I wouldn’t know I am just a CPC shill I am not concerned with questions unrelated to Xi.

But if you’re looking for John Connor it’s that guy 👇

Dude, take a break!

I mean I completely disagree with you, but this thread can’t be healthy for you. What purpose is it serving to get enraged here?

I’d say take a breather and if you dare: ask yourself how reliable your impression of China really is, maybe research some older claims that have been proven to be misrepresented or false, like this for example. Not saying you have to become a fan, but there seems to be a propaganda effort to prepare the public for a economic/military war with China. So more people need to be sceptical.

You seem to haven’t accepted it yet, but the capitalist class, through the means of communication they control, construct most impressions you have of foreign countries (without them being able to interject) and facts are negligable as they have been in the news-medias support of every US war effort in history as well.

I got a little carried away, but I meant it in good faith, you decided to wear a badge of socialism after all.

What you do is obviously up to you!

Dude, on lemmy consent is just not as heavily manufactured by capital interest as on other platforms.

Its the absence of bots you’re experincing and possibly some withdrawal symptoms.

All good we’re here for you, one doesn’t get off of propaganda easily

The post itself is dumb, so I wouldn’t complain about dumb comments

Tbh, I find the hexbears quite refreshing👌

Great news! I really hope for the people of Niger that they can avoid a gruesome proxy/civil war that the western colonial powers seem keen on forcing upon them

Call me buddy all you want but it doesn’t change the fact that you are not good at making sense

Why are you jumping to conclusions so weirdly?

Case in point that complete second half is you responding to conclusions you’ve drawn up in your head. Re-read this thread, nowhere is it ever about ML or socialism. You think its accurate to call me ML because…?

This thread is about US propaganda on reddit, which I characterized by posting a fact that is affected by it (with the goal of fabricating consent for military action against another country).

Your mind is closed AF when you equate my mention of that with being a “LEniNisT tyRanT LoVEr”

You are the one dismissing anything which doesn’t align with a very narrow ML head-cannon as indicative of being a US intelligence asset

An obviously completly untruthful rendition of my statement. I phrased it carefully so if you’d do me the favor and try harder to understand it.

I would appreciate it if you could refrain from purposefully misrepresenting my statements as you have done in every one of your comments so far

A big part of my gripe here is precisely the idea that one can engage in critical analysis of statecraft, while hand waving away inconvenient statecraft. Or worse - supporting broad censorship of inconvenient statecraft.

I have no idea what that sentence is supposed to mean.

My gripe here is that nobody can have an informed opinion on foreign policy if they do not acknowledge the tons of pro US propaganda that surround them on EVERY issue in this category and dominate most of it.

It is important to call you out on your power-serving statements.

You tried to push critical thought out of the overton window when you painted it a kind of sacrilege (“make folk heroes out of tyrants”) and everyone engaging in it someone that needs to be shunned by society (a “tankie”).

Mind you all without addressing, let alone contesting, the facts.

With all due respect: As long as your actions are indistinguishable from those of a US intelligence social media asset, don’t expect any good will engagement.

Have an open mind and start to reflect a little more

Lol standard halfwit take:

Adopting the “tankie” slur for everyone without substance and obviously no knowledge of what they are talking about - check

Being embedded in propaganda and blaming others who point it out - check

“You’re not including facts” - lol for what? Am I responding to a factual argument? Am I demanding facts from you?

But sure have some facts:

Guardian from 2011 - Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media

Intercept from 2014 - HACKING ONLINE POLLS AND OTHER WAYS BRITISH SPIES SEEK TO CONTROL THE INTERNET

Believe me it has only gotten worse in the >10 years since

Twitter files revealed pentagon bots were whitelisted as well

If you miss your propaganda friends that hard reddit is still there for you

Edit: I realize your missing punctuation threw me off, I read: “(aka anything, they don’t like including facts)” …doesn’t change much though

I legitimately don’t understand why Leninists are so keen on making folk heroes out of tyrants.

What a sentence! You’re jumping to conclusions all over the place!

You’re conflating information with a desire to “make folk heroes out of tyrants”, trying to denormalise a desire to understand what was actually happening.

There was bloodshed but not on the Tienanmen square and the conditions are less clear than you believe

It is obvious that most peoples idea of what happened is heavily influenced by propaganda, I know mine was.

If you could stop sabotaging efforts to cut through the disinformation that would be great thanks

Also: “They are tyrants” thanks I’ll defer judgement as long as the evidence you present us with turns out to be propaganda, there are other “tyrannical governments” much more in reach

I agree, the best thing is to not jump to conclusions neither the conclusion “Everything is 100% CIA lies” nor the conclusion “China bad” and be patient with individual topics before stepping onto the emotional roller coaster

I’ve listened to a podcast (“Silk and Steel”) by a Chinese living in the US and he describes the media coverage of China in the West as skewed, but he describes it as narrowed onto a certain slice of Chinese reality that is there just blown out of proportion.

I don’t remember his exact words and I am not an English native so I might not transfer the nuance precisely. But along those lines is what I remember. And even IIRC its just the opinion of one person, but it stuck with me. Tbf that was years ago though and narrative has certainly picked up since then

Thank you for the appreciation, I have to say I have yet to get used to the discussions on lemmy being seemingly way more good-faithed than on reddit!

Also your summary sounds like ChatGPT

Nah they have a typo (“anit-China”) in their summary I think they’re fine.

the article you posted

Wasn’t me. I haven’t read that article yet

It’s in the article I referenced

As I obviously have not read yours. I will catch up on both. Thanks for quoting that anyways

NGO is some kind of CIA backed organization

I wouldn’t be surprised. The CIA has a history of backing NGOs like this dating back to the Congress for Cultural Freedom whose goal it was to purge leftism in europe of communism. Nowadays they usually use the NED for that though

… “Devil Eyes” … is bit disengenious to bring up. … they only ever built a few prototypes. … I don’t think we can really trust China’s take on this.

Whether or not it is true they only ever produced prototypes I don’t think its disingenious as my point was not the impact it made but how the CIA operates and this is a good example as it simultaneously needs to be: somewhat recent, yet not too recent so its publicly known (declassified or uncovered) and ridiculous.

I wanted to push back on your notion that something sounds too ridiculous for the CIA to pursue, which generally is just not a framework in which to understand the CIA.

The Chinese source was not “China’s take on this” it was a source of the washington post in China where the CIA allegedly commissioned the dolls (which they did not dispute according to wapo).

But since you brought up the trustworthyness of a take: I wouldn’t trust the CIAs take on this, which is the source claiming “too their knowledge” only 3 dolls were produced.

But personally I think its clear these dolls never got into the hands of many customers, its just such a dumb plan.

Antcedotally, I’ve heard other stories of China doing stuff like this

Historically many narratives about China have been proven false or misrepresented too (social credit system, authenticity of tiananmen papers,…) thats why I am sceptical.

Thanks to the illusory truth effect this anecdotal gut feeling is terribly vulnerable to manipulation. It happens in media all the time, i.e. some rightists believe the LGBTQ community is full of groomers bc its what they are told all the time (not sure if this is a good example, I just wanted to pick a partisan one)

If the targets voice is not represented its even worse bc the claims stay largely uncontested and false claims can stack up (one misrepresentation giving you the feeling “this is totally something they would do”, strenghtening your misconception), creating a gut feeling in the population that is wrong. A fairly uncontested example for such a deconstruction of a foreign target through the media would be Iraq pre invasion. You can look up polls from around the time and correlate it with the reporting of the time. This is also the effect of filterbubbles of course filtering out the opinions you lose the corrective

Whether or not the CIA was/is involved in influencing public opinion like this (personally I have no doubt), this is absolutely what is happening WRT reporting on China ATM, there is no corrective and false claims just stack up.

Look at the histeria that an off-course weather balloon caused: people would line up at an event to scream at Biden about the balloon, even though the initial press release of the pentagon clearly states that this was not an uncommon phenomenon and that there is no threat associated with it (granted its longer than that and one can have a discussion about some of the wording, but this comment is long enough already)

As long as you don’t question that the enemies of US imperialism deserve it you should be mostly fine. The big geopolitical topics are more sensitive.

I was permabanned from multiple subs for sharing this telegraph article for example:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230701133656/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html

It differs from sub to sub but the bigger and more political the stronger the imperial narrative is enforced.

r/worldnews is one of the worst, and honestly suspect its astroturf and run by assets or a derivative of an imperial institution (council on foreign relation, think tanks, the likes)

Thanks for the source, definitely gonna read it later.

when I researched I thought a couple of things were off curious what light the article shines on that

These types of stories have been popping up around the world

Can you specify? How many cases do you know? And in which countries? Otherwise its hard to guess if the CIA can fake it. But I’d say if it is up, say to a hundred then: Yes totally something the CIA could and would do.

and I doubt the CIA has that kind of reach in some attempt to… what… make China look bad?

To influence public opinion and manufacture consent for a wide range of political actions against the only threat to US hegemony in existence

That is not even close to the “too ridiculous for the CIA to do” scale. They once produced Bin-Laden dolls whose face would scrape off to reveal a demon. It was called operation Devils Eyes.

You have to imagine people sit there 8h a day to hatch schemes on how to best sway public opinions

Some of the assasination attempts on Castro were also quite ridiculous.

This, my friend, is the absense of neocon/neolib censorship and propaganda that you were so used to on corporate social media.

Isn’t it great?

If you want a starting point to address your ignorance:

Juche on wikipedia

Bc I haven’t heard of the cultural identity of a government

And its still not true, they have a distinct political ideology that used to be called juche, idk if they changed the name.

Also you said: “the problem with North Korea is…” not really an indicator you’re talking about the government, especially given the context of a cultural identity

Okay seriously guys! Who let John Bolton join lemmy?

Also take note of the arrogance of the claim to know and declare another nations complete cultural identity.

To give them a chance I have asked them to clarify but I am pretty sure they haven’t lived in the DPRK