English language NATOpedia has the same “unbiased” views as the corporate media people have always consumed. It doesn’t occur to them that liberal media has a capitalist bias. Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent aren’t in the media literacy curriculum.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Funny thing, the person in question watched manufacturing consent (didn't read the book) and generally agrees mainstream news outlets are controlled by the capital (in many cases owned by capitalists and run for profit), but considers Wikipedia a step above - open, free, well sourcedᶜᶦᵗᵃᵗᶦᵒⁿ ⁿᵉᵉᵈᵉᵈ, edited by regular people, etc.
Yup, just regular people who’ve been propagandized their entire lives by the hegemonic Global North liberal ideology.
Sometimes they try to explain things to me, as if I didn’t grow up under the exact same conditions as they did, went to the same schools, consumed the same media, and got fed the same cold war propaganda. I know exactly what & how they think because I was them.
Oh this is super frustrating for me too. I've only been really considered a communist for like 6 months. So all my friends and family and everyone around me had the exact same opinions as me more than 6 months ago. But now that my opinion has changed on a bunch of topics, all of the sudden they need to explain things like I'm 5 years old. I'm a full grown adult and we've known each other for years! You don't need to explain your perspective to me! I already know it!
I’m an elder gen-x, so if you think they’re doing this because you’re young, I’m sorry to report that it’s not that.
Fair enough! Good to know this isn't ageism at least.
Curious when we become old enough to have enough experience to meaningfully argue for communism. 24 is still too "inexperienced" to truly understand why communism can't work and capitalism is the best we'll ever have.
Been calling myself one for ten years. Been studying it for ten years. Still get told by people who haven't even left their home state that I'm just naive about the realities of the world. Lol.
Yup, just regular people who’ve been propagandized their entire lives by the hegemonic Global North liberal ideology.
And feds and assets, see that recent "Words of Iron" story about coordinated hasbara
BadEmpanada's video where he looks into the citations for Holodomor would have been good but for some reason he decides to cap it off with "Stalin bad" brainworms. I think if someone could turn his findings into an essay it would be neat.
Thank you, will definitely give it a watch. I honestly don't mind "Stalin bad" because Stalin is a lost cause for the kind of people who rely on Wikipedia. Gotta choose your battles.
On the surface, yes, but also what good Stalin did and to a certain extent can be implemented in the future is very important for political education if you hope to turn your country into a socialist one.
If you won't believe the truth about Stalin you're definitely not believing the truth about the Holodomor.
People who believe 95% lies aren't going to be that much more amicable if we only push to correct 90% of them.
I agree that it is unwise to lead with or bring up Stalin unnecessarily, but I will not tolerate lies about him.
It's kind of crazy how there are sources needed for this nowadays. I remember when people would say you can't trust Wikipedia because anybody can edit it.
Check any "current event" and you'll see that Wikipedia is the first thing the narrative controllers seek to manipulate
The Grayzone did a deep dive into Wikipedia, particularly its connections to US intelligence and billionaires.
Then again the people who trust Wikipedia will tend to trust it when it says Grayzone is a blacklisted source due to misinformation or whatever.
Awesome, didn't know that! I'll look it up and read it for the talking points and sources. Definitely wouldn't send grayzone links to a liberal, particularly after the COVID debacle.
You can just read a wikipedia article and look at the sources. that's usually enough to see through wikipedias bs. Most wiki editors are too dumb or too lazy to read/vet/critically examine what they link.
You'll see a bunch of cites on a sentence and read those and come to find out it's just different articles quoting the same Radio Free whatever, or anonymous sources. Some times just hearsay. I can't remember exactly what article it was (Mao's mangoes?) but two cites were different reporters reporting on a talk that was given by some professor to a special interest group and not only that but it was a retrospective. Basically guys remembering the talk years later. Now that I think of it, most reporting is about to that standard anyway. Miserable fucks.
lol yeah it was mangoes 2, 5, 7 and 8 quote the same Lady just saying things. 4 is a description of the book Alfreda Murck (aforementioned lady) wrote about the mangoes.
So many citations on wikipedia are like this, that’s a great example. I remember reading the page on the city of New Delhi a couple of years ago and coming across the claim that most Indian people don’t even realize the city is polluted, or something like that. My first thought was, how the fuck is that possible, obviously people can physically see the pollution and know what a clear non-smoggy day looks like. Struck me as a very odd and most probably extremely racist claim.
The citation for it was a NYT article about pollution in New Delhi and I could not find a single line in it that referenced local people not realizing the city was polluted. No clue at all how they got that claim from the source but it was presented on the page as a verified fact. Can just imagine some western kid doing middle school project on pollution and coming under the assumption that Indians somehow don’t understand the concept.
This is a relatively benign example but I’m sure the more you dig into a lot of this shit the worse it gets.
Yeah it's pretty much every article, If you bother clicking the links. What's funny is in that mango article the talk tab mentioned the cites sucking but the person was unable to change it. So basically if you want to discredit Wikipedia just hit random and check the cites. Any fair minded person will at least start being curious. Or maybe not 
brain is powerful.
You could read articles about that cool lady that fights against Nazi historical revisionism on Wikipedia, which is inherently anticommunist.
I dived into the discussion pages for the CPC (it's CCP on wiki, in the first few sentences they write the official name of the party) and Azov battalion (you can see when the war started, ideas about it being used as russian propaganda and sorta being careful with the article...)
I would use the same ones Wikipedia uses. Scroll down, find out where the information in the article comes from, and scrutinize those sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
(this is a joke, but there are some actual references in there for further reading.)