Comradeship // Freechat

Of course not, but principled Marxist groups exist. Principled squishy soft-left groups in the west, not so much

true.. baking through ignorance is often painful, which is why we often fight it

At this point it's painfully obvious that it's a lot of bots seeding the comments and then libs regurgitating all the same talking points. Reddit has basically become this sort of entity where you just need a few bots to get the ball rolling and then everyone falls into line. Which is hilariously on display when you see everyone calling every other subreddit an echo chamber, or when you see how common certain phrases show up on reddit. "unhinged", "mental gymnastics", and other rhetoric that tried to dehumanize the other party/group/individual basically in any exchange. I recently noticed this since Hexbear and Lemmygrad has it's own lingo of sorts and it doesn't fall in line with reddit's lol.

Point is, the image that you get of the political mood in society if you just look at online social media is deliberately and heavily manipulated.

I still need to read Manufacturing Consent, but this became glaringly obvious to me after reading Inventing Reality. I think this is what sets ours Lemmy instances apart from other social media in a lot of ways. It cracked me up earlier today on a reddit post about how it turns out China is basically taking over in the technological innovation department since the US is too busy feeding the war machine, and it was just comment after comment saying how China stole everything and don't care about patent laws(lol...). It was just like 400 of the same fucking comment man, and like one guy saying he moved to China last year and it's a lot nicer than the States. This post coming the same week as the US churning out 25 new laws aimed against China and shoving something like $30 billion into the anti-China propaganda machine. Not suspicious...

I started noticing it more via twitter after the October 7th thing happened and all the zionists coming out of the woodwork there, who would use the same general talking points, be accounts who were inorganic in their origins, posting history, username, etc.

And I agree, it seems heavily a part of reddit as well; it's just harder to spot at a glance on reddit because the accounts are more anonymized, as is the voting. But the tonality of it (for lack of a better word) is distinctly there. Although it's certainly believable, like you say, that there are fanatics out there, the numbers don't make sense. Many regular people are plain busy and do not have the time to be posting foaming at the mouth imperialism on the internet, even if they wanted to; and if they did, they would articulate it in varied ways based on their levels of ignorance regarding imperialism and conflict and so on, not this stuff where suddenly everybody has more or less the same talking point.

Yeah if you think its bad now just imagine what it was like in the early 2000s. American bloodthirst was at an all time high and universal healthcare was considered communism by 90% of Americans.

Fair enough. My main experience has been with Reddit (and Youtube early on), as well as a few forums here and there. Consistently, if I ever brought up any of the third candidates, even as a question, I'd be attacked as a shill for the other side trying to waste votes. I'll admit that now, because media has become deranged as well, people are a lot more willing to act fervently and lash out. But I've been seeing the basic behaviour since forever ago.

And back when I first started getting involved in online discussions, you still had the whole "patriotism" parade going on as well. I've been called "Unamerican" multiple times (people just assuming I was American in the first place), I've been chastised and banned for "not respecting the troops", I've been reprimanded for calling out the stance of candidates on the wars in the Middle East. And especially during election season, if I were to mention that I'm a communist, the American conservatives would almost always conflate me with a liberal, and the American liberals would almost always conflate me with a conservative.

Maybe APL could be better at any rate I believe organizations at least in the west retroceded rapidly since the fall of the Berlin wall, the loss of the USSR, for a bunch of reasons contributed (directly and indirectly) the structure of Marxists organizations to un-radicalize. The best example in recent memory of Marxist organization on the US is in my opinion the black panthers, particularly in Fred Hampton's time. We should go into that direction, do collective action towards empoverished populations. Work with them for them, take Marxism out of the college grounds and into the back allays where nobody else looks to. Of course that isn't easy, and especially doing it right and respectfully, but it's the only way, without going towards the masses it's just spinning wheels in vain, it goes not very far, refining the theory is helpful but we got to the point that it's all many organizations do and often in the wrong direction. So I don't know how to move things to the right direction but hopefully I kinda painted a picture of where said direction is, now the hard part is to get there.