polity
High horsing around
Spend billions constantly smearing and badmouthing the enemy rival regime
“You’re no better”
“NOOOOO a historian would just say ok and not challenge our propaganda!”
PS: This is of course satire. Since the rise of the historians, all hypocrites have been killed.
PPS: Just read this and I think it puts the hypocrisy of OPs meme better than my bullshit:
It reminds me of what Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter said in his acceptance speech in 2005 critiquing the Iraq War and U.S. foreign policy:
“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Very based and kill all the hypocrites pilled!
My country has committed countless acts that would be considered atrocities either now or at the time. We had several groups of second-class citizens, dabbled in genocide, were religiously tolerant, sided with nazis, sided with communists, convinced muslims that alcohol is okay, foiled plans of every ally and enemy we came into contact with, our president endorsed Trump and was endorsed by Trump, successfully invaded russia twice, enlisted animals into army and had pedophiles among clergy.
And we still have several movements, modern or historical, portraying us as the good guys and calling us “Jesus of nations”
Which country are you speaking of?
Ha! I expected people o try to guess…
spoiler
Poland!
You guys have CD Projekt Red, so that makes up for it.
Sometimes I wonder why our official “Epic Work of Art of National Importance” is a long-ass rhymed story by drugged hopeless romantic instead of Witcher games.
Oh, that country
Yup, we exist, despite evidence of it being frankly unlikely
Very based idea, but let’s make sure we focus the bad to handle the current happening right fucking now and we can stop it bad from continuing to happen.
No nation on earth is without blood on their hands, is that so hard for us regular working people to see?
“The world is built with genocide” - Bo Burnham
USA has committed way more genocidal acts than just that.
Most people don’t know because rewriting history is a long standing American tradition.
No way, thanks for the head’s up. WHO KNEW
Yeah but if you want to see some real proper genocidal acts then we gotta break out da history books and head to checks notes everywhere on earth.
Sentinel island is only known for small scale murders rather than full on genocide, tbf.
It’s pancakes and waffles.
“Genocide A is bad.”
“So you’re saying you support Genocide B?!?!?”
Tribalism is great because its actually sportsism.
Tribal relations are varied and nuanced among plethora tribes, but Sports is a zero-sum A-B, the limit of ways things can be.
I’ve always hated sports. Sports fans to me appear to be little more than neanderthals. “Think with your muscles, not with your brain, cause life is a zero-sum game. My team better than yours. If you ain’t first you’re last.”
Philosophically speaking, every part of that is just the complete opposite of everything I believe in.
The meta of this is if you put philosophy toe-to-toe against sports. In that case, philosophy is better. A sports fan might say “but athletes can score more points than philosophers!” But a philosopher would say “What kind of points? What game are we even playing? What’s the objective? How does one win?” and question the assumption that “points” and “winning” would have anything at all to do with physical prowess in the first place.
Sports demand real cognition, not less than philosophy, arguably more, since it happens live, under time pressure, with a body that must execute the conclusion instantly. A point guard reading a defense while the shot clock runs down is doing applied game theory. A boxer managing distance is running live Bayesian updates on an opponent’s intent every half-second. “Think with your muscles” gets it backwards: muscles are just the output device: what’s upstream is pattern recognition and split-second reasoning under uncertainty, the kind philosophers usually get to do slowly, with a pen and no clock.
As for competition being some corrupted, zero-sum betrayal of philosophy’s higher aims, Nietzsche would say you have it exactly backwards. He didn’t see struggle as an unfortunate feature of life to be reasoned away; he saw it as life’s basic structure. “Life is will to power,” and where there’s no resistance to overcome, there’s no growth. “What does not kill me makes me stronger” wasn’t a locker-room slogan to him, it was near his actual metaphysics.
He also admired the Greek agon, the competitive contest underlying their tragedy, philosophy, and athletics alike. In “Homer’s Contest” he argued the Greeks needed structured competition to keep ambition from curdling into destruction, the contest channels will to power into something generative rather than annihilating. Sport isn’t philosophy’s opposite; it’s an old technology for making competition survivable, even beautiful.
So framing this as philosophy-versus-sports, which wins, may be the more “neanderthal” move, it smuggles in the same zero-sum, must-crown-a-victor logic you’re accusing sports fans of, just relocated to the seminar room. Nietzsche’s real challenge wasn’t ranking pursuits; it was asking why you need a hierarchy at all, rather than seeing both as arenas where the same drive, to test yourself against resistance and become more, gets expressed.
So framing this as philosophy-versus-sports, which wins […] smuggles in the same zero-sum, must-crown-a-victor logic you’re accusing sports fans of
That’s why I called it “the meta,” it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. I was poking fun at myself for the seeming inconsistency there. I probably could have left out that entire last paragraph and it would have been better but sometimes I forget that my oddball humor doesn’t always come across the way I intend it to
I believe the scientific consensus among historical anthropologists is, and I quote in an Australian accent for some reason:
“we’re a right bunch of dickheads we sure are now, ain’t we”
Actually, it’s the exact opposite.
Humans are a communal species who, if not for the arbitrary social institutions which sprang up within the last 5000 years of humanity’s 120000 years on this planet that incentivize us to go against our nature, have an unending capacity for empathy and solidarity. If we didn’t, we never would have formed communities to begin with.
Read Graeber, famed historical anthropologist who wrote two entire books on this very subject.
Thank you for pointing to Graeber. “Dawn of Everything” was such a good book, it really changed my view on humanity.
Prior to those institutions, right around the birth of agriculture, 90% of men were killed. There are massive pits of Neolithic people murdered in this war.
homo sapiens genocided our competitors
That is not a question we have an actual answer to yet though. So any strong claim like that is based entirely on your own personal opinions, not facts.
We also genocided ourselves in prehistory
We also intermingled and incorporated them into our society in equal capacity. Anyone with a nut allergy has genes that were associated with neanderthals. All humans of non-African descent contain 1-2% neanderthal DNA in their genome. It’s just a coincidence that we outbreed them to the point they, over the course of millennia, faded as modern homo sapien became the dominant species.
The DNA presence only confirms that there was interbreeding happening, not what kind of conditions they were happening under. Knowing what I know about our species, especially from the early days, IMO its equally likely that we intermingled via war/conquest (in the form it would have existed for hunter/gatherer societies) and incorporated via slavery. My guess is that history contains examples of both (peaceful and violent exchanges) for each of Neanderthal, homo erectus, and Denisovians, plus maybe others that history isn’t as aware of, depending on how diverse hominids got before homo sapiens got settled in everywhere.
Our species is capable of the full spectrum from good to evil and even today we have a large amount of psychopaths in leadership positions.
Though we are the first species to be aware that other species have gone extinct and wonder how much of that was directly because of us. And it’s not like any homo sapiens that exist today have any responsibility for what happened to species that went extinct before recorded history began anywhere on this planet.
Slavery wasn’t really a thing in pre historic Hunter gatherer society:
“Somewhat more convincing are statistical surveys of large numbers of societies that show that slavery is rare among hunter-gatherers, is sometimes present in incipient agricultural societies, and then becomes common among societies with more advanced agriculture. Up to this point slavery seems to increase with increasing social and economic complexity.”
Which makes sense, the benefit of slavery is that the master can expropriate all the surplus a person can generate, but hunter gatherers don’t really generate surplus. Combine this with the difficulty of keeping someone against there will without a state and people specialized in violence to keep them in line and slavery isn’t really that viable.
In general hunter gatherer tribes were anarchic as consensus and social cohesion were necessary both to make sure you don’t starve and to be able to fight off other tribes
Yeah, I don’t think they would have been like modern slaves but more like bully/bullied relationships where those at the bottom aren’t forced to do labour but get targetted for various forms of abuse, including sexual, which would have sometimes resulted in a child.
They probably wouldn’t be abused by everyone in the group. Other apes like chimps show sympathy to individuals that get picked on by more dominant individuals, so I’d expect some of us were like that back then, too. But other apes also demonstrate that some individuals can just be assholes or otherwise decent but can get in bad moods.
Even primitive folks have weapons and combat injuries appear in ancient archeological records too.
They also have plenty of archeological evidence of taking care of the sick or elderly even when doing so would be a resource drain, which means they cared enough about the sanctity of life to help someone who was I need even if it was not mutually beneficial to do so.
I never said conflict doesn’t happen.
They still are today. I thought you wanted to make the point of the people from the past being fundamentally different/pure.
No, I was objecting to the misanthropic point that “humans are inherently bad”.
This quote from Graeber said it best.
We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
… Had to read that last sentence thrice. Thought it said trapped in tight shackles of inequality, instead of what it actually says.
If we didn’t, we never would have formed communities to begin with.
I find that hard to believe. The earliest communities likely didn’t emerge because a bunch of random strangers got together and said “I feel your pain, let’s share each other’s burdens.”
More likely, parents become grandparents and then great-grandparents, and then with each successive generation the number of cousins grows. These likely had a natural tendency to cohere into clans and tribes.
Maybe then some diplomatic relations with other clans and tribes helped communities grow, but I find it highly improbable that the earliest ones emerged from anything other than organically as families expanded.
Saying the first one is how you get banned from tankie communities.
Good.
I was accused of “Orientalism” last week and banned for three days from the community (Memes@lemmy.ml) with all of my comments nuked because I said Xi Jinping and the CCP are bad (largely due to what they’re doing to the Uighurs) and that the Xinnie the Pooh meme isn’t inherently racist (though as I said in the nuked thread, it definitely could be used for racist purposes that I hadn’t even realized a connection for initially because
anti-Asian racismorientalism is simply a blind spot for me).This week I had a comment removed for “Electoralism” from LeftyMemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com because I said Kamala Harris turning towards supporting the DSA is a good thing that we shouldn’t drag her for.
Obviously the first accusation is pretty transparent as far as guessing what orientalism is (as well as the real reason for the ban), but I had to look up what electoralism even is. After reading the Wikipedia article I’m 99% sure it doesn’t fit what I said in the slightest, and I’m 100% sure I don’t know what rule I violated over there.
So anecdotally in my brief time here, Lemmy moderators do seem to be much more removal/ban-happy than the Reddit moderators I’m used to, but at least it’s way easier for competing communities to out-compete the crummy ones. If your city’s subreddit (i.e. /r/tampa) goes to shit because one moderator power-trips and the others could not give a flying fuck if they had a gun to their heads, you’re just out of luck. There is no such thing as tampa@differentredditdomain.whatever. You have to pick from some off-brand /r/tampa2, /r/realtampa, /r/bettertampa, etc. Then the /r/tampa moderators report you for “brigading” and you’re on the admin shit-list.
Anyway, I guess the lesson I learned about Lemmy is that Memes@lemmy.ml and LeftyMemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com have one or more overzealous tankie moderators. Very well, that’s what the block feature is for, especially if they don’t answer my appeals like I expect will happen. There are other meme communities.
There are a lot of tankies on Lemmy. If you do not like to interact with them, you can make your user experience a lot better, if you block the instances, where you see tankie comments, or posts, heavily upvoted. They sometimes comment on random places, so it is impossible to avoid completely, but at least then, their comments denying Uighur genocide and that kind, are usually argued against.
I just don’t know where to draw the line.
Like I hear rumors that lemmy.ml is infested with tankies but I generally do not see that anecdotally as I’ve lurked over the years. Their posts tend to be a lot more moderate, but as I found out, at least one of the moderators in one of their communities is pretty tankie. I also got dogpiled with votes in the “Is Xinnie the Pooh always racist?” discussion, so it could be the silent majority are tankies or otherwise rabidly pro-socialism/anti-racism. So you’re saying I should just block the entire instance off of one bad experience and some rumors? I ended up just blocking the community a few days ago.
Then there’s lemmy.dbzer0.com which is an anarchist instance as I understand them, so the instance itself is not tankie but lets tankies do their thing. So if I block the instance I’d just be throwing the baby out with the tankie bathwater?
Tough choices. I feel like blocking instances for things like this would very rapidly make my fediverse very small, especially given the entire foundation and growth of the platform arguably arises from decentralization in protest of auth-right social media platforms. I would rather rub elbows with tankies discussing non-tankie topics than proactively cut myself off from all suspected tankies and thus a huge swathe of the fediverse.
Edit to add after I saw the last line of your comment (did you add it late? does Lemmy support ninja-edits like Reddit?):
I’m pretty sure that my announcing that I blocked the two users who were arguing with me and asserting that I was racist for not realizing Xinnie the Pooh could have racist connotations as well as saying the Uighur genocide is western propaganda is what actually got me banned and all of my comments nuked. Obviously they’re too far gone, but they wanted to make a spectacle of me and as soon as I noped out they realized I could no longer be fit for purpose.
It is tough choices, I agree. I usually block only communities and users, but I have blocked some instances, that pop out as constantly bringing annoying posts on my feed. Personally I have very low tolerance for tankie propaganda, but on the other hand I also hate the Usaian discourse dominating everything, and try to block the communities having only USA-centric news and political debates. I guess we all just have to choose, for what reasons we interact with platforms, like these. I do it for fun, and that means I am “trigger-happy” when blocking - you might be seeking something else.
But yes, that I think arguing with tankies and the like, ends up being practically pointless, or even harmful. A lot of them seem to be just "Winnie the Pooh"s propagandists, so they are not interacting in good faith. They will just gishgallop with walls of texts, to exhaust you, and interacting with them just allows them to get more visibility, and spread their propaganda even further. The same applies to other propagandists too, but on Lemmy I have mostly seen just “tankies” doing it for China and Russia.
Sadly this also means, that if they post heavily on some instances, that could have some good purposes (like the anarchist ones), in the end interacting with those just gives them more visibility as well. You can also easily spot, when you hit the nail in the head and found them, when you criticize Russia or China, and get a lot of downvotes. I know many people think, it is good to see the opposite opinions, and I agree. But when there is so much bad faith actors around, in the end, it is going to affect you negatively, in one way or another.
Edit to add after I saw the last line of your comment (did you add it late? does Lemmy support ninja-edits like Reddit?):
I did not add it, but Lemmy allows “ninja-edits” for few minutes after posting, I think. I personally aim to mark, when I edit the comments, so people do not have to guess what changed.
Yeah, the trick then becomes, “At what percentage, with how many anecdotes, do I consider a community/instance Bad Faith Central?”
Like I said, getting 20+ downvotes and 0 upvotes followed by a ban for my “Huh, I never realized the potential racism connection between Winnie The Pooh -> yellow -> Asian before this conversation, but I still disagree that anyone who criticizes Xi Jinping or the CCP is racist” comments was a large red (heh) flag in my face that made me instantly block the community, but the other one (+6/-6 comment removed for “Electoralism” for saying attacking Kamala Harris for supporting the DSA is silly party purity cannibalism) is a tougher call.
There’s also the issue of insulating myself from differing viewpoints essentially creating my own echo chamber. As you indicated, for me Lemmy isn’t just Fun, it’s also a way for me to interact with and learn from different people around the world. I hadn’t met someone IRL who had anything positive to say about the CCP until I was well into being a grown man, for example. I do value hearing from those people because there is bound to be some truth to what they say, and it helps me grow as a person and think about my own government more critically.
But you’re right in that critical thinking is not necessarily Fun, and can be exhausting or even a waste of time in scenarios like I mentioned where by the 5th reply it was no longer about realizing that some people might be using Xinnie the Pooh to further racism but suddenly a tankie circle-jerk where I’m being dogpiled and accused of being a racist because I didn’t realize that previously, with a bit of Uighur Genocide denial as a cherry on top. I’d link the thread for the curious who want to read what was actually said, but given your own comments are deleted on Lemmy when a moderator deletes them, I can’t find it any more.
Yes… at what point do you stop blocking the single posters, but block the community instead? And at what point do you stop blocking the communities, and block the whole instance? We all draw those lines differently, but it is definitely not easy, when you also want to interact with the people thinking differently, but also in good faith. And how to spot those people, from the mass of bots, propagandists, trolls, and useful idiots… And not end up wasting that time, or unintentionally boosting their message.
Though, for me the last line absolutely is drawn in the genocide-denialism, as for example defending Chinas “assimilation”, is just wording genocide to sound palatable. If the moderators of a community accept it, and other users upvote it, it goes into the “sitting at the table with nazis”-metaphora, for me. It really is very important, to hear other viewpoints, to avoid the echo chamber, but I also refuse to become a part of the crowd even just accepting the approval or defending of attrocities from the sidelines. Some people of course do find something worthwhile in reading, or even taking opposing part in even the worst discussions as well, but I just get unhinged and extremely angry, and that is not a good thing to expose yourself to all the time. Especially, when I seek the mentioned fun here, be it memes, or meaningful discussions (like this one), as I already get my dose of Awful, from following the news from multiple sources.
The problem is also a lot of people refuses to do good things because said good things is something that is done by someone who is perceived to be bad.
Am so happy my nations of England and Spain have never done anything…
😳
Isn’t that exactly the point of the person on the top right? They’re defending against the “Communism bad” stance, by trying to communicate that it isn’t exactly a fair stance when talking about atrocities as it’s always powerful, authoritarian nutcases doing them. It’s not like it’s part of the communist agenda to be fucking horrible.
I think the logic is that if bad thing (A) (e.g. genocides) happens in both communist and capitalist societies then its not the communism that’s the factor causing bad thing (A)
No, because it’s often said to deflect any criticism of second-world governments. Like “Nuh uh, Stalin wasn’t bad! Just look at the Trail of Tears!”
USA’s CIA had toppled a lot of democratically elected governments and replaced them with brutal authoritarian regimes that lasted decades. Basically they let the natives of respective countries do the killings.
Yes that is bad, and it does not excuse anyone else’s atrocities.