cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/18744645
don’t know if this is the best community to post in but interesting.
Throughout our topic analysis, we find that tankies are particularly vocal about major geopolitical events (Fig. 4 and 5). They are especially focused on issues such as Chinese and North Korean politics, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. They also show a keen interest in topics related to communism, fascism, and Stalin. However, when it comes to everyday societal challenges that are usually points of interest for the left wing—like policing, climate change, healthcare, housing, and workers’ rights—tankies seem less engaged.
This pattern reveals a striking insight: tankies appear to be deeply invested in state-driven political events, often at the expense of grassroots societal issues. This underscores a distinct divergence in the priorities and discourse of left-wing extremists and the wider far-left community.
Now do an analysis of comment times to see which timezone they are likely living in and which country’s holidays they sync up with.
I think they’ve wised up to the necessity of posting in the timezone of the targeted country at this point.
And yes, it is weird that they went into so much detail about how deeply these accounts care about state-actor issues, and how little about domestic political or social issues that are more normal for the ideologies they are claiming to speak for, without drawing the obvious conclusion. “Just one of those little mysteries,” they seem to say.
However, when it comes to everyday societal challenges that are usually points of interest for the left wing—like policing, climate change, healthcare, housing, and workers’ rights—tankies seem less engaged.
Ah yes, the “I don’t care if trans people get sent to concentration camps because the Democrats are continuing to permit the war in Gaza” crowd.
Seeing the data on it is, admittedly, releiving. These Internet bubbles can really leave you worrying for people.
I found two things interesting about this:
The article goes at length to downplay the militarism. Tankies are militant and are quite focused on military action. I feel like the ‘state actions’ it calls out misses that it is primarily military involved shit. So yeah, no more than I expect those users cranking it to drone kill footage to weigh in critically on abortion care.
Which was the other odd takeway from the article: categorizing feminism as a distinct political ideology. I know it wasn’t the focus of the article but to me, but I found that to be a strange distinction. Classifying it in the same way as tankies is a subtle framing for the conclusions they then draw. I know it is based on available subreddits, but I recognize that framing anywhere as its inclusion is not required or even referenced in their article.
So missing the military fandom (military isnt even used once) and then also inserting and making feminism its own ideology has left me wondering.
This report completely missed why many Marxists refer to China as the CPC vs the colloquial CCP. They say CPC because the “Communist Party” part of it comes before the nation, as a symbolic way to reject nationalism in favor of internationalism.
I think the author of this paper would have benefited from talking to the hardline leftists and asking them their thoughts rather than trying to analyze them from the outside. Most of the time, if you ask someone in good faith why they believe what they believe, they’ll honestly answer out of a desire to be understood.
