MeanwhileOnGrad

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Meanwhile On Grad

Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!

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Tankie talking point speedrun! F35s -> Gaza -> Biden and Hillary Clinton -> "successful counterterrorism operation in Xinxiang through education, job creation, peace and prosperity results" (ponder.cat)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Check this link for context, the whole evolution of the conversation is the particularly funny part:

https://ponder.cat/post/2054411/2336210

I also have no idea what they mean talking about Xinxiang (a city in Henan Province) instead of what they and I obviously meant, Xinjiang. It's easy to write it down as a meaningless typo, but I'm a little bit surprised to see someone who is clearly pushing overt CCP propaganda making an "all those foreigner-letters are basically the same" Westerner mistake.

Maybe that's a strong argument that they are an honest proponent of this stuff (as well as obviously not real educated about the basics of what they're talking about), and not part of any CCP influence operation. I just thought it was interesting.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

"Counter-terrorism"... sound familiar? 🤔

Ohh yea, that's the same excuse the US government used to justify giving aid to israel to do their genocide

tankies literally took a US excuse to justify their own genocide.

Both genocide are unacceptable

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I suspect you’re correct that they are a useful idiot rather than Chinese propagandists. The errors are too easy to make

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah.

It would also, if true, be a sadly anticlimactic answer for what was a lingering unresolved mystery for me:

https://ponder.cat/post/1411455/1610864

So this particular troll account mostly just posts pro-Russian (or anti-Western) gibberish, barely comprehensible, of the type you can see on display here. They don't even seem to care very much whether people even believe them, and certainly not enough to slow down and post anything all that coherent.

But for some reason, when the slrpnk moderators took some time out of their busy schedule deleting criticisms of Jill Stein, and deleted instead some comments criticizing a misleading green energy article, this person suddenly stepped out of their troll mode and started posting reasoned and detailed defenses of the slrpnk moderation team. Why did they do that? Why was that weird minor Lemmy-drama issue the thing that motivated this troll to slow down and try to make sense, and read the messages they were responding to and construct sensible arguments about them?

If they're just sort of mentally ill in a vaguely anti-Western sort of way, then I guess there doesn't have to be much of an answer. It can just be that stuff triggers in their brain and they get passionate about it and start typing. I still find it a little bit curious though.

Edit: Okay, I looked more. I think this person is a pro-Russian shill. The stuff they get truly passionate about is all anti-Ukraine stuff. They'll performatively serve up some salad about Gaza or Xinjiang when prompted, but their main focus is Russia (specifically Ukraine), and there is absolutely no way that any useful idiot is this impassioned and consistent about how important it is for us all to agree that Putin's Russia is the good guys.

From https://lemmy.ca/comment/14204276:

I know that demonic imbeciles (or paid shills) such as yourself will when Putin runs out of patience with evil, and nukes your mother, you will ask your ruler to force him to nuke your father too.

So we're left, again, with the question of why the only time they got calm and started really actually trying to talk to people persuasively, was on behalf of the slrpnk moderators in an unrelated-to-geopolitics random Lemmy drama event.