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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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"Disagree on his politics"? Are you not disgusted by polemics that global warming isn't real or that vaccines are dangerous?
I can't believe that I need to have this struggle session every single time someone posts a hard right source.
You have to have it until you come to the realization that Marxists are capable of engaging with information in ways that liberals are not. Marxists can, and indeed must, draw information from across the political spectrum in order to meet the requirements of material analysis. Cutting off an information stream due to ideology harms, rather than benefits, the ability of Marxist's to analyze what's going on in the world.
To be honest, I don't understand how some people are arriving at the conclusions they are in this thread. I'd think a warning is a very low bar to ask for w/ regards to the way you're presenting it. Like, "Hey, this is from a source that I find trustworthy on X narrow subject, but on Y, I do not advise listening to them." Then there is at least a baseline established on the why. Because: 1) It is foolish to not guide people at all on what is and isn't trustworthy and 2) It becomes hard to distinguish who is and isn't laundering anti-communist politics if they can post just anything as long as it's agreeable to communism and anti-imperialism some of the time.
In particular, w/ regards to this part:
I can guess what the intent is here, but it can't be approached blindly as an individualist problem of discernment. For this to work, it requires an organized and disciplined approach to information. You wouldn't tell a communist to listen to Fox News for 4 hours each day because they might "miss out on information streams" if they don't. Cutting off information or not requires processing it with care. China didn't cut themselves off from information about the world as a whole, but they did develop their own social media and messaging platforms, making it much harder for the west to come in and astroturf on them and their people.
It's not liberalism to recognize that managing information and how people engage with it is a critical part of developing towards socialism and communism and their goals. We are supposed to approach it from the standpoint of actual truth, not manipulation for selfish gain, but that doesn't mean you let just anything in because it contains a nugget of truth in it. You must have some boundaries, it's just a question of what and when.
This is a very well reasoned response, and for the most part i would have to agree, particularly with the bit about having an organized and disciplined approach to information (that was excellently put and i will certainly remember that phrase). Disclaimers can and should be added, if only for newer comrades who may not be aware of the biases of a source.
That being said i wonder if we can't just use a bot that would call up a boilerplate disclaimer for sources that are used on a somewhat regular basis which are of dubious political orientation.
I like the idea of a bot for it, for certain domains maybe? That seems feasible, at least for some of it. For youtube links, it might get hairy, since they don't necessarily have channel information in the name (unless there's a way a bot can extract some kind of metadata from where the link leads?). Don't know if the admins would go for it or not though, either way, or who to ask about that kind of thing. But I like the idea.