davel , 3 days ago

I accidentally a did that I oughtn’ta done.

davel , 3 days ago

Yes, I accidentally the whole do not.

davel , 4 days ago

No, it’s just about 4,700 km.

davel , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains. — Rosa Luxemburg

There’s the ongoing nationwide persecution of college students protesting genocide, for one.

How US gov’t prosecution of Uhuru activists threatens a ‘First Amendment exception’

Then there’s Julian Assange, who the US has been persecuting from afar for the last 13 years despite 1) breaking no US laws, 2) not being a US resident or citizen and 3) not having been on US soil. It does this to threaten journalists not just at home but everywhere.

davel , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

How is that relevant? Political dissidents like Omali Yeshitela and journalists like Assange have also been persecuted before, but why point it out?

Honestly it sounds like you may be trying to make excuses for these attacks on student protestors by claiming that they’re an inevitable force of nature. That it’s always been this way and always will be. Nothing to see here, move along. Hopefully that’s not what you’re trying to do.

And no, the state is not persecuting students for thinking, it’s persecuting them for the same reason it’s persecuting Yeshitela and Assange: for expressing things it would rather not have expressed.

davel , 5 days ago

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/4fe3fddc-31ff-4373-a172-79ccdabaf431.jpeg

davel , 5 days ago

Same. If It’s to exist at all, it should be opt-in and explicit about what it’s doing.

davel , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

Less Wrong is brainworms, as are the effective altruism and longtermism movements. US tech industry oligarchs like Musk, Thiel, and SBF (as you mentioned) are closely associated with these movements. Look into Less Wrong’s Eliezer Yudkowsky. Podcasts Tech Won’t Save Us, This Machine Kills, and Team Human have covered these movements, their movers, and their associated tech billionaires extensively. Some are grifters like SBF, and some are outright fascists like Thiel.

davel , 6 days ago

Appropriate username is appropriate.

izutsumi-idea !nonpolitical_memes

You know where the block button is.

davel , 6 days ago

Your account is as old as mine. By now I’d think you’d know better.

Oh right, we had this conversation just last week: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11375618

So I shouldn’t expect you to know anything.

davel , 6 days ago

bootlicker

davel , 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

It’s infuriating considering that it’s in the first goddamn sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

If those libs could read they’d be very upset.

davel , 7 days ago

There’s a spectre haunting Sailing7 specter

davel , 6 days ago

The history of socialist movements shows that it is. Rosa Luxemburg was right over a hundred years ago.

davel , 6 days ago

Average imperial core Cold Warrior understander.

davel , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

By millions murdered, you don’t mean people who died in the last famine in China after centuries of famines, and you don’t mean the last famine in the region that became the USSR after centuries of famines, right? Famines that happened during or soon after the bloody revolutions overthrowing the tsars and emperors, under which the previous famines occurred?

davel , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

The boxer rebellion was 50 years before the Chinese Communist Revolution. The CIA’s own unclassified reports show what people in gulags were fed. Why would they choose people at random? That would be dumb. Nazis, kulaks, other prisoners of the revolutionary war, and common criminals were in gulags.

davel , 5 days ago

If ever there was a real world example of Newspeak, it is how—thanks to class war and three red scares—the working class no longer even has a word for socialism. So now welfare capitalists like Bernie Sanders call themselves socialist despite never calling for the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production. It’s an amazing achievement of the capitalist class’ propaganda machine.

davel , 5 days ago

Bruh, they literally picked people from bread lines and threw them into the gulag.

[citation needed]
Do you even think critically about the cold war propaganda we were fed? Why would you pick people out of bread lines and put them into gulags to feed them there? That would mean you’d have to build more gulags and get people to staff them. Why would you do that unless you’re a cartoon villain? It makes no sense.

Not to mention the majority of clergy for just being christian clergy.

I have no great love for clergy, especially when they side with tsars against a worker revolution.

davel , 6 days ago

To be fair, most liberals don’t understand taxation, ether, which is why neoliberalism lumbers on, the zombie ideology it is.

• Your [US federal] Taxes Pay for Nothing
• Why The Government Has Infinite Money

davel , 6 days ago

What, defeating the Nazis? Breaking free from Emperors, Western imperialism, and Japanese imperialism? I’d say those needed to be done, yes.

davel , 6 days ago

Anyone who disagrees with me is MAGA!

fucking liberals

davel , 7 days ago

This is just as indecipherable as your previous comment.

davel , 7 days ago

this u?

And [China] has worked tirelessly to create [disunity in Europe], yes. Europeans have looked at the chaos in the US with a sense that it represents some kind of moral failing specific to Americans, but the reality is they themselves have been part of the same decades long social engineering campaign by Russia and China.

The only difference is the goals have been slightly different for each target and the type of trolling and propaganda exploits slightly different social and cultural weaknesses. But ultimately the goal has always been to drive a wedge between the US and Europe, and weaken both.

Because that is some weapons-grade BlueAnon conspiracy theorizing.

davel , 7 days ago

Tell us more about this fascist regime.

BTW, what’s the US up to at the moment? Oh right, genocide.

And what’s Canada been up to lately? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_gravesites

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/ab5c4e61-4de8-474f-8142-69c75646bc2e.jpeg https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/ca19f670-d088-403c-91f7-7d72efbe8be5.jpeg

davel , 7 days ago

Case in point 😂 Every goddamn time 😭

The Cold War had only a brief pause before the pivot to Asia. The US tried to foment unrest in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and when those efforts failed it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop, just last week.

• The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
• The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
• Uyghur genocide allegations
• American Debunks All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang
• US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
• A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
• The blueprint of regime change operations

We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.

Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.

The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.

Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.

Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).

Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.

davel , 6 days ago

Let me guess, Tiananmen square was a totally justified response to CIA instigated unrest too?

Presumably your understanding of the Tiananmen riots is about as garbage as almost every other Westerner’s.

• The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
• 1989 Tian'anmen Square riots
• A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
• Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
• Tank Man video footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989

.

How about you link to a single source from any reputable news agency anywhere around the world instead of random shady sites that totally aren’t propaganda?

Sorry, I don’t have any MBFC-approved sources for you on hand. I think you’d just ignore them or move the goalposts if I posted them anyway. I doubt you have an understanding of how our own propaganda works.

• Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
• Propaganda model
• Edward Bernays
• Walter Lippmann
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Powell Memorandum
• The Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy

davel , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

And note that I said anywhere in the world

Yes, I heard you the first time.

they’re all cia psyops

Obviously not everything is. This isn’t a a very good straw man.

America is authoritarian doesn’t mean you should trust what their opponents say about their own bad behavior

Obviously not, and yet again you’re putting words in my mouth to construct a ridiculous straw man.

Have fun licking that boot

Have fun licking imperial core boot, I guess? I don’t know how or why you’ve twisted this into boot-lickery.

davel , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

China:

• Reuters, 2018: China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
• United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding

---

US:

• World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country
• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• A Detailed Chronological List of US Interventions, Invasions, Destabilzations, and Assistance to Oppressive Regimes (ending in 2002)
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
• Shock therapy (economics)
• Are We The Baddies?
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
• Infographic: US military presence around the world The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
• Michael Parenti: Africa is Rich

davel , 6 days ago

Ignorant? Do you imagine that we haven’t been exposed to exactly the same imperal core propaganda our entire lives as everyone else here? Generally speaking, we know everything that you know. The only difference is that we took the time & effort—and had the intellectual honesty—to learn more.

davel , 8 days ago

Someone reported this as NSFW, but I don’t see it. This is just Grandpa Simpson gumming a cucumber with his dentures out.

davel , 8 days ago

I usually rely on TinEye to for that: https://tineye.com/search/3ae58e30783903f716bfe5708e6c0ff6442ba1d6?sort=score&order=desc

davel , 7 days ago

You’re on .ml, clown.

davel , 7 days ago

Lol

Imagine defending a state online by posting a CIApedia link

The Cold War had only a brief pause before the pivot to Asia. The US tried to foment unrest in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and when those efforts failed it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop, just last week.

• The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
• The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
• Uyghur genocide allegations
• American Debunks All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang
• US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
• A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
• The blueprint of regime change operations

We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.

Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.

The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.

Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.

Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).

Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.

davel , 8 days ago

“Totalitarian” is itself propaganda: The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt came from wealth and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. This is a bourgeois liberal, anticommunist construct for the purposes of equivalating fascism and communism.

Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited

U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.

If fact almost all of the “Western left” (that wasn’t repressed by the red scares) was captured by the imperial core’s propaganda machine: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism

davel , 8 days ago

how about you give me a word that describes a country with a single party, ruling in perpetuity?

You’re still trying to construct the thing we’re saying is nonsense. Typically attributed to Julius Nyerere: The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.

The US has has been ruled by the bourgeoisie since the 1776 bourgeois revolution. The wealthy, white, male land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers intentionally constructed a bourgeois democracy, which was never meant to represent us, and never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

In socialist states, the “one party” is the party of the working class. The two major parties today in the US are parties of the capitalist class, as were the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and Whig parties before them.

davel , 8 days ago

That is not why things are getting worse in the US. I could go on at great length on why things are getting worse, but I don’t think this is the time or place for that.

This post is actually a great example of how memes can be effective. The meme is the hook. The conversation that’s being had around the meme is the meat & potatoes (apologies for the mixed metaphor).

Going back to an earlier comment of yours:

Memes are short, contextless appeals to emotion and thus the perfect format for propaganda

By “context,” I think you mean something different from what I’m about to say, but memes are densely packed with context: our shared cultural context. They are effective at communicating so much out of seemingly so little by leveraging our shared context. The a-ha moment of perceiving the meme through recognition of the implicit context is the hook.

davel , 8 days ago

Our theories are materialist ones, not idealist ones. We believe that ideas fundamentally arise from material conditions. Those ideas do affect the material in turn, dialectically, but the material conditions are still the prime mover. Dialectical materialism (and historical materialism) are fundamental to all Marxist theory.

We reject the popular liberal theory that, if one presents one’s case well enough in the “marketplace of ideas”, that those ideas will win the day. That doesn’t mean ideas shouldn’t be presented—because that’s clearly what I’m doing here—only that it’s not sufficient. The capitalist class spends billions each year pushing their propaganda and suppressing any that oppose it. They know very well what works. Just having a good idea and presenting it cogently won’t cut it.

Memes aren’t even a new thing. 18th century memes don’t look alien to us. And we’re not spending all of our time in the meme mines.

I would say that political discourse has become shorter, more emotional, and less informed and complex

I’m not sure how I’d go about trying to prove or disprove this. Online social media ain’t everything. I think most people are abysmally uninformed/disinformed and disengaged, but I don’t know how I’d measure these or compare them to the past. In 1993 Noam Chomsky wrote, ”the general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.”

davel , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

We’re knee-deep in a thread about totalitarianism being nonsense, and now you trot out its synonym?

Authoritarianism is whatever the Council on Foreign Relations says it is this week.

davel , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

The number of downvotes on this meme is fascinating.

Perhaps this will also be popular: Reuters, 2018: China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data

---

Edit to add: Do people think we just make this shit up?

United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding

World Bank, 2022: Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience

Tricontinental: Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China

davel , 8 days ago

libs == liberals, and by liberalism we mean the hegemonic bourgeoisie ideology of capitalism.

davel , 8 days ago

The is just reheated BlueAnonsense from the many RussiaGate conspiracy theories.

• IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor's Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
• Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA "Cooked The Intelligence" To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away

---

Paris Marx: The TikTok ban is all about preserving US power

davel , 8 days ago

I thought blahaj was better than this.

The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and when those efforts failed it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop, just two weeks ago.

• The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
• The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
• Uyghur genocide allegations
• American Debunks All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang
• US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
• A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
• The blueprint of regime change operations

We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.

Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.

The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.

Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.

Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).

Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.

davel , 8 days ago

Yeah, where do we get such nonsense?

United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding

World Bank, 2022: Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience

Tricontinental: Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China

davel , 8 days ago

You know where the modlog is if you like dogshit takes from imperial core liberals.

davel , 8 days ago

I’m amused that you think saying you’re amused is going to matter to me somehow.

davel , 8 days ago

😂

davel , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Raising 800 million people out of poverty in the span of 70 years is not “cherry picking,” it’s the “greatest such achievement in history” by the UN’s own reckoning. How do you square the circle of China being an “oppressive regime” and raising 800 million people out of poverty? I’m sure you’ve been fed virtually the same fire hose of cold war propaganda your whole life as I have.

concerning behavior jagoff Thank you for your concern trolling.