What I have learned:
- Russia has already won the Ukraine war
- Which NATO started
- A lot of people in the West think that Ukraine should surrender
- Also Ukraine was the world’s main provider of CSAM
- Also Ukraine is exploited by the West but if they can unite with Russia then their economy and everything else will finally be alright
It’s literally like a bizarro world and everyone is over there agreeing with it. I’m genuinely confused by, who even are these people (what is the mixture of Russian bots / Russian-aligned ordinary people / confused Westerners / some other explanation.)
It’s just so… weird.
Like it seems like they genuinely believe it. I can’t see that it’s useful to have a whole server of propaganda-bots all just talking to each other; it seems like probably some decent number of them are real actual people.
I feel like I have a pretty good handle at this point on why people hold weird political opinions on the internet, but the whole “Russia’s the best, Russia’s totally winning the war, anything and everything in the Western media is lies, RT and SCMP are the only things you can trust” viewpoint is still a mystery to me. The best thing that I can come up with is that it’s a sort of little self strengthening propaganda-box like some authoritarian religions – like “every source that doesn’t agree with me is lying, don’t believe them” and a few other key principles that make it hard to break your way out of once you’re in it. But I don’t know. Like I say I can’t figure it out.
They do genuinely believe it until and unless they are challenged on it in a way they cannot refute and also simultaneously does not anger them.
If it angers them, they all become screaming sarcastic trolls.
If you manage to do it politely they will act as if they have an extremely nuanced opinion and well we basically believe the same thing with minor differences.
In short, they basically have late stage irony poisoning which has legitimately caused many of them to become delusional and extremely aggressive if correctly agitated.
If you are enough of a leftist to know their more grounded ideas and the lingo / meme culture, you can fit in well until you trigger them with a verboten question or idea.
You are correct that many of the psychological traits are basically the same seen in other cults of personality. Self reinforcing bubble.
Also lets be real, a whole lot of these people are also chronic weed smokers. Sure, in moderation that shit is fine, but use it consistently to the point that you need it to cope with reality and … well long term hallucinogen use kind of warps most people’s sense of reality.
Yeah. There’s this culture of lemmy.ml, too, that’s elevated arguing in bad faith to this sort of “this is the way” status. Like if you’re calmly citing sources and asking questions, that is “sealioning” which is a bad thing to do, but hurling abuse at someone who you don’t agree with is fine. Also, I’ve noticed a common thread of behavior which is telling other people what those people believe and then disagreeing with it. Like hey, you disagreed with some ludicrous thing that I said, so that means you’re a “centrist” and you support establishment Democrats and Israel, and so now I’m gonna go HAM about telling you how wrong you are for supporting the Democrats and Israel even though you never said those things or anything even roughly similar to them. It’s like a little one-man band of internet debate. The other person doesn’t even really need to be involved in the process at all beyond showing up and saying a couple things enough to be branded as the enemy.
At one point I thought it was bots. Like they’re programmed with this pattern of general hostility pushing a certain viewpoint, that doesn’t even need to have anything to do with what the person they’re talking to is saying, and that’s why it’s so bizarre in the flow of conversation. But now I’m not real sure about that. IDK. Maybe it’s not worth time trying to figure out, but it is a mystery to me that I wish I could know the answer to.
A lot of minor social media sites got created by groups unwelcome to larger sites. Lemmy in general has a tankie pedigree. At least tankies aren’t fascist, but they can still be insufferable.
They’re extremely authoritarian. Like they prefer authoritarianism to leftist economics. What is the practical difference between their brand of authoritarianism and fascism? They want nominally leftist authoritarianism with selectively harsh law enforcement.
Yeah, they are extremely authoritarian against people they don’t like. They just don’t punch down.
I’m just comparing them to fascists.
Fascists and “red” fascists are so similar in practice that even though they’re adjacent, own ideologies, it just usually doesn’t matter a lot
My pet theory/explanation is that, the more people see things go wrong in society (or, rather, believe them to), the more they tend to become contrarians. They look for views and beliefs that are opposite to what people in authority say. It seems to be built into us, like a tribe of stone age people will question their leaders’ methods and decisions after a row of bad hunts and then desire to hunt in a new place, at a different time, using different techniques.
Modern information warfare appears to use that idea centrally. The far right has been indoctrinated to believe that the “establishment” they rebel against is left wing and that a hard turn towards right wing politics is needed. After Trump won in 2016 and they were officially in power, they splintered a bit until they found a new lore: “actually, we’re still being ruled by the left, they’re the deep state, the cabal, etc.” to rekindle the contrarian / siege mentality and come together again.
I see all that in tankies, too. Society feels like it’s going wrong, so they sponge up any reason they see to hate the “establishment,” which is where the already running information warfare provides them ample facts to blame liberals and hate western powers, etc.
Also, on the hostility… yeah. These echo chambers seem to almost intentionally breed a nastiness that shuts down any useful discussion. Try to defuse anger and you’re “whiteknighting,” try to point out that something decent is good and you’re “virtue signaling.” When these communities erupt into other spaces, they quickly drive out anyone discussing in good faith. Survival of the nastiest.
You clearly don’t have a good handle if you can’t even work out the very obvious fact that nobody there thinks “Russia is the best”.
Would you agree or disagree with the bullet points I listed in the body? Follow-up, would you agree or disagree that those are consensus views in the comments I linked to?
That’s about the size of it.
World defederated from them months ago. Save yourself the psychic damage and block the instance if your instance hasn’t defederated.
Or have fun and ask exactly what NATO’s end game was after they “encircled” Russia and when exactly they planned to invade. Or how if Russia’s goal was to prevent nato expansion, why are there 2 more NATO countries than before the war started. Or ask them to explain how the holodomor was actually not that bad and the millions of people that died deserved it.
Tankies are a mess.
Yeah, the holodomor lol.
I had a hex person once tell me that actually the holodomor happened because of Nazi agents sabotaging agricultural production in Ukraine.
You know, in 1932 and 33. When the Nazis were putting all their resources into street fighting, barely eeking out a substantial amount of electoral power, Hitler becoming chancellor due to a compromise… you know largely before they had large numbers of party members or massive control of the state… yep they just secretly managed to sabotage the agricultural system of another state.
This person’s source was literally ‘I heard that…’.
I asked them for an actual source and they retreated into “Wow, way to ruin my good faith conversation attempt.”
Its like they’d never actually been responsible for anything in their life, and just assumed that gossip and hear-say are totally on par with like… an actual idea with any kind of evidence.
It’s like a sore tooth, I can’t keep from poking at it.
I also learned just now that the collapse of the USSR and and its former constituent countries in the 1990s is an example of how great communism is, because when the communism went away, everything got worse. It’s flawless logic; I can see no counter argument.
Oh the worst part you may have noticed is they’ll use US atrocities to excuse other atrocities. Like they did it so why don’t you care about that instead of tens of millions dead under stalin/Mao etc.? While failing to realize the actual correct position is all of that was bad. Best of luck in your adventures.
Or “you think CHINA’s justice system is bad, have you heard about the police in AMERICA?”
The utility is that they use hexbear and .ml as intro exercises before they promote the trolls to Facebook or reddit.
Take a bunch of citizens, destroy their engagement as voters over generations, keep their political knowledge on both local and international stages at the lowest level possible, then have the internet happen.
Generally you get two things: a massive increase in knowledge, critical thinking ability and empathy or hexbear.