nocages

Yes, I understand that. What I am trying to say is that they are dismissing the song's impact as if every view was from a bot, when they are not. Real people are listening to and talking about it.

I think a simple part of the problem is that fascism "has it easy" when it comes to messaging: they get to scapegoat easy targets, and appeal to populism. We do not have the luxury of such easy-to-consume messaging. This is also why our memes get made fun of for being wordy or hard to understand, whereas right-wing memes can be easily distilled to "haha minority bad."

We're also fighting against decades of entrenched liberal propaganda in each individual we try to reach, whereas fascists get to build upon that foundation.

Am I reading something different than everyone else here? Because I completely understand what she's trying to get at.

Leftists are dismissing the song because its early interest was astroturfed. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because it has actual interest among people now, because of the astroturfing. How do we combat this problem? Just because we dismiss the song as astroturfed right-wing propaganda doesn't mean the listeners are. The right is changing minds with content like this, and it's problematic for us.

"It can't be viral because it was astroturfed" isn't a helpful assessment, because the song absolutely is viral now. It even came up in my feed on a music community. I clicked it because it looked like it would be up my alley based on the title and thumbnail (I enjoy folk music that shits on capitalists) and I only realized it was that song once I got to the line about people "milking welfare." The astroturfing may have raised the song up the hill, but at a certain point it had enough views and such to carry it based on momentum.

What I think the author is trying to say is that the right is succeeding here, and largely leftist media fails to make the same impact. Probably because we don't have the same connections that allow astroturfing that the people who pushed this song do. But that does leave a meaningful question: how do we reverse this trend and get people interested in leftist topics through arts and culture? How do we promote the material we have already created?

Edit: Oh no, I just heard it on the radio.

I didn't see the original comment, but I agree with general anarchist sentiment and even I know that we won't be able to jump right to it from capitalism. I view it more as an ideal longterm goal, and we are of course going to need to have a stable socialist society first to get there. That's why any communist willing to work with anarchists is a comrade of mine!

Nobody is saying that.

They call leftist spaces the "echo chambers," yet they are the ones rushing to shut up opinions they don't agree with by defederating. Kind of funny.

Here's a terrible take I saw today from a lemm.ee user:

[Hexbear's] they/them tags are a blantant mockery of trans people.

I guess my pronouns are a joke??

no, they aren't pro trans or pro lgbtq. They purposely pick those pronouns and go around to post racist stuff, bigotry, chinese propaganda and all the accompanying junk. Typical online terrorism.

Hexbear is so good at being GSRM inclusive that they literally think it's satirical or something. Which basically outs them as having never been a part of a truly inclusive space, since they expect that most people should use "normal" pronouns, and that spaces shouldn't be visibly queer.

Believe it or not, high school.

When I was in my last year of high school, I took an elective course on world history. The curriculum covered major events from the Spanish Civil War through to the fall of the Berlin Wall. You'd certainly expect this to be a typical curriculum of liberal back-patting, and maybe the official material was, but my teacher was a socialist and made sure to instill in us the kind of critical thinking skills that would allow us to think about countries' motives for things, and to be able to spot propaganda.

For example, for each segment of study she would highlight what kinds of secret things the US was up to at the time, which groups they funded and trained, who they tried to assassinate, that sort of thing. And she emphasized that they did this in the single-minded pursuit of destroying communism, often leading to them funding fascists. This did a lot to break the facade of "west good" that we had grown up with.

I read the Manifesto that year thanks to her, and kept reading.