I'm thoroughly convinced the entire tankie triad is a psyop to turn people off from socialism.
Defederation is of the utmost importance!
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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If you replace Maduro with Yanukovych and Machado with Poroshenko or Zelenskyy, I could almost mistake this for russian propaganda about Maidan
Almost like the Kremlins and tankies share the same ideology 🤔
and quite possibly the same computer
There's a reason for that. Certain framings resonate well, and especially if they are synced up with how the target audience likes to view things anyway and who their "good guys" and "bad guys" tend to be. It's just a matter of plugging the right people and situations into the powerful framings and then repeating the construction from a wide variety of sources. It's like turnkey social engineering. It works incredibly well when it is done at a big scale.
Some examples:
And so on. None of this has anything to do with reality. A person who was starting from first principles would never reach those conclusions, since they are precisely literally the opposite of what happened. And, if you press the people pushing them for details, they'll always fall back on basically the exact same individual anecdote or thought-pattern to support the backwards-land conclusion and push really really hard on that one anecdote. They are always super confident and pushy about the conclusions.
Supporting anecdote examples:
I can't continue, I am getting genuinely annoyed lol. But anyway. There are other examples, they went all-out coming up with new ones of these leading up to the 2024 election and deployed a handful of pretty effective ones against Democrats. But those are the ones I currently see in active rotation.
"The fascist dictator goes into the square hole" type puzzle
This propaganda shit is getting too complicated
Honestly it's kind of a good sign. I grew up pre-internet, where all you had to do was get the nightly news to report your version of reality and there was literally no other way that people could find out it was all gimmicks. A person could maybe run across Noam Chomsky or something, but they would be the only one (there was literally one person I knew in school, and one person at my office, who was a super-lefty person like me, and everyone else thought we were more or less terrorists at any point if we talked about it). Now with the internet it's easy for people to run across criticisms of anything, so you can't just report the bullshit and move on, so they have to get more sophisticated with it. It's good that they are having to work and be creative.
The bad news is that they've worked at it and got creative. Like what I mean is Bernie Sanders would never have gotten near power in 1996. The system would have been able to shut him down way earlier, they still had to ratfuck him a little but he was (and still is) wildly popular in a way that Ron Paul never was outside of a select internet demographic. But of course along with that comes Trump. The information free-for-all is a mixed blessing.