Welcome ex-Redditors!
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Yes everyone is aware of this power so are using the word as a propaganda tool to further their causes. And everyone is aware that the word is being used as a propaganda tool.
The scary part is that by watering down the meaning of the word, it's made actual genocide more likely. If everyone is constantly being accused of genocide all of the time then no one will know when an actual genocide is happening.
If everyone is constantly being accused of genocide all of the time then no one will know when an actual genocide is happening.
If you can do something as simple as compare numbers (a skill taught in elementary school), you can know when genocide is happening, regardless of what other people around you try to weasel about what they believe the term to be.
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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.
Earnest response:
::: spoiler spoiler
I was in my teens, just gaining political awareness at the time of the nato intervention in yugoslavia. I was in the US for that experience. The difference between what was said about the bombing campaign inside the US vs what I heard from my family outside made it clear to me that there's always two narratives at play. When 9/11 happened I was made extremely uncomfortable by the open jingoism, then with Iraq I was primed to distrust the WMD line. I got involved in anti-war protests, then I quickly became aware that democrats were not faithful opposition when it came to war. The Kerry campaign pitch was essentially just to run the war better than bush was. When I wrote my democratic senator/reps expressing opposition to the war I got boilerplate responses.
I pretty much only hung out with the punks and theater kids through high school because being opposed to the war would get most anyone else to respond with 'what are you a terrorist?' I was reading political theory at this point, but legitimately found it hard to engage with marx or lenin at the time because it was the end of history and all I could really see was that avenue being closed off entirely. I'd get lots of exposure to that sort of politics from listening to my grandfather rant though. While I wasn't really drawn to organizing at the time I was perfectly happy to go onto conservative forums and rile up/dunk on the fox news watchers.
What I did develop at a young age was a really critical eye for the media, it was jarring whenever I would travel to visit family, leaving America really felt like leaving a bubble. Not just leaving the rat race, but for example when not visiting touristy areas, if I was speaking in English I'd get people being like "oh you're American? why are so many people in prison there?". I still remember as a kid trying to wrap my head around just why so many people were in jail, the result was a deep disappointment in the US, and any politician upholding 'norms'.
At the same time as being totally disenchanted with the US I realized that I still needed to survive somehow, and living in the US gave me better options than anywhere else so I opted to stay. I knew I was trans at this point, not that I really had the words to properly describe the feeling, though I also felt that pretty much everyone I would interact with would be hostile to me if I expressed them, which made me avoid discussing it at all. I did know that I couldn't afford a prolonged encounter with the American medical system. I also hated the prospect of having to be the sickest patient in the mental ward just to be able to get medical support. I concluded that it just wasn't to be and instead I opted to repress and went to college. My degree selection based on a cold calculation of what degree that I could stand would make good money and graduated in time for '08 financial collapse. Putting off transition felt like a wise move as I then needed to move back in with my parents while looking for work.
I remember being actually hopeful that something might change after that and the occupy protests, only to be monumentally disappointed by Obama.
I was actually hopeful for Bernie too, it was nice to see what looked like the pendulum swinging left for a change. To then have whatever youthful energy there was so callously shut down to prop up the old guard democrat fossils really made it clear to me what side they were on. COVID also got me to to re-evaluate my life and political commitments. Organizing with my local anarchists was great for connecting with other trans people who were also COVID-concious, many of whom would probably also be considered tankies by lemmy users at this point. It also motivated me to read more theory, anarchist and marxist. Parenti was actually a great entrypoint for me on the marxist side, while Graeber was my original favorite on the anarchist side. I opted to start transitioning late in life when I finally had both financial independence and the social supports.
I went on reddit for easy dopamine hits pretty much since the digg migration, but after october 7 I just kept getting banned repeatedly and that motivated me to finally move over to lemmy.ml and I've been here since.
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"You must never go there, Simba!"
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Can you go back and make an new account there instead?
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Point to where I'm believing yanks.
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I mean, most of the communities are on .world, and if they're not federating with .world, they're just not going to show up in the majority of comment sections.
But also, HB is much more of a communal space than most of the big instances, and much more aligned on how they engage with off-site content. And as the fediverse grows horizontally, a significant part of it probably going to be through focused instances, rather than more general purpose sites. We have those covered already, and most of the people interested in something like that aren't going to leave Reddit anytime soon.
They have what they want.
This means there will be more "we don't want to host this kind of content" discussions over time, not fewer. The fediverse will look more patchwork, not less.
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.ml's slur filter removed a slur for trans people.
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So far, it's quite refreshing. However I miss some of the smaller niche hobby subreddits, as fediverse hasn't gained enough momentum yet. There are "channels" (?) that have like 300 people, and a post every other month, which is too small right now.
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It's not propaganda if it comes from the USA!
Nobody thinks or acts like this
You can be critical of two governments at the same time. You don't have to love one to hate the other
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yes a decentralized federated community is very aligned with tankies totally
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The politics community on world is even more rabid and unconstructive than the Reddit equivalent
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Here are some thoughts:
Marx said communism is stateless
The state won't wither away if you keep defending its right to use force
The vanguard party must either accept revolution against themselves so that society can become more communist, or become reactionary tyrants
Modern Russia isn't fucking socialist, you don't need to defend it anymore
State capitalism isn't socialism. State socialism requires robust democracy
Every actual successful communist nation that reached communism didn't have a vanguard state
Being an enemy of the West doesn't mean a country inherently deserves your support. That's how voting works, it's not how international relations work
Trump is planning to displace the Palestinians and make Gaza a US colony, and Lemmy's Marxist-Leninist community tried to help him
Having a small movement with little power isn't an excuse for making bad decisions. Take responsibility for your actions
Drag is not seeking to have an argument about each and every one of these points. Drag is seeking to prove that "tankie bad" is not a thought terminating cliche as you said. Drag has plenty of thoughts, and has already discussed them exhaustively on this platform. And this list of thoughts isn't an invitation to sealion.
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- There’s a big difference between ‘there’s Nazis in our military’ vs ‘our government is erecting monuments of Nazis.’
- It’s not even ‘almost a genocide.’ The US officials are trying to save face. The CIA and State Dept were training Uyghur extremists to destabilize the region, and they’re pissed China put a stop to it, and started rehabilitating the militants.
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Okay bro wtf is that wall of text. They're all communist, full stop. Trying to label them something else doesn't change the fact that communism is a political system for psychopaths