• Jesus@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Lots of suspicious comments in this thread. Seems like political astro-turfing has already arrived on Lemmy

    • wesley@yall.theatl.social
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      11 months ago

      Unfortunately they’re probably real people. Most of Lemmy was full of tankies before the reddit migration so any post involving China or Russia brings them out in force.

      • Jesus@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Possibly, I didn’t look where they’re all from, nor do I know what hexbear is or why it’s significant. Sounds like some kind of intra-Lemmy drama which I’m not too interested in. Just noticed a fair amount, lets say…not totally organic, seemingly agenda pushing comments.

        Edit: Forget my previous comment. I now see the problem with Hexbear.

    • lukini@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      I was curious what you were talking about as there are only 10 comments through Beehaw so I checked out the original. It’s overwhelmingly coming from hexbear.net which we’ve defederated from.

    • randint@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I know right! How come there are so, so many people defending China here? I thought they were the minority. Ugh. When I was back on Reddit comments like those would always be downvoted to hell.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        The issue is there are a much higher percentage here because brigading wasn’t allowed on reddit so they’d be banned for this type of activity. They come here and can do what they want, which is fine as long as it doesn’t hurt other people doing what they want, which in this case is arguably happening because it clutters the comments with the same thing repeated over and over, and they are organized so it’s all up voted. This doesn’t make them the majority opinion though. It makes them the organized opinion. They are not the majority by any means, but they will make sure to come to China’s defence whenever it’s mentioned, where others won’t bother.

        • randint@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          Yeah! It’s kind of sketchy how most hexbear.net comments here have >10 upvotes

          edit: it’s also sketchy that over 95% of comments on this post are from hexbear.net, while on the average Lemmy post (not on lemmy.world) there would only be less than 20%

      • Jesus@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        They’re laughable. I’ve gotten like 30 replies to 1 comment and then they say “You seem mad” Yes…I’m the mad one. 🙄

    • Gsus4@feddit.nl
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      11 months ago

      Yea, it feels like 4chan suddenly saw the light and then turned far-left all at once. They act like what the far right imagines the left to be like, but just looks like really bad anti-leftist propaganda, or they’re just tankies :/ some hexbears are ok, though, but most here are just discrediting themselves by throwing the propaganda handbook at the passersby.

      • Jesus@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Yea, it feels like 4chan suddenly saw the light and then turned far-left all at once

        Exactly this. They’re running around spewing barely-sensical insults acting like they’re dunking on people, but all their really doing is turning off anyone who was ever possibly sympathetic to their cause. And are completely un-informed on top of that

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Taiwan, which China claims as its territory, has repeatedly complained of Chinese military activity near it over the past three years, as Beijing steps up pressure to try to force the island to accept its sovereignty.

    Taiwan’s defence ministry said that starting at around 9 a.m. (0100 GMT), it detected a total of 25 Chinese aircraft engaging in operations out at sea, including J-10 and J-16 fighters, as well as H-6 bombers.

    The ADIZ is a broad area Taiwan monitors and patrols to give its forces more time to respond to threats, and Chinese aircraft have not entered territorial Taiwanese air space.

    China staged war games around Taiwan in April after President Tsai Ing-wen returned home from a visit to the United States where she met U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

    Taiwan Vice President William Lai leaves for the United States this week on his way to Paraguay on what is officially only a transit but which has angered China.

    Taiwan’s democratically elected government rejects China’s sovereignty claim and says only the island’s people can decide their future.


    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    Surprise surprise, Hexbear users came to brigade other instances exactly the way they said they would. Bad actors through and through.

    • Gsus4@feddit.nl
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      11 months ago

      I thought they weren’t even federated with anybody…at least I can’t see their communities in the list.

    • Fox@pawb.social
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      11 months ago

      They say they’re not getting paid, and with arguments like theirs I actually believe them

  • OceanSoap@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Goddammit, I do NOT want us to be propping up a war in Ukraine and fighting an actual war with China.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      11 months ago

      I wonder if we’d drop Ukraine if WWIII was starting. On the one hand, it’s WWIII, on the other hand maybe Russia is still a likely enemy?

      • Benghandhi@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        I assume NATO would officially swoop in and bomb the everliving fuck out of Russia’s fleet and fortified positions before diverting their attention elsewhere. Basically giving Ukraine a much easier path forward.

    • TheRealTurducken@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Nobody wants to have to defend free and sovereign nations such as Ukraine and Taiwan from agressive expansionist foreign powers like China and Russia. But here we are.

  • socsa@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    They are just showing us what non-imperialism looks like

  • Stahlreck@feddit.ch
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    11 months ago

    Holy shit this thread is a good example of why Lemmy is quite far from mainstream still. The army form one instance is strong here, quite fascinating and amusing to read.

  • theodewere@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    oh yeah, lots of internal economic pressure on the CCP as their property market comes CRASHING down… Emperor Xi the Eternal needs a big distraction quick… and he needs to be a bully, so that people think he’s strong… and bullying Taiwan is so easy for him…

    what a big, brave, clever Winnie the Pooh

  • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Weird. There’s a lot of anti China stories circulating this week. Like maybe they are trying to influence public opinion.

      • zephyreks@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Shitty things like… Flying within China’s ADIZ that happens to overlap with Taiwan’s ADIZ because Taiwan refuses to use the median line as their ADIZ boundary like China does?

    • AnonTwo@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      I find it more weird you brought that up honestly. News is News, post something else if you want more variety, nobody is stopping you.

      • randint@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Hi, you should come back and look at the rest of the comments on this post. Apparently all of hexbear.net is pro-China

        • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          They can’t see the hexbears because lemmy.world preemptively defederated with them before they joined the lemmyverse.

      • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Just so you know, when you insult someone like that without explanation. You push them away from your position. I will now make it my mission to learn everything I can about tankies to prove you wrong. 😃

      • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Capitalism and the neoliberalism that supports the aristocratic hierarchy funneling wealth from developing nations is destroying the world. But go ahead, focus on China while the housing crisis and inflation fuels fascism inside western countries destroying them from the inside.

        • duckington@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          it’s okay to admit both are true lmao. we can have developing fascism in america AND china can be a dictatorship. They’re not mutually exclusive

          • NormalC@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            11 months ago

            Developing fascism is the understatement of the century lmao the US has slavery enshrined into the 13th amendment. Henry kissenger is literally still alive.

            When white people do it, it’s “difficult history but ‘workable’” but when China superficially resembles it (taking Chinese history at face value), it’s “unforgivable capitalist dictatorship imperialist empire big brother”

              • NormalC@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                11 months ago

                There’s more to China’s political system than “just a dictatorship” but I won’t disagree with you that it’s not a dictatorship if you see one party rule as emblematic of one.

                What I am arguing is that even well intentioned comments like the one I was responding too still misrepresents history and is to the benefit of the American political establishment (that being Washington and its business oligarchs). The person I was responding too wasn’t blatantly wrong, but the diction at use here is deserving of criticism. “Developing fascism” is an easy way to conflate both the Western European fascist culture and aesthetics and the historically unique proto-fascist (before fascism was defined academically) culture of the USA.

                Neoliberal bootlickers like Johnny (“sell-out to the WEF”) Harris exploit this heavily to great effect on large for-profit social media sites: trading historical nuance for sensationalism. This isn’t a moot point it’s whats happening now.

                • duckington@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Fair enough. I can see how the phrase “developing fascism” might mask the severity of the existing and growing problems within the U.S. To be honest, I wasn’t really aware of such differences, and think that myself and a lot of other people could learn a lot from that message. I’d be happy to discuss what we both think of as Fascism to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.

                  But also, that wasn’t really my main point. I’m not trying to minimize the faults of the US or demonize the Chinese political system. I of course know that there are a lot of forces contributing to the state that it’s in, and that there are a lot of factors that keep it that way. And I’m not even especially criticizing the idea of one-party rule.

                  But the fact is that there are many, varied human rights and freedoms being suppressed in today’s China, and those problems have been perpetuated or worsened under the control and direction of a single dynasty of leaders. I’ve read and watched a lot of accounts of political events in 2021/2022 from people who live inside and outside of China, and I’m forming my opinions on those. Stuff like the inhumane conditions during lockdowns, constant nucleic acid testing, corruption and negligence leading to huge wastes in the housing markets, etc. And I know that a lot of these phenomena were spun up due to how quickly China industrialized as a nation. But too many of them were brought about under the direct orders of Xi.

                  So when people see criticisms of China being challenged, whether or not they disagree with the idea of a dictatorship, they see it as a denial that those injustices are happening. I think more productive than arguing with someone who you perceive to be misunderstanding something, would be to ask them questions, see where their misunderstanding lies, and to offer information or sources that could educate them or help them educate themselves. When you go into the interaction assuming that someone is trying to paint with a broad brush and accuse them as such, then you’re going to get a lot of people to shut down, and then they’ll never receive your message.

            • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              In other words what you’re saying is that because other countries do fucked up shit that means it should be perfectly acceptable when china does it.

              Seems awfully strange to try and normalize shitty behavior.

    • zephyrvs@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      China discovered that Lemmy exists and sent their bots here, it’s so obvious! No thinking person would ever doubt Western media!!!111

      (Not saying that one empire is better than the other, yadda yadda)

      • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yep, I’m a bot. Don’t think for myself at all. Just an NPC. How ‘bout we stop empiring?

    • boredtortoise@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      There’s been both “China Best” and China being shady posts. We’ll never know for sure in this age of fake information. Might be that they’re trying to follow the Russia model.

      • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Haha. You don’t even know what that means. Please, let’s discuss dialectic materialism for the masses. Revel in your ignorance.

    • Nioxic@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Or maybe its because china is china… lol

      Theres also more heat wave/clinate related news in the summer than in the spring