Soon after I joined Lemmy a few years ago, I searched for communities based on my interests and subscribed to the ones with the highest numbers of users to ensure they are active. Sometimes I joined multiple, but then saw that some people post the same thing to more than one, cluttering my feed, so I left the smaller ones.
It’s only after my community ban from !games@hexbear.net for disagreeing about Ukraine that I was told about MeanwhileOnGrad, learning exactly what “the tankie triad” means and why big Lemmy instances have defederated from those. Lemmy.ml, where the ML probably stands for Marxist-Leninist, seems to have been defederated by fewer, possibly because it’s run by the creator of Lemmy, Dessalines. Nevertheless, there is evidence of Dessalines holding the same authoritarian communist views as the rest.
Recently, there were two posts on !privacy@lemmy.ml about Signal, but then in both cases, admin davel (who is known on MoG for seeing CIA’s hand in running Ukraine, among other things) and Dessalines linked (1, 2, 3) the same article by Dessalines, which not only argues Signal could be a CIA honeypot (as if it matters when proper e2ee is used), but also manages to shoehorn China even into that, claiming its government “prefers autonomy”. This sort of portrayal of totalitarianism as sovereignty is the reason I unsubscribed from the community. As it has been said by others, ML is not a neutral instance but a means of pushing authoritarian views onto unsuspecting users.
Edit: Made the post title clearer.
MeanwhileOnGrad is the place for you to cry your little heart out and join your fellow Mc Carthyists.
Complain about “cluttering my feed” and then think it’s a good idea to make a whole post about this?
Want to talk to the manager Karen?I don’t give their opinions on China, Russia, NK, Iran, Ukraine, any sort of credibility. I’ve been banned from some of their comms but they’re on point for pointing out the crimes and hypocrisy of the west, and there’s a lot of deliberate effort to minimize their reach.
Fuck em’ for defending authoritarianism but without them it’s all propaganda from mass mainstream media and whitewashing of the west.
tldr: Fuck tankies and wankies trying to whitewash their atrocities with concern trolling.
Agree with you about the propaganda thing, but imo some of the biggest “deliberate efforts to minimize their reach” (which I’m not denying exist) are from them.
I’m banned from there for “being a liberal” or some shit even though I never posted there (IIRC, going off from dates it was from a comment in support of Ukraine), when everyone I know IRL thinks I’m one of the most radicalized leftists they know, and still roll my eyes to this day when someone goes “but the scary Marxists!” when I suggest ditching Reddit for Lemmy.
To the person who banned me : I’m sorry, I don’t know if you really deserve such a heinous term, but that shit is literal Reddit mod behavior.
I really am not sure what you mean - at least on Lemmy. I don’t see pro-western propaganda. In fact everyone is highly critical and self aware of the vast majority of the West’s moves and motives. Even articles of the rare positive moves are met with skepticism and pessimism.
The problem is that the tankies automatically attack any post by someone being critical of any other non-western nations as being hypocritical. An argument by hypocrisy. Annoying as hell, a yapping ankle-biting tiny dog constantly interrupting the conversation with “But the West did/does (insert awful thing) too!” when 99.99% of the time we’re well aware of the West’s failings, and those failings don’t mean other’s can’t be pointed out.
Pro western propaganda is often not just about promoting western countries. It also includes lying about enemies of the west. Pro western media also has a disproportionate focus on the faults of its enemies. It totality that kind of bias suggests there is an imbalance between the harms caused by the west and other countries leaning in the west’s favor.
I think plenty of westerners can identify the lies western media tells about the west. Thats easy enough to do given westerners have first hand experience living in western countries. Unfortunately, even well intentioned westerners are much worse at identifying those other forms of propaganda. As such, they have a hard time understanding geopolitical conflict between western nationals and other countries.
Personaly, I find the “argument by hypocrisy” isn’t really what critics of the west are doing. Instead, bringing up the harms caused by the west is meant to undermine the credibility of a western source and/or criticize it for its lack of focus on harms caused by the west. If you avoid jumping to accusations of “whataboutism” and engage in good faith, I’m confident many of the people you claim are “tankies” will give you a much more nuanced critique of the countries you think they’re reflexively defending.
Instead, bringing up the harms caused by the west is meant to undermine the credibility of a western source and/or criticize it for its lack of focus on harms caused by the west.
More broadly, the atomic unit of propaganda isn’t lies, its emphasis. The way effective propaganda integrates facts into its story leads the reader to come up with a desired narrative almost on their own.
You can’t really attack this type of propaganda with evidence, because true facts are being used to tell a lie, all you can do is provide a broader perspective to show how narrow and distorted the initial one was. This looks exactly like “whataboutism”.
Something something parenti quote
spoiler
“In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests propagated anti communism amping the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War the anti communist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If Soviets refused to negotiate a point they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off guard. By opposing arms limitations they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armaments treaties it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full this ment the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions) this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system. If they didn’t go on strike it was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated failure of the economic system; and improvement in consumer goods only meant that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communist in the US played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African Americans, women, and others this was only a their guileful way of gathering support among disenfranchised groups and aging power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is an unfalsefiable orthodoxy so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the political spectrum.”
Well articulated, great description of how Lemmy discourse ends up getting warped by its developers’ politics.
What’s a wanky? I’ve been here for a while and that one’s new to me.
Nobody cares ffs. One post out of 5 is whining about tankies.
Once had a ml slag try to reason to me that political censorship is good lol
It was high in “but but the those people over there are bad why can’t I be?” energy.
Censoring and repressing your political enemies is good actually. If Biden repressed Trump by throwing his ass in prison there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be at war with Iran and Cuba might not be facing famine while fewer people would be harmed by ICE back home.
This axiom here isn’t “all political repression is good”, it’s “repression of political projects that are bad for the working class is good”
No you see, when .world platforms fascists it’s good. Don’t ask why, they’ll remove you. It’s “Tankie” to remove fascists advocating for political violence to queers.
Go learn the definition of repression please. Also you are high in that “but but the those people over there are bad why can’t I be?” energy. Which I don’t see you saying is good.
Censoring and repressing your political enemies is good actually.
You imbecile, you fucking moron.
If you guys had repressed the pedophile in chief we wouldn’t be in this mess idiot
You guys? Fuck up you don’t know where I am from. If trump was oppressed the way navalny was, we would have a whole other bunch of problems, such as political oppression like what happened to navalny.
And if communists hate trump so much why did their governments get him elected? Fucking think ya basic dogcunt.
Communist russia got trump elected? 😂😂😂😂
Seriously your dad bred his own sister didn’t he?
lol Navalny, the extreme-right racist fuck.
why did their governments get him elected
that’s Blue MAGA tinfoil hat BS
If trump was oppressed the way navalny was, we would have a whole other bunch of problems, such as political oppression like what happened to navalny
People who do illegal things should be punished according to the law regardless of whether they’re a billionaire or not, and since the law doesn’t allow us to throw people like Trump in prison for harming millions of americans so he and his pedophile buddies can feel more powerful, then it needs to be amended.
if communists hate trump so much why did their governments get him elected
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You think Russia is communist? God damn I thought America had shitty education, but we at least learned about the fall of the USSR (though the 90s was framed as a warm time of reopening, not the greatest drop in life expectancy outside of war and famine in the 20th century)
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Russia has infinitely less influence on American elections than our own billionaires.
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Yeah but what if Trump had repressed Biden and now you were in tye 10th year instead of the 6th year of the kid fucker running the US.
That particular sword cuts both ways. Something the tankies never seem to understand.
There is free speech in plenty countries, in none of them it’s absolute.
From Shitipedia: Common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, hate speech, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, blasphemy and perjury.
But when China does it it’s “repression”
Noooo “calling it “authoritarian” is meaningless”!!!
Stop “phrasemongering”, it’s “not fascism” when China pulls its shit! China also not guilty of Uyghur genocide, that’s western propaganda you racist!
Smh. Tankie propaganda was making me mad, I’m actually glad I got banned off their subs for adamantly refusing to accept their lines of reasoning for their blatant, apologetic, wholly uncritical acceptance of china.
What portion of the tankie userbase do we think are Chinese intelligence assets? Or at best, shills?
The down vote shaping on this thread I think supports this notion. It’s something that I have seen and personally experienced on Reddit. And, it seems that liberal left wingers are invariably the target.
My experience has always been that tankies, regardless of community, are exceedingly rare in the wild of a western nation. With leftist views usually comes compassion, and that prevents the development of authoritarian views.
There is something wrong with the proportions on Lemmy. There’s more going on than fringe local western tankies. Perhaps Dessalines insistence that Signal was a honeypot, is a projection about Lemmy.ml?
down vote shaping
Downvotes are publicly available. If you can identify unlabeled downvote bots, admins will probably ban them.
There’s been an uptick of downvotes and new users leaving critical comments since the Hexbear thread linking this one. Though Hexbear is defederated from .world, I’m pretty sure that if you examine the downvotes, you’re going to find barely active alt accounts of users from Hexbear. There’s one who literally quoted a point from that thread.
Edit: Also of note is that after they made that thread, they revisited the Ukraine thread from 10 months ago and removed my comments individually to make them harder to access. They know no reasonable person reading them is going to come to their conclusion that I’m a “fascist sympathizer” for essentially siding with Ukraine. Thankfully, they have no control over the Web Archive version also found at the OP link.
I don’t know if borders on tinfoil to call Lemmy.ml a honeypot. I think if you’re China, and your goal was to destabilize American/Western politics by poisoning the well of discussion amongst it’s citizens, it seems natural to just… let Lemmy.ml continue doing its thing. A honeypot is for baiting and trapping a target, it’s what you would do to catch CSAM predators. You eventually capture and prosecute them.
But for long-term destabilization of a generation of people, you just stand up a bunch of bad faith actors and let them post their heart out for a couple years. Eventually, your posse will have brainwashed actual citizens into repeating your (and coming with their own) propaganda.
So Dess and his ilk may not even have to be Chinese intelligence agents, they could just be extremely railroaded Westerners. But I don’t care enough about them to get even close to doxxing territory.
Edit: And for the record, Russia pulled the same stunt back in 2014-15 with the Alt Right. Both nations could very well be standing up bad faith actors pretending to be Fascists and Marxists at the same time, and that would be an efficient strategy.
Yes hello, I would like to learn more about privacy.
But don’t tell me about threats to my privacy unless I already know about them.
I don’t want to change my mental model of the world, I already know everything important.
Because praise for China is to improve privacy? Is that a religious thing?
You post a lot about anti-communist material in a community about hating communists than fascists. Privacy is more important for the people the state dislikes, like anarchists and communists and socialists. Not those who the state benefits from, like hard-line anti-communists.
They get work for free from you, while you run away from the people who establish open source methods of communication to avoid the fascist puritanical states, that you seemingly prefer.
One post about authoritarian communists isn’t a lot. The states those people praise only curb efforts to stay private. A common feature of totalitarianism is that it wants to control even people’s private lives. Funnily, as I note in a different comment citing a blog linked by davel and others, the US, as authoritarian and fascist as it’s getting, has funded great open source tools and protocols like Wireguard and Tor. Meanwhile the likes of Russia block them altogether, while the likes of China and Iran crack down even more.
You’re not gonna get good privacy advice from people whose lives aren’t threatened by the state.
I know you’re quoting from the Hexbear thread again, which comes off as trolling, but I’ll reply anyway for the sake of others. From what I know, Dessalines lives in the West and there’s no threat to their life. Meanwhile the rest of Lemmy and PieFed includes people from all over the world.
All of Lemmy is propaganda bro. The ratio of bots/shills to real people is like 1:9
If you can find an actual unlabeled bot, admins will ban them.
I left my home in the suburbs as an angry teen for this very same reason!
I did that years ago
Don’t subscribe to anything Lemmyml if you want to keep your sanity
You can always just block seeing the instance. Sure you still see them mulling about the rest of Lemmy but generally they’re better behaved when interacting with everyone else.
The issue with the rest is that it’s full of people whining about tankies
I got banned from their privacy instance for 3 days because of something that, imo, barely is justified by the rules they cited, while other people were being insufferably hostile. It was probably one of the same posts you’re alluding to. Granted I let a troll bait me into getting frustrated (that’s on me). Mistermodal I believe the user name was. After that happened, I was seeing a lot of these same criticisms about ML on other communities. I paid more attention to how the people there conduct themselves, which coincides with your point. I’m still fairly new to the fediverse/lemmy entirely so I don’t quite know the lay of the land if they aren’t obvious in the name of the instance. I haven’t bothered going back because .world seems a little more normal, less unhinged, and less hypocritical.
i stop interacting with thier instance the moment they called certain shows/movies(the ones that ascribes thier authotarianism too) as shit lib or woke, yea thats conservative speak , instant block.
You’ve misunderstood them entirely. To them, liberals include both democrats and republicans. Thats not an uncommon usage among Marxists. They also use woke in an ironic way because of how right wingers used it to insult almost reflexively.
I can see that thread in the mod log (which is public here on Lemmy). Your comment they removed was
Aw the mewling wittle baby is in love. I actually don’t use signal, but nice try. I do know a fair deal about the obscene income inequality and disparity in non-profits though.
Indeed, you were responding to a condescending comment in a manner that’s also snarky, but as a long-time moderator of big communities, I don’t think that warranted a ban, or at least an action that affected only you but not the instigator. However, it’s worth noting that their rule 2, which was among the cited rules, is incredibly permissive (and widely abused, as seen on MoG), basically allowing to ban for anything at a mod’s discretion and making the rest of the rules redundant.
I hope you stay on the Fediverse one way or another. Its power is that even if you clash with any of the staff or even the Lemmy maintainers themselves, there are always other instances or even PieFed to replace Lemmy itself.
Yep. I own the mis-step in how I acted. It was juvenile of me and I let my temper get the better of me when I should have went about my business. This was when I also discovered the modlog. I came over from Reddit, which doesn’t have that feature at least from what I noticed when there. Now I just take a trip over to the modlog and search the user to see what their deal is and block them if need be. It takes me out of the initial reaction I get from bait like that.
I have not had much issues with lemmy.ml and cm0002 made it a priority for me to preference the instance with everything else being equal.
Lmao, bro Dessalines is legitimately the most cringe person on the entire internet. He literally will not comment outside his own instance, because he cannot handle any form of internet where he doesn’t have his magic “win argument” ban button.
too bad he sustains lemmy indirectly though
go back to Reddit then
Thers always piefed :)
“indirectly”? He fucking wrote it
Meh, youre making this post itself from .world, which itself just last week had a massive struggle session as its most prolific mod was under fire for claiming the genocide in Palestine is unrelated to US politics. If that’s not propaganda, I dont know what is. I dont know of any other instances that have the same censorship issues as .world.
I don’t know of any other instances that have the same censorship issues as .world
Considering that it’s common knowledge that hexbear and ml both ban for the slightest anti-auth left comment, you’re both lying and proving the point that .ml should be blocked and not taken seriously.
Classic, .ml that chooses whataboutism rather than seeing two things can be wrong at the same time
For real. I can go “Hey does this piece of software/hardware have any connections to China and should I be concerned?” and someone will hop out and be like “BuT iT’S oKaY wHeN tHe uS gOvErNMeNt StAlKs YoU?!?!?!”
Like no dumbass, that’s the reason I’m trying to move away from surveillance of any kind. Both countries can suck in major ways.
Worst part is that we are all on the fediverse for a reason and have too much common ground to then squander into a net lack of action.
I’ve gotten into it with tankies time and time again over Signal. They point to all this hypothetical nonsense repeatedly and then refuse to provide evidence. Signal, on the other hand, has proven that they either don’t have this info or don’t provide it over and over again through publicly-disclosed subpoenas, but the tankies continue to push this propaganda, which one can only reasonably conclude that they’re bad-faith actors and just “haters” of all things American.
I’ve asked them to prove it with sources, when I have deliverable sources that it’s misinformation. They just downvote and run. So I guess that means they won in their eyes.
The actual reason they don’t like signal is because China bans it and they need an excuse for why that isn’t just transparently authoritarian bullshit so they have created this entire lore around it being a CIA honeypot.
Signal’s creation and running costs were largely financed by the US intelligence community. So they’re right to be cautious.
It may seem like it’s technically impossible to track usage but nothing is 100% safe as long as there are humans involved that can be bagged up and dropped off in some offshore torture site.
Signal’s running costs were primarily funded by Brian Acton.
You can bag up whoever you want, they can’t give you info they don’t have. That’s the entire point.
I’m saying they they are right to be cautious about any messaging service and there are concerning stories out there about signal. However as you point out it seems like it is currently tight. But. That can always change if the human beings involved are put under pressure.
What “concerning stories” are you referring to?
How about the one I linked?
Your link is broken
Try it now
Funnily, it’s the same blog as the one from davel about Ukraine being run by the CIA. It’s around the same points as Dessalines’s article: the OTF, Radio Free Asia, and the CIA.
I am willing to bet the recent Prarieland convictions are probably the drive on this recent focus on Signal.
I’ve had hexbear blocked for so long, I actually forgot about it. Wow, that place is nuts!
they have infilitrated political memes com, since thier instance is likely wasnt getting any traction.
