Concern trolling is how you know it’s a fed. Your average online lib would either just type death threats in a fit of rage or snarkily comment about muh orwellian nightmare state.
It’s possible in some cases – I assumed these kinds of things were true when I was an uninformed liberal (a bit redundant), although I never posted about it online and I’d like to think I was more humble about what I “knew”. We shouldn’t give up too soon (at least this person doesn’t seem openly hostile)
The problem imo is that some things are just accepted as axiomatic: “Russia bad”, “China bad”. Everything else eventually stumbles upon these axioms and stumps progress.
Yeah, unfortunately you won’t get anywhere with those who are unwilling to educate themselves and eventually get rid of these illogical prejudices
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Same here. Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes
“No investigation, no right to speak”
– Vladimir Parenti
The things is that the “true” part is there. They did do a bunch of sruveillance, some repression and they did do a large re-education program that undoubtedly had problems within it given the size of it. Some element of force was likely needed with some particularly problematic individuals as well. But the vast majority could just do their mon-fri and go home on weekends.
That’s where the truth ends and the lies begin though. Mass incarceration, torture, rape, forced labour, genocide blah blah blah complete and total distortions of reality.
What occurred was quite proportional given they were eliminating islamic extremism and the number of attacks and bombings that were occurring, and that’s why they need to do the big-lie. The reality is something a lot of people can be reasoned into understanding so you may as well go all-in with an immense lie.
This has been something I’ve struggled with since radicalizing. I just don’t know what to believe anymore when it comes to things non-theoretical. I could assume that the form of indoctrination I got in the West were all lies, and do something like take the opposite of everything said about Socialist states to be the truth. On the otherhand, I could take a more middleground approach and assume that some things were lies and other things were truthful, but then that leads to the problem of determining what is true and what is false, which seems like an impossible task when it comes to the realities of geopolitical narratives and propaganda.
In other words, Western media says one thing, state operated media says another; how do I find a consensus with that.
Yeah you shouldn’t take the opposite side, you should hold no opinion on a topic until fully investigating it to the point of feeling clear-headed on what the real situation is (and even then maintain the readiness to change that on verifiable new information).
This necessarily means doing a very large amount of reading and investigation on some topics. And it necessarily means that when huge things like the uighur issue occur that you keep up with socialist spaces during those times in order to follow along in realtime with investigation. The better socialist spaces were debunking the new propaganda pieces as we went along. One would come out and within 1-2 days a firm debunk would develop, but it takes time because finding the truth requires investigation.
When something is as large as the uighur issue and they spread such HUGE quantities of bullshit this eventually reaches a point at which you have 400 page google docs debunking each and every single thing out there. This is not very helpful for the average person who certainly isn’t going to read that, it’s a nightmare tbh but there’s little more we can do.
Right now with Ukraine it’s similar. As it develops we find things like this nuclear plant being a piece of propaganda, and we find the truth of the matter and develop a way to communicate that. It was the same with that theatre bomb and the same with those bodies killed by Ukrainian mortars north of Kiev that the propaganda machine claimed was Russian mass-killings.
If you were to keep up with the truth only AFTER the event you would have to read a 400 page doc of debunks for the Ukraine war too, just like the Uighur issue needs enormous amounts of reading if you’re going to get de-brainwormed on it after the fact.
There is little we can do about this unfortunately. Once brainworms are injected by the mass media their removal is significantly harder than if the injection were prevented in realtime as it happens. This is why it’s so important for us to develop better socialist media, better delivery of counter-narrative, to undermine the attempt at injecting brainworms from the start.
Thanks for this, I’d like to get more informed on a lot of various national and global issues, but the only real “alternative” media sources that aren’t filled to the brim with Capitalist/Western dogma are, to my knowledge, places like CommonDreams and Jacobin. Other so-called “Leftist” sources of mainstream news appear to merely be Neo-Liberal (or Liberal) media wearing a Leftist (or “Progressive”) aesthetic.
Do you have any other sources, maybe some more daily news types, as well as some sites that do a lot more of a deep dive into global issues?
Well I come from a British perspective so my consumption is going to be lean a specific way.
Socialist papers are a start. Morning Star is a very long running British one linked to CPB. Liberation News is the PSL’s.
Kawaschun News is Bolivian which tends to have good south american coverage. CGTN is Chinese.
There’s a few other good projects. Double Down News is another British media project. As is Novara Media which is basically a British Jacobin but isn’t infiltrated by sussy potential feds.
Grayzone is well worth paying attention to despite some bias in their work, especially because intelligence agencies are interested in shutting them down. Mango Press is a collective and does some similar stuff.
I’ll give a direct shout to Benjamin Norton here too. His work is absolutely excellent. His main project is Multipolarista but is also involved in Historic.ly
In my experience a lot of deep dive stuff can be pretty specific and ends up being led by very specific collectives. For example the best Xinjiang one I know of is presented by Qiao Collective. A lot of this stuff is better picked up by following along with socialist content aggregators like lemmygrad, hexbear, genzedong, etc.
So covered by everyone who has a financial incentive to destabilize China, keeping labour costs low? Not to mention maintaining western Hegemony…
Libs really can’t think more than one step out can they?
Source: my capitalist government that does everything it can to destroy China. I believe their news on China.
It’s hard for some people to deprogram, I understand. My family in law consider themselves very educated and smart people, with a lot of political knowledge. They mostly spew socdem shit about capitalist reform. But by passively yelling at them and actually debating them I at least made them consider there is some nuance to the things they read in their smart people newspapers. They honestly didn’t think of themselves as victims of propaganda. For these people, there seems to be hope.
But when you are presented with multiple sources debunking your worldview, and if you are then still holding on to your view, you need help. You’re living in a constant fairy tale world and you’re not going to ever improve it for yourself.
Posting YouTube comments on this community is cheating.
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What about the organ harvesting report launch by Australia and New Zealand this week? All the prominent news channels, journalists, and even some countries parliament covered it (except for OIC countries. No hate I love china and chinese people but the CCP is doing serious human rights violations.
