What if they’ve been here, asking all along, and we’ve been shoo-ing them off as libs?

“That’s Isntreal and nah, we don’t endorse Israel.” an example of a statement that proves we are evil

and did you not read the paper, us using the correct accronym just proves we are brainwashed by chinese propganda… by assertion

I almost appreciate the CCP/CPC thing, because it gives me a shorthand as to know whether the upcoming argument will have any merit or just be bullshit.

I still look at their actual argument on their merits, but 95% of the time it has gone exactly the way I expected.

We made it comrades, we’re going to get banned from flights

Second their citation for the Uyghur genocide, while I cannot read the book to find its sources, is written by someone who worked for 7 years is USAID for the former USSR “managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs” he is known for his “… comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China …” and is an open critic of the belt and road initive in his open seminars,

You can find the source on libgen. Here’s the sources for the preface:

1 Mamatjan Juma and Alim Seytoff, ‘Xinjiang Authorities Sending Uyghurs to Work in China’s Factories, Despite Coronavirus Risks,’ Radio Free Asia (27 February 2020).

2 SCMP Reporters, ‘China Plans to Send Uygur Muslims from Xinjiang Re-Education Camps to Work in Other Parts of Country,’ South China Morning Post (2 May 2020).

3 Keegan Elmer, ‘China says it will ‘Normalise’ Xinjiang Camps as Beijing Continues Drive to Defend Policies in Mainly Muslim Region,’ South China Morning Post (9 December 2019).

4 Erkin, ‘Boarding Preschools For Uyghur Children “Clearly a Step Towards a Policy of Assimilation”: Expert,’ Radio Free Asia (6 May 2020).

5 Gulchehre Hoja, ‘Subsidies For Han Settlers “Engineering Demographics” in Uyghur-Majority Southern Xinjiang,’ Radio Free Asia (13 April 2020).

So… SCMP and RFA.

And the first ten sources for the introduction:

1 Emily Feng, ‘China Targets Muslim Uyghurs Studying Abroad,’ Financial Times (1 August 2017).

2 See Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (14 March 2017); Magha Rajagopalan, ‘This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,’ Buzzfeed News (17 October 2017).

3 Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, ‘Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang,’ Jamestown Foundation China Brief (21 September 2017).

4 Nathan VanderKlippe, ‘Frontier Injustice: Inside China’s Campaign to “Re-educate” Uyghurs,’ The Globe and Mail (9 September 2017); HRW, ‘China: Free Xinjiang “Political Education” Detainees’ (10 September 2017); Eset Sulaiman, ‘China Runs Region-wide Re-education Camps in Xinjiang for Uyghurs and Other Muslims,’ RFA (11 September 2017).

5 Alexia Fernandez Campbell, ‘China’s Reeducation Camps are Beginning to Look Like Concentration Camps,’ Vox (24 October 2018).

6 See ‘Inside the Camps Where China Tries to Brainwash Muslims Until They Love the Party and Hate Their Own Culture,’ Associated Press (17 May 2018); David Stavrou, ‘A Million People Are Jailed at China’s Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here’s What Really Goes on Inside,’ Haaretz (17 October 2019).

7 See Amie Ferris-Rotman, ‘Abortions, IUDs and Sexual Humiliation: Muslim Women who Fled China for Kazakhstan Recount Ordeals,’ Washington Post (5 October 2019); Eli Meixler, ‘“I Begged Them to Kill Me.” Uighur Woman Tells Congress of Torture in Chinese Internment Camps,’ TIME (30 November 2018); Ben Mauk, ‘Untold Stories from China’s Gulag State,’ The Believer (1 October 2019).

8 Shoret Hoshur ‘Nearly Half of Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s Hotan Targetted for Re-education Camps,’ RFA (9 October 2017).

9 Sean R. Roberts, ‘Fear and Loathing in Xinjiang: Ethnic Cleansing in the 21st Century,’ Fair Observer (17 December 2018).

10 See Zenz and Leibold, ‘Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State.’

Zenz, RFA, and Financial Times.

Not exactly promising.

Can someone please explain “…more Stalinist than Leninist” because from my years of experence being an ML this sentence is absolute gibberish

This is trotskyist political view, considering how much time they spent agitating, it was somewhat accepted by the radlib part of mainstream. Btw. it’s telling how of entire ton of trotskist propaganda mainstream accepted exactly the anti-AES parts.

I don’t know if humanities could have salvaged some of this paper. They just make so many assumptions out of thin air and expect the reader to just go along with them, like this here:

The support of tankies for the hardline Soviet era extends to Russia’s current authoritarian regime’s actions.

This is a specific claim, that in other words says “tankies support the Soviet Union, and as such they support the Russian Federation”. But no source accompanies this claim, no definitions either, and ultimately the next sentence contradicts this claim – they started from the conclusion, the starting point being them wanting to prove “Acceptence [sic] of the Russian Narrative in Ukraine” (yes the typo was originally there).

But the two are two entirely different claims, it does not logically follow that support for the USSR means support of Russia in the war. They just gloss over that though and start talking about their “word pairs” as if that proved anything lol

This is divination for computer scientists.

I’ve never written a scientific paper before but I would be ashamed to actually put this out for my peers to review.

The authors are not qualified to speak on this professionally seeing their degrees and expertise is in tech and computer science, not political science or philosophy.

I don’t know how anyone can say “tankie” with a straight face, let alone publish a research paper about the “tankie” phenomenon.

current socialist systems

Stalin

Damn if only

they where funded by the US government a little over half a million dollars

We really owe it to the researcher for making themselves so easy to dunk on. My favorite to add to the list:

“there being stories of r/GenZedong users attacking Uyghurs and promoting violence against them in the press [ 27],”

which leads to this infamous source:

[27] Andrew R. Chow. 2022. Reddit failing to control hate speech on Global Forums: Mods. https://time.com/6121915/reddit-international-hate-speech/

Dunking on the Rushan Abbas AMA = attacking Uyghurs. Filter that narrative through enough reports and citations of articles citing reports that cite articles and you have the Truth™.

INVEST NOW

We are da bestest stonks.

Not just websites, we’ll even recommend books for you to read! Truly, we are the greatest evil.

A review of the paper. I’ll try and update this as I go.

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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/disinformation, and real-world violence. However, the overwhelming majority of existing work has focused on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale, data-driven study exploring left-wing extremism.

Perhaps there is a reason that most of the research on extremism finds itself looking at right-wing examples.

Finally, we show that tankies exhibit some of the same worrying behaviors as right-wing extremists, e.g., relatively high toxicity and an organized response to deplatforming events.

“Relatively high toxicity” screams horseshoe theory. What and/or who the extremists are “being toxic” about matters, not merely that they “are toxic.” (Spoiler alert: far-left “extremists” score very high on being “toxic” about fascists and fascism; not exactly a novel observation)

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Introduction

The use of social media by extremists is well documented in the press [ 4, 23, 108 ] and has been a heavy focus of the research community [7 , 46, 75 ]. However, almost all recent work has studied right- wing extremists. This concentration can be attributed to several factors. The growing popularity of research on populism, as a result of the increasing prevalence of populist parties and leaders globally [ 106 ], has led to a greater abundance of identifiable right-wing extremists online and their substantial impact on society. At the same time, there has been a steady rise in political rhetoric characterizing mainstream political parties as far-left extremists, scapegoating the far-left for violent activities (e.g., claiming Antifa orchestrated the January 6th Insurrection [ 15], accusing far-left extremists of planning and organizing violence during protests after George Floyd’s death [ 31], and blaming left-wing extremists for setting forest fires in Oregon [51]).

Comparing “increasing prevalence of populist parties and leaders” to “a steady rise in political rhetoric charcterizing mainstream political parties as far-left extremists” is not the comparison the authors think it is. “Actually existing far-right parties and leaders” aren’t in the same ballpark as “some people say that some other people are far-left.” Further, this doesn’t state where that political rhetoric is coming from. So I checked the sources:

• 15 is: “Tommy Beer. 2021. The antifa lie: Conservative lawmakers, pundits push a baseless claim that leftists were behind Capitol Insurrection. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/07/the-antifa-lie-conservative-lawmakers-pundits-push-a-baseless-claim-that-leftists-were-behind-capitol-insurrection/?sh=227140324b8d”
• 31 is: “Miranda Devine. 2020. Nationwide George Floyd riots are the price of liberalism: Devine. https://nypost.com/2020/05/31/george-floyd-riots-are-the-price-of-liberalism-devine/”
• 51 is: “Margot Harris. 2020. Joe Rogan apologized for spreading misinformation about Oregon fires amid Spotify employee backlash. https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-rogan-spotify-apology-oregon-forest-fires-antifa-left-activists-2020-9”

Lo and behold, the “other side” of the far-right extremism coin is… the far-right complaining about the far-left.

many of the characteristics and behavior we associate with right-wing extremism online have historically applied to hardline left-wing extremists as well. For example, spreading mis- and disinformation from unreputable or overtly biased sources [ 122 ].

That “or” is doing some heavy leg work to try and equivocate between “unreputable” and “overtly biased” sources. Let’s see what source 122 is about:

• 122 is: “Richard Stengel. 2020. Domestic disinformation is a growing menace to America. https://time.com/5860215/domestic-disinformation-growing-menace-america/”

And some choice quotes from the article:

Yes, disinformation comes from both the right and the left, but research shows that highly partisan conservatives are far more likely to share disinformation than partisan liberals.

…

China has now entered the disinformation game in a big way, aggressively seeking to fix blame for the epidemic on the U.S. and it has been regularly highlighting American missteps in coping with the virus.

…

The Super Bowl of disinformation will undoubtedly be the 2020 election. All of the malign actors, the Russians, white extremists, China and Iran will get in on the game.

…

Disinformation created by American fringe groups—white nationalists, hate groups, antigovernment movements, left-wing extremists—is growing.

These are the only quotes in the source that could conceivably have some way of bolstering the claim that “many of the characteristics and behavior we associate with right-wing extremism online have historically applied to hardline left-wing extremists as well.” The first is the closest that comes to support. Alas, it doesn’t apply because “partisan liberals” aren’t far-left. The next two could only conceivably “apply” in a very hand-wavy “China = far-left” sense (which, as we’ll see later, the authors make liberal use of). The last is merely a re-stating of of the claim without supporting evidence.

Not a good start.

Despite the impact of right-wing online extremists, political rhetoric, and a history of violence and chaos attributed to far-left extremists, there are essentially no studies of the far-left on social media, let alone far-left extremists.

I think this might be a misprint? As in, it was supposed to read “despite the impact of left-wing online extremists.” Because structurally the sentence doesn’t make sense otherwise. And also, there is no citation given for “a history of violence and chaos attributed to far-left extremists” either. Which is odd, because there are examples you can dig for and cite within the United States, a la the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front.

We focus primarily on a large left-wing community known as tankies. Historically, tankies were supporters of hardline Soviet actions [43 ]; more Stalinist than Leninist. The name originates from Soviets using tanks to put down rebellions in eastern Europe [ 34, 50 , 94 , 100 , 105 , 107].

The definition is crude but in the ballpark, excluding the “Stalinist” jab, given that Stalin died in 1953, the Hungarian uprising was in 1956, and Khrushchev was not at all a fan of his predecessor Stalin. Curiously, the authors already are aware of this distinction (Appendix C Misalignment Analysis):

Nonetheless, in cases where keywords possess polarized or disparate meanings, we partition them for specific interpretations within certain communities (e.g., when validating the Stalinist leaning of tankies, we do not put “Khrushchev” and “Stalin” in the same keyword list).

Perhaps different parts of this paper were written in isolation by each of the authors. In any event…

Examining the sources:

• 43 is (libgen link): “Marion Glastonbury. 1998. Children of the Revolution: matters arising. Changing English 5, 1 (1998), 7–16.”
• 34 is (libgen link): “Angela Dimitrakaki and Harry Weeks. 2019. Anti-fascism/Art/Theory: An introduction to what hurts us. , 271–292 pages.”
• 50 is (online source): “John Harris. 2015. Marxism today: the forgotten visionaries whose ideas could save Labour. The Guardian 29 (2015)”
• 94 is (libgen link): “Christina Petterson. 2020. Apostles of Revolution? Marxism and Biblical Studies. Brill research perspectives in biblical interpretation 4, 1 (2020), 1–80.”
• 100 is (libgen link): “Neil Redfern. 2014. No Friends to the Left: The British Communist Party’s Surveillance of the Far Left, c. 1932–1980. Contemporary British History 28, 3 (2014), 341–360.”
• 105 is (libgen link): “Emily Robinson. 2011. New times, new politics: History and memory during the final years of the CPGB. British Politics 6, 4 (2011), 453–478.”
• 107 is (libgen link): “Raphael Samuel. 1987. Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism, Part (III). New Left Review 1 (1987), 165.”

That is actually a healthy listing of sources. I may or may not come back to review each of them in turn. I’ve been at this for several hours now :) (TODO)

Maybe they mean we talk more about imperialism and geopolitics than identity politics?

Really did feel like a deliberate missing of the whole point, didn’t it? Felt like a lot of their data stripped out any context that the posts they were ‘analyzing’ had; and drew deliberately-misleading takes from their sanitized data. Like, do you know any marxists who make a habit of attacking muslims? Meanwhile, most of the takedowns I see of Amerikans squawking about ‘muh chingchang’(i’ve deadass heard a white person pronounce it that way; imagine these crackers actually learning how to pronounce ‘Xinjiang’) winds up boiling down to "Oh yeah, 'cause the country that spent fifteen years murdering muslims wholesale in the middle-east, and leaving depleted uranium in the sand to mutate their babies really cares about the Muslims in Xinjiang allasudden."