I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.

Definitely a joke, I’m having trouble imagining a person who could believe this in earnest, let alone enough to say it out loud. I’m even having trouble accepting that you can imagine that a person would say this with no sarcasm. No one actually believes that.

edit: just realized that maybe you’re trying to be funny and I’m slow on the uptake

This essay resonates with me, thanks for sharing, the author makes her points pretty effectively. I’m not a historian and I don’t know shit, but I think even if I give the critics the concession that everything is absolute rubbish, I still think there’s no convincing argument that the beliefs are dishonest or malicious or not genuine.

There’s so much bullshit and conflicting views about literally every historical event that I find it really hard to penetrate the context of the discussion and feel confident in anything, but I think the fact that I keep seeing people who hold “tankie” opinions dismissed as malicious propagandists pushes me very strongly towards feeling that the critics have not made any attempt to seriously engage with the ideas they’re fighting against.

I think the realization I’m coming to now is that when part of your ideology is that people who claim belief in a specific conflicting worldview can be dismissed as bots or propagandists, finding out that those people aren’t manufactured makes it a lot harder to take everything else you’ve said seriously.

On the other hand, the guy you’re replying to is correct that the author’s points fall completely flat and are ridiculous once you hunt down that specific paragraph and remove the context immediately before and after. Then it becomes obvious to an unbiased reader that the author actually ignored communist death tolls because it was inconvenient for her argument.

I’m using an android phone because apple doesn’t allow anything like fdroid to exist on iphone.

EEE was my first thought on seeing that threads would federate, so I felt a bit of relief when I looked at the op just now and saw that Rochko directly addressed this, then I read what he said and it doesn’t seem like he addressed it at all.

It’s not coming completely out of nowhere. The fact that you’re having a discussion on Lemmy means the people you’re conversing with are aware that you’re willing to consider libre alternatives to shitty mainstream tech.