Muh critical support
Comment on YSK: Mint Press News is Russian propaganda
gigachad@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
So probably a great news source for Lemmy.ml!
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 weeks ago
What the fuck
TIL. I’m so confused by this concept.
reddit.com/…/what_does_critical_support_mean_in_l…
What level in school did these guys reach that this idea needs a special word for it? Like yes, of course you are allowed to support one action or portion of something but still be critical of the bad stuff, or of that thing as a whole. That’s… that’s how it works. If you’re not some kind of “YAAAAAY MY COUNTRY hooray forever” idiot, then that should be how you look at everything. You decide whether something that’s happening is good or bad, and then you express your support or not accordingly. This whole thing where it is relevant in any respect “which side” is doing the good or bad thing, in order for it to be good or bad or whether and how we need to talk about it, is some State Department bullshit that has no place in a normal person’s brain.
Do they imagine that there are a lot of people who go around uncritically supporting Ukraine / Democrats / NATO / whatever, just because they decided to like them? And that they need to distinguish that their support for their causes is the other kind? I kind of agree with the person who said that in practice it seems to boil down to “Fuck Putin, but Ukraine should just roll over and stop fighting” more often than not. I don’t really know, but that is the only way that to read this that makes sense to me, the on-the-surface reading seems just bizarre and pointless.
Auntievenim@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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)
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 weeks ago
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.
I 100% agree with this. I was actually confused for a long time by how people on Lemmy.ml are so universal about using the same types of bad thought patterns and arguments… they came across as genuine, individual people, not like some of the propaganda accounts that all employ the same lazy dishonest methods because they are literally just reading from the same handbook. But certain ways of looking at things and flaws in their critical thinking, all the .ml people just happen to share (or it happens to be really common for users there). It was really odd and I couldn’t understand it.
I have reached a tentative conclusion that maybe they just tend to be young or be really unfamiliar with reading critically or being rigorous about judging an argument… and that is why they are still comfortable on .ml. I think it is self-selecting. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t taken in by certain types of failed logic, because that is the logic that is enforced from above over there.
I’m still not 100% sure but it kind of seems to me like that is what is going on.
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.
Completely agree with this also. I don’t think deleting or blocking this stuff is the answer, because that will always be a temporary solution. I think vigorously pushing back on it is the answer for exactly the reason that you said.
Lies in public discourse isn’t anywhere near a new problem, and humans do have methods to deal with it. It just takes time and it takes a sensible community where some of the tools that can give traction to the truth can get some leverage.
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.
Yeah. Even Trump voters, I don’t really think are “the enemy.” Self defense is fine, they can be deadly dangerous in the short run. But in the long run they are more than anything victims of that same powerful machine, and a the way to save ourselves will be to save them from it, too, so we can all survive together.
Irelephant@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Why would you give support in any form, even critical, to Russia
DicJacobus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Contrarian behavior is like. A molecular level thing to some people’s existence
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 weeks ago
There are already .ml people in here, whataboutisming hard.
neatchee@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I was wondering wtf you were talking about until I remembered I have the entire tankiesphere blocked. Oh the blissful, golden silence 😁
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 weeks ago
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGSKrC7dGcY
neatchee@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
😍🤩 Contextually relevant Depeche Mode 🤩😍