Half a million for this is both hilarious and sad. On the one hand that could have funded several researchers doing actual science for the public benefit so it’s a tragedy, on the other they grifted half a million dollars for what isn’t even 50k of work IMO. I mean this is stuff that random hobbyists do in their free time in about a month or less and post on subreddits about data visualization for free.

On the other hand money is not really an object when it comes to fighting the enemies of capital and empire so a small price to pay I’m sure. And better spent here (in their minds) than on researching actual hate groups and extremists like Nazis, channer-fash, alt-right, Qanon weirdos, etc which while it could be done to this caliber would obviously look a little lacking for the 500k considering there are private groups that do far better research on them and publish far better reports for far less money.

Best part is they’ll eventually ban Genzedong, remove/scrub that reddit thread and random online haters (same variety making ridiculous claims about Lemmy’s devs) will begin to claim the removed reddit sources actually were proof of actual genzedong users actually physically attacking Uyghurs.

It’s almost inevitable with the game of telephone they’re playing. Just launder something enough time through enough sources while being vague and generous with words and it magically becomes fact to everyone but super serious and honest academics (e.g. not the type who write this garbage) who really don’t impact the discourse at all anyways as if one discovered it and wrote anything at all it’d probably be a 1-2line citation in some voluminous work mostly unrelated to the fact, a total aside that they researched it and found it false, which obviously will never be seen by anyone.

poisonous: if it bites you, you die

toxic: if you bite it, you die

severely toxic: my mother in law after a couple beers yes Dana I remember the christmas party

It relies on this website to calculate both.

The measurements still seem somewhat subjective. You can test how “toxic” comments are here: https://perspectiveapi.com/

I suspect that the way they came to that conclusion was: any post mentioning one of those groups, that also had a negative sentiment rating, meant that sentiment was directed at that group. Which is horribly dishonest. What’s more likely is someone to be angry (which registers as negative sentiment) about those groups being mistreated or what have you. By the naive approach they seem to have taken, that’s indistinguishable from being mad at that group.

Also, the methodology they describe, and the conclusions they come to don’t align. They don’t describe any methodology by which they could determine that the identities are being attacked. It would be like if they concluded some cause-and-effect relationship but their methodology had absolutely no way of establishing a causal relationship in the data.

Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Trotsky, Engels, Luxemburg - all tankies. Leo Iljitsch Stalinzedong and Karl Engels von Liebknecht killed 30 Billions people.

No joke, I remember writing absolute bullshit on facebook years ago to troll liberals. I said things like that Lenin kept slaves and bribed the workes with beer, to gain support. Guess what, their only problem were, that I said, that communism killed 5 billion people. This number was “a little bit to high” lol

More recently, tankies have grown to support the actions of the CCP in China, a currently operational actually existing socialist (AES) country.

Using “CCP” instead of “CPC” is a telling choice of terminology. One that they consistently use throughout the paper until they have to examine “tankie subreddits” specifically later, and find themselves needing to use the correct “CPC” version for misalignment analysis (Tables 4, 10), as well as:

The first indication this is true from our misaligmment analysis is tankies’ use of the Chinese government’s preferred nomenclature of Communist Party of China (CPC) [ 22, 73 , 93] instead of the more commonly used western term CCP.

Moving on…

Notably, their support can extend beyond just AES countries, often siding with or excusing anti-NATO, non-socialist, autocratic regimes, including Putin-controlled Russia’s actions [ 24 , 35].

I mean, at least the authors recognize that Russia is “non-socialist.” And it is true that socialists of varying stripes are against NATO, not just “tankies.”

Examining the sources:

• 24 is: “Roane Carey. 2022. Don’t Be a Tankie: How the Left Should Respond to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. The Intercept (Mar 2022). https://theintercept.com/2022/03/01/ukraine-russia-leftists-tankie/”
• 35 is: “Jan Dutkiewicz and Dominik Stecuła. 2022. Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine. Foreign Policy (Jul 2022). https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/04/us-politics-ukraine-russia-far-right-left-progressive-horseshoe-theory/”

These sources faithfully recount the fact that Marxist-Leninists (“tankies”) are not uncritically accepting NATO’s framing of the war. Using the Foreign Policy article as an example:

Meanwhile, many on the progressive left—including members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the politicians they support, left-wing academics and essayists, and swaths of self-proclaimed online “anti-imperialists”—have tended to side with the aggressor, Russia (or at least not side with the victim, Ukraine) in one of the clearest examples of colonial aggression in recent memory. Their primary arguments mirror those of the right—NATO expansion and Russia’s legitimate security concerns as a trigger for the war as well as the misuse of funds that could be used to solve domestic problems—but they also express opposition to war full stop and, sometimes, espouse outright support for Russia, all wrapped in language of opposition to U.S. intervention abroad, often construed as “U.S. imperialism.”

There has always been a fringe minority of voices on the far left that have been pejoratively labeled “tankies.” Often self-identified as Marxist-Leninists, they have been apologists for the repressive actions of authoritarian communist governments, such as those of the Soviet Union or China. The insult was originally hurled by fellow leftists at the Western communists who cheered as the Soviet Union rolled tanks into Budapest to repress a popular anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. Today, the term is mostly tossed around in online circles, referring to supporters of repressive regimes and applying primarily to the opinions held by fringe journalists working for opaquely funded alternative news sources who praise dictators, such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The article stretches hard to say that horseshoe theory is real and its basis is a yearning for populism, but it is a decent read at least for getting inside the mind of someone who considers themselves not on either end of an extreme. If nothing else, it does support the authors’ contention that “tankies” – though of course, other socialists as well – are anti-NATO. A contention that I don’t think anyone here would object to.

Regardless of their historical tactics, tankies have recently shown behavior similar to the right-wing extremists (e.g., denying the Uyghur genocide [104]).

• 104 is (libgen link): “Sean R Roberts. 2020. The war on the Uyghurs. In The war on the Uyghurs. Princeton University Press.”

The “Uyghur genocide” narrative has been debunked ad naseum. Denying the “Uyghur genocide” is in no way comparable to denying actual genocide. But for the sake of completeness, user /u/ComradePubIvy has already taken a peek at the source:

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,

And in the “NOTES” section of this book, here are the sources given for its 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).

And here are the first ten sources for its 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.’

RFA, SCMP, Zenz, et. al. Not exactly reliable sources.

As an anarchist, I’m betting on a short (yes I own stocks, it funds the revolution, you tankies would do this too if you were actually socialists like me and realised the revolution doesnt come from your well wishes and online posting). As more and more people realies how tankeis are actually not socialists but authoritarian red fascists, they will naturally abandon this label and it will plummet in the graph. its just human anture.