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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I saw some research about this recently let me see if I can find it, it was based on reddit communities but I think it applies to lemmy as much if not more.

    ah here it is

    ABSTRACT

    Social media’s role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online hate, mis- and disinformation, and real-world violence. However, most existing work has focuses on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale measurement study exploring left-wing extremism. We focus on “tankies,” a left-wing community that first arose in the 1950s in support of hardline actions of the USSR and has evolved to support what they call “Actually Existing Socialist” countries, e.g., CCP-run China, the USSR, and North Korea. We collect and analyze 1.3M posts from 53K authors from tankie subreddits, and explore the position of tankies within the broader far-left community on Reddit. Among other things, we find that tankies are clearly on the periphery of the larger far-left community. When examining the contents of posts, we find misalignments and conceptual homomorphisms that confirm the description of tankies in the theoretical work. We also discover that tankies focus more on state-level political events rather than social issues. Our findings provide empirical evidence of the distinct positioning and discourse of left-wing extremist groups on social media.




  • Thats because in generaly the “leftists” that occupy spaces like ml arent really leftists at all, they are anti-western idologues. You will very rarely see them posting about things left wing people tend to care about like workers rights, cost of living, housing or things like that. They are far more interested in geopolitics, especially on issues where they can make “west bad” posts.



  • Compared to

    It’s easy when you’re an obscure band to bellow “kill your local MP” or bray “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”.

    Yeah, pretty much. Very few people would argue against stopping killing Gazan civilians (even if they are not willing to back the measures that would result in that, like applying real presure to Israel), that makes it a fairly apolictial thing to say. Advocating killing MPs or supporting Iranian proxies is certainly a lot more contencious.





  • For the record I disagree with you (and that wasnt clear from your previous post), but thats a resonable concern to have.

    comparing someone to hitler is not.

    As to the substance of your concerns, do you think that doesnt happen now? There are plenty of deaths of dispair in the world currently. This bill does absolutely nothing either way for someone who becomes paralysed, loses their job and puts a gun to their own head. What it does do is allow people who are going to die immenently have the peace of mind that if it becomes unbearble to them they will be able to end their life even if they cant physically manage it any more.

    I just dont see how providing assistance to die for those who require it has any bearing on people who end their lives due to financial hardship, would you want to go back to making suicide a crime?


  • I honestly cant tell what argument you are trying to make. Yes the world can be a shit place with people suffering and dying for the profit of others, but what does that have to do with legislation being put in place for people - in intolerble pain, with less than six months to live and have been judged by independent review and to be of sound mind and uncoerced - being assisted if they choose to wnd their life?

    As to you being the “despised voice” not unless the other comment was from your sock puppet. They were comparing Starmer to Hitler by calling him Sturmer, despite him not having anything to do with this bill. I do in fact see lying about genocide as despicable.





  • As much as we want to get angry at the car brains for this, it’s not the reason he’s been told to stop:

    East Riding of Yorkshire Council said: "It is vitally important that children learn to cross the road safely, concentrating without any distractions, walking carefully and being vigilant of the traffic.

    "In this particular case, one of our officers spoke with this crossing patrol and simply reminded them of the need not to have distractions while children are crossing.