
Ah! Yeah, that's true
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I'm curious where a lot of those folks come from/what their backgrounds are. I assume like 50% are Russian bots, but of those who are real people, how'd they end up where they are in life/their opinions? I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.
I question the "Russian Bots" narrative pretty heavily, there's no evidence for that conspiracy theory nor would it make sense, Lemmy is too small to make an impact. Either way, I started reading Marxist theory a bit in college but more when I actually started working, and over the years I've read more theory and history.
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Yeah I randomly picked an instance when I created this account around a year ago, and these days I see people comment things like “lol of course you’re from .ml”.
I don’t even know what’s the difference between instances. And it’s not like we were given a whole lot of explanation when picking one.
Woohoo for tribalism
![Cowbee [he/they]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c18ce632-5fb5-4888-8226-3dc55a07acc4.jpeg "Cowbee [he/they]"){kind=avatar}
