Remembering to look for and ignore folks with that telltale indicator has made the fediverse so much more enjoyable.
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
"Conspiracy theory" for libs is anything that deviates from western state propaganda.
To paraphrase Michael Parenti: teachers and farmers, when they unionize they meet in rooms, and discuss their interests, goals, their plans and their actions to reach these goals, what propaganda they need to create, this is obvious to everyone. But when I suggest that the rich and powerful do the same, they call me a conspiracy theorist.
Lol tankies will take everything from Putin and xi and eat it up like it is the eternal truth.
If you can't admit that, then you are not better than the consumers of said "western state propoganda". At least they get to think for themselves.
"Michael Parenti = le evil Asiatic country!!!"
I dunno that dude.
My problem is not with "evil asian countries"
Tankies love the russian and Chinese governments and take everything they say at face value. (.ml instance owner is pro-russia iirc). They are not socialist or communist, but authoritarians. Support for them is what irks me, not the socialist ideals.
Ok, I'll try and explain the way I see it using an example.
We, in the west, live in a bubble of western propaganda, the same way people in Russia live in a bubble lf Russian propaganda and people in China live in a bubble of Chinese propaganda. Let's even disregard for a moment the fact that the USA, through arts, films and music, being the largest economic and therefore cultural hegemon of the past century up to today, has influence over everyone else.
When Russia started the war against Ukraine, the Russian propaganda gave as a casus belli to its population the "information" that Ukraine was genociding Russians in Eastern Ukraine. These affirmations stem from the Ukrainian civil war happening since 2014, in which the government and some pro-Russian rebels were fighting in eastern Ukraine, so the Russian government leveraged this and the fact that Russian as a language was removed from the studying plans in Eastern Ukraine, and made big claims of genocide of Russians, propagated all over Russian media. To many Russians within this bubble, all the reputable news sources, journalists, institutions and human right organizations, were giving this information, so they naturally believed it, and if people contradict this, they're genocide deniers!
As a westerner: what should I do? Take the genocide claims at face value because otherwise I'm a genocide denier? No. I should look at the situation, look, importantly, at independent journalistic work and material evidence coming from the region, and reach a conclusion based on evidence and not on "claims". There are plenty of Russian testimonies in Russian TV of how they were tortured in Ukraine, how they weren't allowed to speak their language, how they were bombed for years by Ukraine... But those are just that, testimonies without material evidence. So, do I believe the claims? No, I don't, I don't believe Russians were being genocided in eastern Ukraine. I believe that Ukraine, much like my own country of Spain in Catalonia, was violating the right to self determination of people in Eastern Ukraine, and Russia amplified these claims by a factor of 10 and called it a genocide. I've seen with my own eyes with the information, independent journalistic work, and video and photographic evidence, what genocide looks like as is being carried out In Palestine, and nothing like that has been proven for Russians In Eastern Ukraine.
I can now repeat this analysis for the western claims of genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang by the Chinese government, and reach the same conclusion that nothing remotely like in Palestine is happening, so there is no Uyghur genocide. Is this "taking Chinese propaganda at face value"?
Well... no, not exactly.
Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).
Side note about russian independent journalists
I can name many independent russian journalists, but that's because their names stand out; there just aren't that many allowed to exist, and their jobs are incredibly dangerous and memorable. Many of them are unironic proletariarian heroes. (Favorskaya and Kreiger, both of Sotavision, are the two that spring most readily to mind, both having been recently sentenced). They stick in the memory because of their rarity and how messy their fates tend to be.
(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)
I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:
And that's I suspect what you have done too.
But... when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it's very much occurring. There's overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it's a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.
Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia's claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?
Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it's internally inconsistent reasoning.
My dismissal of the supposed "genocide of Russians in eastern Ukraine" doesn't come from sources denying it, it comes from the sources claiming it not providing compelling enough evidence that it's happening. To me, individual testimonies aren't enough to determine there's a genocide, and that's really all the evidence available in the case of Xinjiang pointing towards genocide.
The Uyghur minority was, firstly, excluded from the single child policy precisely because they were a minority, and in this period acquired the majority status in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. A wave of ISIS related terrorist attacks stroke China in the 2000s and early 2010s, and the government reacted to it by doing a big reeducation campaign in the Xinjiang province which, with its significant Muslim population, was the region where most attackers came from.
This reeducation, mostly consisting of vocational training (also linked to the Belt and Road initiative going through Xinjiang, and the development of the region), was compulsory for many. In the west this looks morally abhorrent, but to Chinese people, it's not so strange a concept. Many Chinese people spend their teenage years in boarding schools in which they study from 9 to 9 and in which they sleep, so living in an education center isn't that big of a deal in many Chinese people's opinion.
As of 2022, the reeducation campaign finished, the camps were closed, and life returned to normal in Xinjiang. Even western state sources like BBC confirmed the closure of the camps, of course with their rhetorical "but at what cost / what's next".
The "evidence" of genocide, as per the International Amnesty inform (the most trustworthy source in my opinion), again consists of "anonymous interviews". I don't doubt there have been cases of police abuse (ACAB after all), but extending that to the definition of genocide is hurtful to people suffering actual, demonstrable genocide such as Palestinians.
Lastly, I'll respond to this:
Essentially information that can be falsified in nature. Pictures can be proven to have been taken at a location and time and to be unedited. Data (such as that of the Ministry of Health of Gaza) including names and identification of actually demonstrably existing people. What I don't consider material evidence are things that aren't falsifiable, such as testimonies (especially anonymous ones), reports of the type "it seems/it has been seen"...
I feel like this is why we need to stick with primary sources whenever we are debating with liberals . Liberals don't trust any news source coming from Russia, China etc (which I'd actually say is a rational fear considering there education) but western news sources time and time again have been proven to lie and not base any of there arguments on the truth.
If we want to actually argue points to liberals or other people we need to use primary sources that can't be disbuted by saying "that's Chinese communist propaganda". Although that does represent another problem in that primary sources are usually harder to read, or are very long and most people probably aren't willing to read through it to verify it's authenticity themselves, which does create a vector for misinformation. Although I still think it's better than secondary sources that liberals will just deny.
You're not categorizing genocides properly
The Uyghurs don't have their own news agencies, and they're not being splattered over the streets like Palestinians
It's a cultural genocide, it was more like what the US did to the natives. Forced education, over surveillance and policing, forced marriages...
They've backed off on it, and it's better than killing people... But it definitely isn't good
That's the western claim, but Xinjiang is a special province of China called "autonomous region", with more powers to local politics than most others. Uyghur people can study Uyghur language at school (unlike for exmaple Occitanian people in France) and their culture is preserved. You wanna see a cultural genocide in real time? Look up the population of Occitanian speakers over the past 100 years and the French policy towards Occitanian.
Yes, they have largely stopped doing it, which is good.
No, it's not good that it's happening somewhere else. I haven't heard about that at all. Maybe we should make it an issue so they stop too???
This is not a zero sum game. I don't care what France is doing when I'm talking about China or vice versa, I just want less bad things in the world
This person isn't engaging in good faith - they present as though they have engaged with a wide range of sources, but they extremely clearly have not (if the blatant whattaboutism didn't tip you off already). They don't source the controversial claims, either.
I was just giving them enough rope to hang themselves with honestly
My positions are real... Cultural genocide is bad, and we should stop it from happening if we can
Is the thing in France happening? Probably not, but if it was I'd want it to stop
That's the benefit of having real beliefs. When they start dancing around and mudding the waters, you can ignore all that and assert your beliefs proudly
Unfortunately, it also works if you believe in bad things, but luckily tankies (can't believe they're self admitted, that's so rare) have to pretend they believe in good things
That's the entire point of why tankies like me bring up such topics. When Europeans insist in the "superiority and democratic rule" of Europe vs. say China, it's because we remain oblivious to the sins of our own countries while we're constantly bombarded with propaganda against socialist projects. You can get started with the Wikipedia article on Occitan Language if you're interested.
Thats the entire point. There is immense propaganda about China while we literally don't know what happens in the neighboring country. If there were an equal amount of contributions in .world about repression of Occitan as there is about China, I would make it less of a point to bring it up constantly. It's not deviating, it's not letting anti-China discourse dominate in the platform
No, that's whataboutism.
When we're talking about China, I don't need info on the horrors America has inflicted on the world. Just like when I talk about America's past, I don't compare it to Canadian history
Advocate for good things and against bad things. Don't interrupt people already doing that