This is definitely me when I'm not parroting state propaganda!
This is part 1 of our new Libs of Lemmy series. If you wish to contribute, just make sure you include Libs of Lemmy in the title. An award* will be presented for capturing the biggest lemmy lib, so get posting!
NSFW spoiler
*one-way ticket to official CCP cbt + milking dungeon
Why is it always "paid agents" or "russian bots". Don't they know, in this day and age, its way more likely we're all just fucking idiots. Anyone can post anything on the internet, the US barely has to spread its own propaganda because there's about a million morons logging in and posting every day
I think it's a combination of thought terminating cliche and in-group signifier.
"You're a bot/Russian agent" completely dismisses everything you have said and could possibly said and shuts down the conversation. It's a textbook thought terminating cliche. They can throw your entire argument out while protecting themselves from cognitive dissonance.
And then it also signals to their fellow libs that they can disengage, the enemy has been discovered and dealt with, we have won, blah blah blah. If anyone questions it or continues engaging they're undertaking a very small risk of being challenged by their fellow libs ie "why are you arguing with them, it's just a bot, come back to our safe lib spaces where we will talk about the GDP and nato's new cluster bomb that mulches 3% less infants".
Reminder that most of these people's political theory comes from whatever the last marvel movie they watched or whatever childhood videogames they've put the most time into.
So it's either brainwashed russians/non-whites or npcs (bots) through that lens.
Like there's a good chance the worst material "harm" that these people have experienced in their lives is the inflation of gold prices on the market on their world of warcraft server.
I get the impulse towards extreme cynicism but most libs afaik are still one or two paychecks away from the street, making decisions about when they can afford to get medical care, etc. The general public is mostly ignorant, alienated, and disenfranchised, completely trapped in the hegemonic power of a propaganda regime they don't even suspect exists. You don't have to be nice to them but it's worth remembering most of them were probably perfectly decent when they were six and it took years of indoctrination to turn them in to libs, just like it does for everyone else.
Reminder that most of these people's political theory comes from whatever the last marvel movie they watched or whatever childhood videogames they've put the most time into
Reminder that no one is immune to propaganda and that the people most vulnerable to it dogmatically claim that it has no meaningful effect on them.
Ironic. Zizek could show others their unexamined ideology... but not himself.
liberals have a tendency to look for a qualifier in their political opponents that makes them a bad person with opinions not worth considering. They have to discover which aspects of your political ideology are invalid enough so they can dismiss you.
Strangely, being an idiot isn't enough for them. They think idiots can be reasoned with. You have to be compromised in some way, or lying about your ideology. They have to find that you're breaking the rules somehow. They have a hard time conceiving of a reality where their political opponents strongly believe what they mean, they have to believe you've been tricked or have ulterior motives. They think liberalism is simply the ideology you arrive at if you've thought really hard.
Exactly. Liberals don't believe they have an ideology. Ideology is something bad and brainwashed peoole have. They fundamentally think ideology is a problem and stops people from being able to understand reality the "correct" way like they do.
"Why does everything have to be political these days? Why can't we just agree on common sense and logical and objective ideas?"
Let's translate this:
"Me, a liberal, joined a communist site because I wanted to find other "leftists", by which I mean other liberals. I got shown facts about the lies I've been fed to my entire life, and instead of taking a look at my long held opinions I instead turned the projection engine on full power, called them tankies and left to return to my hug-box echo chamber filled with other liberals."
They've done the studies. People aren't convinced by facts, they view it as a social attack and re-trench to protect their ego and social position.
I'm as leftist as it gets but my imperialist home country is much less bad than most of its adversaries!
As I've said before:
1984 george orwell animal farm authoritarianism no food holodomor 100 million dead
The "Holodomor" really is a huge propaganda coup.
You know what I don't see mentioned much? The decades and decades of war movies and history channel documentaries and related shit that puffed the Nazis up in to hyper-competent war wizards with super tanks while pretty much erasing all their political and ideological positions. An entire generations of Americans grew up knowing that the Tiger II was actually a Gundam, but very few if any of them learned anything at all abut Nazi economics or ideology.
Like you shouldn't be able to say "Public/Private Partnership" without being immediately denounced as a fascist, but no one knows where neo-liberal ideology actually came from, and it's popular in certain circles to claim neoliberalism isn't even real and is just a pejorative commies use.
Holodomor is so wild like society regressed to comparable understanding of "hight of the cold war" sovietologists. Like mf the archives were opened we know what happened
Yeah but also you have issues like post-Stalin USSR "admitting to" the Katyn Forest Massacre for political expedience so Soviet "documents" and "archives" are not always reliable since you can't really verify each and every one independently.
I'd like to see this "leftist" link to a single socialist org that is pro-nato.
Yeah they always point at socdems and say socialist because they're politically illiterate.
Crime is down
Anytime someone tries to use crime statistics as a measure of good policy, I can feel the disgust rise to the backs of my tonsils
You ever think about how crime has been steadily falling even despite the regime's brutality and austerity politics? What would the world look like if we didn't have all these fucking neoliberals running everything?
Especially since it's been steadily falling for 30 years regardless of anything else and only had brief spikes during the worst part of the pandemic. Congratulations, Brandon. By literally just being alive (a big ask for Biden), he can say the crime rate went down during his presidency.
"Crime's down"
How fucking brainwashed do you have to be to have crime as one of your main overriding worries in 2023 in America? Jfc. But fuck, I guess that's what the media has been pushing hard for the last few years. Anti-Homeless propaganda and blowing up massive news cycles about petty shoplifiting.
When company profits are creating a greedflation and people say: No crimes are happening.
Why did you just post an r/politics thread while using Darkmode
If supporting any current or former AES state is evil and supporting it makes you evil as well, then with God as my witness I declare myself the evilest person alive and I will stay so because I'd rather be evil than a Nazi
Pretty much yeah
The Great Satan counts on people being like "America might be bad, but the alternative is worse!"
And it's like, no, they're really not
Evil is when you don't have property, and the less property you have the more evil you are; Capitalist morality.
I signed up for hexbear, hoping to meet leftists, but these are not leftists.
Correct. Everybody here is a liberal. I don't think he's savvy enough to know that.
Look, I'm as conservative as they come, but I believe in seizing the means of production to enable the liberation of the proletariat from the bourgeois imperialists.
I embrace the values of our forefathrs, the ancient ways, the ancestral methods - First we shoot the royalty, then we take all their stuff and establish a workers paradise, just like great great grandad used to do!
If you don't give a shit about bullshit propaganda from totalitarian regimes why are you pro NATO?
#gottem
I don't care about what bullshit propaganda you show me from a totalitarian regime
Wow they're actually right. You should never trust US or NATO propaganda
I've noticed something libs do is that when it gets overwhelmingly clear that the USA is evil they immediately jump to the idea that China/Russia/any country on the bad list is mega super evil.
THAT is the "whataboutism" they so often fucking accuse us of. It will never not piss me off that when they claim "whataboutism" at us, it's to avoid having to confront the obviously real atrocities of the regime they're defending. But if we use the same rhetoric back at them, it's rUsSiAn DiSinForMazIa!!
Likewise. It's a thought terminator. I have a theory that you need a more sophisticated understanding of history to be able to place the countries in context. Honestly I'm not sold on Russia being a positive force in the world, but I know what an insatiable imperial war machine America is and I don't think Russia has bloody trails leading through the global south like America does. And I'm more concerned with the country I have a more intimate understanding of having lived there before.
There's a similar trick liberals also pull where they somewhat acknowledge something horrible that
is doing but then say "but that's human nature and everyone would do the same thing if given a chance." 
Liberals and fascists shaking hands meme, and the hands are "building entire social institutions to convince everyone that their specific brand of smug sadism is normal and universal, actually."
Sure, the US is the only country to have used nuclear weapons, they have invaded like half the countries in the entire world, use crippling economic sanctions to strangle ideological dissidents, deny their own citizen critical medical care if they can't afford it, are perfectly fine throwing millions onto the streets if it benefits landlords and constantly starve educational spending to further prop up their obscene military, but China... doesn't let its people use facebook?
I wonder if this guy read one of my "NATO leftist" rants and got a nerve struck. Would make my day.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
pure ideology
killed 
