Forming the Stalin Battalion!
Some instances we federate with have free account creation and some people use that to instantly post on Lemmygrad (like 2 days old accounts with comments only on Lemmygrad type of stuff)
I give you my blessing to dunk on those people when you see them, go as hard as you need (within reason).
But remember: people that are reasonable should receive the same too. I’m talking about pure trolls who know what they’re doing.
Then don’t forget to report them and we’ll ban them.
If we mobilise a front to counter trolls, I assure you they will stop soon enough because we take the fun out of it.
we love our admins here folks, they’re the best!
good luck to everyone in the posting trenches
Also important to keep in mind sealioning, which is a favourite tactic of theirs, if someone is responsive and asks questions, that’s good, and we should respond positively, but if they constantly ask questions that are deliberately rage inducing and willfully ignorant and hateful, while pretending to be “civil” themselves, be sure to call out the tactic for what it is.
Might be worth responding with a standard text about the way to ask questions.
Something like (perhaps worded more simply):
We appreciate good faith questions and engagement at Lemmygrad. If that is why you are here, welcome; we do not want to put you off. However, your question/post/comment includes problematic claims/statements that are not conducive to good faith discussion. The problem might be: anti-communism, historical inaccuracy, revisionism, reactionary talking points, bigotry, liberal propaganda, a loaded question, assuming that we will all agree about what you might think are uncontroversial facts, or something else. If you re-word your question we can have a more productive conversation.
If they come back with loads more bullshit, their sealioning will be more obvious. And we won’t unintentionally start dunking on the people who just don’t know any better.
Adding to the other suggestion, what I’ve found to work some times is just asking them to elaborate on their questions if they are too low effort. If they’re spending more time trying to actually provide proper questions, that’s time they’re not spending spamming. Also works well with the accidental questions that do actually look like sealioning. Something like:
Isn’t China really authoritarian though?
Could you explain what do you mean concretely by “authoritarian” and how that differs from other countries that would be less so?
Takes very little effort too.
When our time comes, we will not apologize for the dragging.
It seems most of them are coming from lemmy.world, though there are other instances to keep an open eye to.
Some people would rather just sign up on an open instance than fill out our application, which is fair enough. So not everyone who seems to only interact with us needs to be reported. But if you notice that someone’s behaviour aligns with that of a troll or a bot, and they’re from another instance, please let us know.
We’re much more effective with the help of our instance community, you guys help out a lot more than you may realize.
users saluting the admins, with admins saluting back deleted by creator
We are all slam dunkers on this blessed day
Quite possibly the most based take in a series of absolutely based takes🫡Best of luck to anyone who finds an Anti-Stalin/Anti-AES bastard on this platform. Lemmygrad🤝Anti-Revisionism
I mean. Fuck all governments but why support a shitbag like stalin?
“Critical support” implies there are still critiques to level, but that overall, more good than ill was done
Fuck all governments but why support a shitbag like stalin?
You’re a shitbag
I suggest we all agree Stalin was no superhero and no villain, he just did what he did. He allowed for the insane levels of industrialization and has shown himself as a strong leader during the WWII, but he also held authoritarian grip on power, held political and other prisoners in inhumane conditions, and was the one to make LGBT illegal in the USSR.
Stop glorifying or demonizing him, that’s all I’m saying. The rest is true.
Stalin’s “authoritarian” grip on power was denied by him multiple times. He didn’t want to continue being leader and was voted in anyways. The gulag shit is easily debunked by the simple fact that neary 40% of prisoners in the gulags were released yearly. Not to mention that it ended in the 50s. His LGBTQ policies could have been much better, I understand that, but there’s nothing wrong for admiring Stalin for the hero he was to the working class. Idk if you’re trying to do this in good faith, but I get more than enough anti-Stalin crap already, I don’t like seeing that shit here too
I could answer by mentioning lack of democratic process and about self-proliferating structures of power that held him, as well as atrocities of GULAG (and the point wasn’t the sentence duration, but conditions in the camps), but that misses my core point.
The point is - endless praising of Stalin as some sort of superhero is basically a prerequisite for personality cult - something that Lenin has openly warned us from (and ironically got an even bigger cult himself).
Stalin is a leader, and in many ways, an excellent one. But turning him into a flawless genius of socialism and barking at any attempt to mention any flaws in his policies doesn’t promote a healthy discussion and turns otherwise reasonable left movement into a self-contained cult.
as well as atrocities of GULAG.
If your source is Solzhenitsyn I’m legally mandated to bite your phone in half.
Sorry, those are the rules.
Bold of you to assume they have a source.
But turning him into a flawless genius of socialism …
Nobody is doing that. You’re setting up a straw person. How many times do people have to say ‘“critical” support’?But take away the loaded adjective and I admit the majority of us here agree that Stalin was a genius of socialism. Including me. Because it’s true. But only because he worked within a socialist structure, supported by other geniuses and the working class in general. How many times do Marxists have to say they reject the great man of history thesis?
… and barking at any attempt to mention any flaws in his policies doesn’t promote a healthy discussion and turns otherwise reasonable left movement into a self-contained cult.
Again, we have criticisms. But it’s impossible to talk about them in healthy discussion with liberals, fascists, anarchists, Trotskyists, and ultras, to name a few. Because they refuse to talk on good faith.
All they do is repeat ad nauseum tired old tropes about gulags and authoritarianism. Never do they explain these terms or concepts. Never do they bother to understand the facts. They fall for CIA and fascist propaganda like a drunkard falls to the pavement. Believing literal fairy tales (Orwell) literary experiments (Solzhenitsyn), contemporary shit stirring from arch enemies (Trotsky), revisionist and opportunist lies (Kruschev), and propaganda (almost every other source of ‘research’).
Your comment proves the point. You’re pretending to be reasonable while twisting what we’re saying and refusing to engage in the facts. Then you’re using our response to that to claim that we’re being unreasonable! Can you see why we challenge people who do that?
If there’s a cult, it’s the anti-Stalinist one. And I’ll finish by observing that millions and millions of people outside the west praise Stalin. It’s mainly brainwashed westerners who can’t summon the intellectual willpower to care or work out why.
As your comment is more recent than mine, above, you probably read mine first and chose to ignore it. So here it is again, with added emphasis:
We appreciate good faith questions and engagement at Lemmygrad. If that is why you are here, welcome; we do not want to put you off. However, your question/post/comment includes problematic claims/statements that are not conducive to good faith discussion.
(And yet, here we are, the personality cult of Stalin patiently providing sources and explaining the misunderstanding, trying to engage in good faith…)
The problem might be: anti-communism, historical inaccuracy, revisionism, reactionary talking points, bigotry, liberal propaganda, a loaded question, assuming that we will all agree about what you might think are uncontroversial facts, or something else. If you re-word your question we can have a more productive conversation.
I recommend, the Stalinist cliché that I am, Grover Furr’s work. Notably Khruschev Lied, where many of the popular myths proliferated about Stalin are systematically debunked.
I would recommend, above Furr even, Ludo Martens’ Another View of Stalin alongside Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Both well-sourced critiques of Stalin and the USSR he helped lead that deliver a balanced, humanizing view.
From my own perspective, I would firstly feel inclined to address what I see as your hypocricy in calling for a balanced, non-Great Manish view, while still placing the blame for systemic failures that resulted from the actions of many squarely onto Stalin.
He was, of course, a man. A great man, in my view - I believe it is possible at once to admire an individual without lionizing them beyond historical recognition - but still just a man. I recommend the works for more balanced histories.
Great suggestions.
Reading the intro to each of these should be the bare minimum for people who want to talk about Stalin. I wouldn’t even mind if critics found a rigorous way of challenging these sources. But they have nothing.
Just going to add this comment of yours here, for context:
https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/734345
I believe tankies are hardline communists wishing to instate a brutal authoritarian communist/socialist regime (think Stalin)
Gulag death rate was much much lower under socialism than under feudalism
Especially under capitalism.
I’m doubling the blessing and it giving it to another comrade.
Thanks
Thoughts on us shitting on reactionaries outside lemmygrad? Perhaps I’ve already begun that campaign
I think the best approach there is to just do proof by contradiction using their comments. The key part is to not debate the troll, but to speak to the broader audience reading the thread. Just be polite, provide sources and examples of why the claims are wrong, and move on. I find there’s really a handful of tropes these people like to dredge up, and you can just have a set of canned responses for them.
We don’t moderate what happens outside Lemmygrad unless there’s a report and someone breaks important rules (like if a Lemmygrad account starts spouting racist stuff on another instance, which indicates that they’re racist even if their conduct is fine on lemmygrad). This is completely up to the instance admins you’re on
Really rude dunking will get you banned on most other instances, and maybe gives some ammo to people saying they should defederate from us because we’re mean.
I try to follow the rules on lemmy.ml or wherever, and save the true mean stuff for here.
It’s not hard to dunk on them… Been reporting them but really wish these trolls had better things to do then bother us here, even if it is kinda funny
wish these trolls had better things to do then bother us
“In an ideal world these people would be ending a long fulfilling day by messing with us, but instead I have to deal with these sad excuses for human beings.”
Is that not the goal of every principled socialist?
I don’t think I’ll necessarily want to get into a heated debate about communism in communism.
That’s how the system stays intact, through ruthless criticism even in implementation. Iron sharpens iron.
True, but I don’t know what help trolls willfully misinterpreting you are for crit and self-crit.
S.M.E.R.S.H. - Shitting on Mad Evil Rightists n Stupid Haters
We need badges
if someone makes an emoji for it I’ll add it lol
Also remember we have custom emojis, including emojis to dunk on libs
Yeah I saw the patch upstream, though emojis are used way less here than on Hexbear, I suppose it fits the “culture” here better though, it’s more serious in a way
We don’ need no steenkin’ badges.
- I feel nothing but respect for you and the other admins
I’m new to social media… I mean, to social media in general, I had an account or two, that have been either entirely abandoned after creation or deleted for years… So I hope me enjoying my time here wouldn’t bring much discomfort to others.
If your account was approved on Lemmygrad you have nothing to worry about. I don’t know if you know (some people don’t), but Lemmygrad is federated with other instances on Lemmy. Essentially people from other websites running the same software can interact on Lemmygrad. We like having this cross-traffic, but some people make alt accounts for the sole reason of trolling us on Lemmygrad.
Is it preferable for me to do the dunking from my lemmygrad account, or can I use this one (or maybe my .world account)?
Edit: Also, sorry for the multiple posting. I was getting “Network Error” after trying to comment.
Up to you, your lemmygrad account has less risk to be caught in the crossfire because we look at the instance first before we issue bans (on the basis that we have account requests on Lemmygrad so if someone has a Lemmygrad account, we know they shouldn’t be a reactionary).
Makes sense. Gonna use the lemmygrad account then. Thanks!
Also, sorry for the multiple posting. I was getting “Network Error” after trying to comment.
