Gulags were 'compassionate', 'educational' institutions say morons on Twitter - Polidicks

Holy shit just admit that you fucked up in posting about sending someone to the gulags instead of going in a long ass stupid attempt at justifying your stupid post. This is a person that just can't admit he fucked up.

Any large enough platform denigrating really small-scale crazies is disingenuous enough, but a news agency doing it is inexcusable. A lot of the dissonance, misconception, and vitriol of the current political climate came from practices like /r/TiA blowing fringe crazies with 1-2 likes on their posts way out of proportion, painting them as a serious ideological threat and serious representatives of what *most* people on the opposing side of the political spectrum thought. The amount of times I've heard "I identify as an Attack Helicopter" used to seriously denigrate completely ordinary transfolk is staggering, and an obvious result of this sort of reporting. The reporting of twitter nobodies is the definition of scraping the bottom of the barrel.

We live in a world where gay furry Nazis are a thing.

Critical thinking is dead.

New rule: before it has to get worse before it gets better, it has to get cartoonish and absurd first.

MLs fuck off.

But what if I saw the entire opposite of that? Would it be the true answer instead? Because that seems to be the law at hand here. "Oh, Mr. Putin himself said there aren't any more gulags!"

This is the most embarassing thing i've seen a newspaper publish in a long time. Some twitter thread from a nobody. media is dead

I suppose it could be worse. He could be a full on tankie that justifies the Holodomor because "the kulaks had it coming."

Pretty sure exactly half of those people just have a fetish for leather and hugo boss. The other half, and people who outright identify as "alt fur" or whatever? Er...

It's not a nobody, it's a Twitter account for an official university group (LGBTQ societies are typically VERY close to the SU and the faculty in universities). Sure it's run by some idiot... but it hence can be used to show the theoretical standpoint of the student group. That doesn't sound important because it is, afterall, just a student group. It is, however, important in that it illustrates the thinking of students in universities today and what content SU's are allowing to be posted on group pages (where I went we got a booklet detailing what kind of content was allowed to be posted on the official page). Not to mention the story is also highly embarrassing for the university to have someone posting on an official page such blatantly moronic viewpoints. If you check the twitter page they've now nuked all of their comments until 2014, so I wonder what other embarrassing rants they got rid of...

Perhaps ask yourself in this case if that’s actually likely (no, it’s not).

It is. As usual, what started as an ironic joke attracted unironic believers who didn't get the joke and thought they were among like-minded people, eventually taking over the joint. Now, nothing in that article says they're gay, but it's bound to be inevitable that at least a few are. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2017/02/furred-reich-truth-about-nazi-furries-and-alt-right There are definitely furries who're only fans of the Hugo Boss aesthetic, but they're the only ones who aren't part of, I can't believe I have to say this, "alt-furry".

The Telegraph went for low hanging fruit and found out one tankie dork was running the LGBT twitter of one university and we're supposed to care or think this is in any way representative? God knows why they thought this was newsworthy. This is the kind of story that would hardly register in the relevant university's student newspaper. It's a terribly embarrassing case of grasping at straws from a national publication. Also, tankies have been apologising for Stalin and his gulags since time immemorial. What this person thinks is hardly new. Difference being is that it's an oddity to do that these days, compared to when Marxism-Leninism or Maoism was really in vogue at universities 50-60 years ago.

Science must be decolonised and de-essentialised in order for this to happen. Okay I consider myself a pretty hip young buck. I'm in the know of all the lingo, I'm up to spec on my social terms and shit. But I'm lost with this. What does it mean? What I understand of it doesn't seem that great.

I think they're saying scientists are biased in the experiments they choose to conduct and the questions they want to answer because they tend to be from an educated, western background. Also maybe that the preconceptions they bring to the table shade them in ways which may not be scientific. It could be both. As far as I can tell they want more attention placed on certain things instead of what scientists are currently focusing on? It's hard to tell because decolonising and deessentialising can mean so many things

You know, I was always skeptical about "Russian trolls" and thought its just a scapegoat bullshit created by American 3-letter agencies, but this one takes the cake. I'm not sure anymore.

It's a fucking nobody lmao. It being an ~official university group~ account is utterly meaningless when it's just the account for a god damned student union society. Societies are relatively autonomous and once approved by the uni and SU generally handle all administrative role assignments with no input from anyone outside of the society. The mechanisms to remove someone from the role for a relatively small fuck up like this are largely in the hands of the society members. Imagine drinking the "universities are sjw indoctrination camps" kool-aid so hard that you think one person who operates a Twitter account for a SU society is a fucking indictment against all university students. The SUs over here don't tend to helicopter parent their societies, outside of extreme cases where the society has a rep for being a problem. Stuff poster by societies isn't inherently endorsed by the SU itself because they aren't actively monitoring the output of a lot of their societies. Good work falling for the Torygraph digging for things to get mad at "the left" about I suppose?

All this talk of society and SU made me think you guys were talking some next-generation sociology related to the Soviet Union. I mean, saying the gulags were cool is a pretty stupid thing to say but society (referring to the current zeitgeist of western civilization, not the student organizations also called societies for some reason) never ceases to amaze me at how low people will grovel to find one sick ant in a colony of hundreds. People have had 7 motherfucking years to do the think that maybe the reaction to liberals saying something stupid is far disproportionate to the reaction to conservatives saying something stupid. I was on the fucking SJW hate train too in 2013, I just realized that maybe I don't need someone to chew my opinions for me before swallowing them and maybe someone saying something that pisses me off wasn't the literal downfall of all of human society.

This matches up with my personal experience, I was involved in a uni student group the past couple of years. Of course, different country and different university but it does sound like the UK takes a similar hands off approach to student groups.

I wonder if the YouTube septic community has picked up on this story yet.

Come on, you cannot seriously think that this somehow "illustrates the thinking of students in universities today". Millions of young adults attend universities all over the country/world. I highly doubt even .01% of those students have views similar to this individual.

It is admittedly pretty low-hanging fruit- but it would only hardly register in the university's student paper because the SU leadership would likely throw a fit if it was mentioned. Arguably, people in this thread only think this is non-news because ~it's just one moronic tankie lmao~ and such thinking is an oddity these days because nobody reports on how radical student beliefs can actually be. I don't think that at all- I never said that. I just said that this kind of thing being posted shows the ideas that are floating around universites at the moment. I went to university in the UK, because I'm actually British, and maybe it depends on what uni you went to but the three SU societies I was a a part of all had rules regarding social media use that were dictated to us by the SU. I never got mad at the left. Once again you're reading well into what was said. If I was mad at 'the left' I would explicitly say so. Re-read my post again without getting instantly butthurt over it. That's a misrepresentation of my point as well, but it is my bad for not saying 'the thinking of students in British universities today'. Sure, it's anecdotal, but when I went to uni about 5 years ago a whole lot more that .01% of people shared those same views.

I wasn't saying that they don't exist, I'm saying that this student union being run by alt-furries is unlikely. Which it is.

It's twitter, you can find someone who holds literally any opinion on there

It's based on the principle that people do not come up with ideas independently of their surroundings, and that they often end up creating the logic rationalizing an unequal social arrangement. It's based on the baseline belief that ruling ideas you see around you have origins in a ruling elite and therefore serve to justify their power. In the vein of social responsibility in a world where institutions lord over more and more groupings and cross old divisions between people, they want to remove influences that suggest something is not socially constructed and instead part of a natural reality, since it implies there's a form of inequality and hierarchy that cannot be abolished, therefore dispossession is to that extent inevitable, and therefore there's a set of people who really can't just be individualists abandoning their own advocacy and mutual solidarity without disadvantaging themselves. social constructivism vs essentialism is essentially the evolution of the old conflict between materialism and idealism. that's why the divide between "SJWs" and "reactionaries" heavily mirrors the historical divide between historic socialism and nationalism.

Essentialism is a very old philosophy term, the idea that essence is before existence and thus that certain things are intrinsic qualities just because. Frankly it's a downright anti scientific idea as it's based on asserting assumption rather than proving hypothesis.

People who unironically believe this and spout the same rhetoric deserve to be thrown in an actual gulag tbh along just as holocaust deniers deserve to be thrown into concentration camps.

No one said the student union was run by alt-furries. They were just used as an example to show that non-liberal LGBTQ people do exist.

Where did we go so wrong.