It would be fairly easy to set up a template of copypastas to highjack the top comment spot on rising posts with popular leftist ideas and maybe even edit to be more radical if it gets top spot

certain subs are good targets like r/politics, /lsc, /me_irl you get the idea

  • hexagon_bear [any]13•3 years ago

    /r/publiclibrary did this. The sub is private, so I'll paste some below. Not sure how good they are since I've only read a few, but if there's interest, I'll back up the whole thing.

    • hexagon_bear [any]14•3 years ago

      Response to "coproganda" posts with "cute" police dogs

      This is a propaganda account. Accounts like these tend to post constantly, and especially whenever the police are in the news doing something horrific—which is pretty constant anyway.

      Police are not your friends. Police dogs are not "cute".

    • hexagon_bear [any]13•3 years ago

      A breakdown of why cops are bastards.

      What does it mean when libertarian socialists say that all cops are bastards?

      If it were an individual thing, you'd give them the benefit of the doubt, but it isn't; it's an institutional thing. the job itself is a bastard, therefore by carrying out the job, they are bastards. To take it to an extreme: there were no good members of the gestapo, because there was no way to carry out the directives of the gestapo and to be a good person. it is the same with the american police state. the job of the police is not to protect and serve, but to dominate, control, and terrorize in order to maintain the interests of state and capital.

      Who are the good cops then? The ones who either quit or are fired for refusing to do the job.

      the police as they are now haven't even existed for 200 years as an institution, and the modern police force was founded to control crowds and catch slaves, not to "serve and protect" -- unless you mean serving and protecting what people call "the 1%." They have a long history of controlling the working class by intimidating, harassing, assaulting, and even murdering strikers during labor disputes. This isn't a bug; it's a feature.

      The police do not serve justice. The police serve the ruling classes, whether or not they themselves are aware of it. They make our communities far more dangerous places to live, but there are alternatives to the modern police state. There is a better way.

      Further Reading:

      (all links are to free versions of the texts found online - many curated from this source)

      white nationalists court and infiltrate a significant number of Sheriff's departments nationwide

      an analysis of post-ferguson policing

      why police shouldn't be tolerated at Pride

      Kropotkin and a quick history of policing

      Agee, Christopher L. (2014). The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Camp, Jordan and Heatherton, Christina, eds. (2016). Policing The Planet: Why the policing crisis led to Black Lives Matter. New York: Verso.

      Center for Research on Criminal Justice. (1975). The Iron fist and the velvet glove: An analysis of the U.S. police. San Francisco: Center for Research on Criminal Justice.

      Creative Interventions. (2012). Creative Interventions Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence.

      Guidotto, Nadia. (2011). “Looking Back: The Bathouse Raids in Toronto, 1981” in Captive Genders. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, Eds. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Pg 63-76.

      Herbert, Steven. (2006). Citizens, cops, and power: Recognizing the limits of community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Jay, Scott. (2014). “Who gives the orders? Oakland police, City Hall and Occupy.” Libcom.org.

      Levi, Margaret. (1977). Bureaucratic insurgency: The case of police unions. Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books.

      Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. (2013). Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense.

      Mogul, Joey L., Andrea J. Ritchie and Kay Whitlock. (2015). “The Ghosts of Stonewall: Policing Gender, Policing Sex.” From Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

      Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. (2010). The condemnation of blackness: Race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

      Murakawa, Naomi. (2014). The first civil right: How liberals built prison America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

      Neocleous, Mark. (2000). The fabrication of social order: A critical theory of police power. London: Pluto Press.

      Rose City Copwatch. (2008). Alternatives to Police.

      Wacquant, Loic. (2009). Punishing the poor: The neoliberal government of social insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.

      Williams, Kristian. (2004). Our Enemies in Blue: Police and power in America. New York: Soft Skull Press.

      Williams, Kristian. (2011). “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing.” Interface 3(1).

    • hexagon_bear [any]12•3 years ago

      Fascists deliberately forum creep and spread propaganda on Reddit.

      Fascists have been targeting social media for recruiting for literally years now.

      Stormfront, a Nazi community, has a mantra they use for recruiting.

      This has happened because about a decade ago Bob Whitaker put together The Mantra. Bob tested the parts and versions of that weapon in the opposing views section on Stormfront, and with the help of podcasts by Horus Avenger he built a group of "BUGSers" who spread the Mantra in venues that could accommodate its length, and spread mini-Mantras and short repeater phrases in other venues.

      They have guidelines for how to effectively spread their propaganda. This also includes a set of rules to follow, which includes calling for help.

      We're all part of the team. Remember to report any places that you post The Mantra or mini-Mantras in Where did you post the Mantra today? II Bugsters will offer you advice if you're new, ask them for help Swarming and they'll arrive on the link to help you out.

      Stormfront has a thread where they post updates of where they've spread their mantra.

      Here fascists discuss raiding /r/politics, including step-by-step instructions on how to use Reddit.

      White Nationalists always say they want to “do something.” Well, here’s your chance. This could not be easier. It takes only a few minutes. It can be done anonymously. It doesn’t require you to spend any money. Did I mention it is fun?

      Most threads and comments only get a few up and down votes. There are thousands of White Nationalists on the internet. Liberals on Reddit drastically underestimate our numbers. The pro-White community is one of the largest social groups on the internet. If we were ever inclined to do so, we could upset the balance of power and eliminate the leftist bias over there.

      Let’s get started.

      Here they discuss manipulating /r/europe to incite racism.

      One of the most important places for us to bug is /r/europe. There are already many racially-aware people on there and more and more Europeans are beginning to wake up, so why not use Reddit to wake up as many Europeans as possible? We need to establish our presence on /r/europe and overwhelm the liberal White genocide promoters.

      Nazi website The Daily Stormer called Reddit "fertile ground for recruitment."

      First and foremost, the #1 place on Reddit to recruit people to our side is /r/conspiracy.

      Other fertile grounds for recruitment on Reddit are the European-dominated subreddits – in particular, /r/worldnews, /r/worldpolitics, and /r/europe. Continental Europeans tend to be much more racist and anti-Jew than Americans are.

      They also squat on subreddits like /r/holocaust, /r/ferguson, and /r/TrayvonMartin. Even innocuous subreddits like /r/xkcd were taken and appropriated to suit their agenda.

      The alt-right are basically these people rebranded. They even give Nazi salutes in conferences.

      The Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew “establishment” conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.

      The alt-right was busted pretending to be French to manipulate the French election.

      The chatroom’s admins have instructed users to make fake Facebook accounts that are “ideally young, cute girl, gay, Jew, basically anyone who isn’t supposed to be pro-[FN].” Users are then instructed to lock down these dummy accounts so no one can tell they’re fake. Once they have their fake Facebook profiles, they’re told to infiltrate the comment sections of large French Facebook pages and post pro-FN memes and jokes about François Fillon, France’s current frontrunner for the presidency.

      They also use bots to get hashtags trending on Twitter.

      Examples of them discussing co-opting subreddits to push their agenda:

      • https://archive.fo/RHygl
      • https://archive.fo/kLA3j
      • https://archive.fo/GmLdw
    • hexagon_bear [any]11•3 years ago

      List of reputable scientific and social organizations which affirm the validity of transgender people.

      Transgender People are Valid

      An incomplete list of the reputable scientific & social organizations which affirm the validity of transgender people (that transness is not an illness, that trans people are deserving of respect and equal rights, etc). This also serves as a list of the institutions which recognize the difference between sex and gender.

      • American Psychological Association
      • American Medical Association
      • American Psychoanalytic Association
      • Human Rights Campaign
      • American Academy of Pediatrics
      • American College of Osteopathic Pediatricians
      • United Nations
      • United Kingdom’s National Health Service

      American Psychological Association pamphlet on transgender issues Affirms psychological consensus - that transgender people are valid, have existed throughout history, are subject to discrimination, and that transness is not a mental disorder.

      A 2008 Gender Identity Resolution by the American Psychological Association which expands upon the premises listed in the annotation above and supports total equality for transgender people - affirmation of the institutional legitimacy of transness in psychology.

      Identical to the above, essentially, except pertaining to trans and gender-nonconforming youth.

      Booklet on LGBTQ issues from the American Psychological Association, outlining their policy and attitudes towards aforementioned communities. Expressly positive.

      Human Rights Campaign document published with the American Academy of Pediatrics & the American College of Osteopathic Pediatricians which affirms the validity of transgender youth, encourages appropriate care and respect for their transness and provides resources on how to do so.

      The UK’s National Health Service report on gender dysphoria, which affirms the validity of trans people and discusses ways in which gender dysphoria can be alleviated, the best of which is said to often be social and physical transition.

      The American Psychoanalytic Association’s statement on gender identity, in which transness is validated, social stigma against transgender people is cited as a serious cause of harm and ‘reparative therapy’ - attempts to suppress one’s transness and force them to live as the gender they were assigned at birth - is medically invalid.

      The World Health Organization recently stopped classifying transness as a mental disorder.

      Multilateral condemnation of ‘conversion therapy’ from essentially every medical institution in the United Kingdom, with reasons provided.

      Transphobia? The United Nations says no.

      Gender Transition has a Positive Effect on Trans People

      ENORMOUS meta-meta-analysis on transgender people and the effect gender transition has on their mental health

      • Of 56 studies, 52 indicated transitioning has a positive effect on the mental health of transgender people and 4 indicated it had mixed or no results.

      • ZERO studies indicated gender transitioning has negative results

      This pretty much ends the argument right here.

      Longitudinal study on the effectiveness of puberty suppression & sex reassignment surgery on trans individuals in improving mental outcomes.

      • Unambiguously positive results - results indicate puberty suppression, support of medical professionals & SRS have markedly beneficial outcomes to trans individuals’ mental health and productivity.

      Meta-analysis of studies concerning individuals who underwent sex reassignment surgery

      • 80% of individuals reported significant improvement in dysphoria

      • 78% of individuals reported significant improvement in psychological symptoms

      • 72% of individuals reported significant improvement in sexual function

      Children who socially transition report levels of depression and anxiety which closely match levels reported by cisgender children, indicating social transition massively decreases the risk factor of both.

      “A new study has confirmed that transgender youth often have mental health problems and that their depression and anxiety improve greatly with recognition and treatment of gender dysphoria”

      Longitudinal study which indicates transgender people have a lower quality of life than the general population. However, that quality of life raises dramatically with ‘Gender Affirming Treatment’, the nature of which is detailed extensively in-text.

    • hexagon_bear [any]10•3 years ago

      The beginner's guide to using the public library resources.

      I see a lot of people on Reddit have this misconception that the goal of stunts like this is to convince your opponent that you're correct; this is wrong. First and foremost, your primary goal here is to sway the audience. Audience, audience, audience. Sometimes you'll be able to use the person you're arguing with as a foil to sway the audience; that should take priority over convincing the person you're debating.

      It's also worth noting that what you do in the comments section can make or break your standing with your audience. If you've won, you don't want to lose them, so it's important to be mindful of what you're doing.

      #How to avoid fucking yourself over

      1. If you're taken out of your comfort zone in a way that you can't wiggle out of, just stop replying. Making yourself (and subsequently us) look stupid does not help the cause. Less can be more.
      2. You only need to hold your own until the "continue this thread" link pops up at the 10th comment in the tree. Most people aren't gonna click that shit, so if you get rekt or put in too much effort after the 10th comment in the tree no one will notice.
      3. You don't even need to argue in the comments. The copypasta will do most of the work for you. You've made our points already, so you can just bail. Maybe respond once to common counterarguments we've anticipated if you're feeling generous.
      4. If your copypasta goes against the typical circlejerk of the subreddit you're posting in, then bailing without arguing further is usually the best idea. I've seen posters get their copypasta upvoted, but then lose the crowd and get downvoted as they started to comment further.
      5. Be entertaining. You can win back lost crowds if you're good at this.
      6. Stay cool, even if you get dogpiled. Internet culture views getting mad as a bad thing and declares you the loser of the argument. Actually getting mad leads to making mistakes and potentially losing your audience. Adopt UNRELENTING CONSTANT NEUTRALITY.
      7. If you do get dogpiled, remembering guidelines #2 and #5 can cut down your workload a decent amount. Also not everyone needs to be replied to. Don't bite off more than you can chew. It can actually be a good excuse to brush off essay writers.

      #How to deal with other Redditors

      1. You're not primarily here to argue. You're here to spread our talking points. Anything you do after that is extra.
      2. If someone tries to steer the conversation away from the points made in the copypasta, don't let them. People do this because they can't address the argument and want an exit without losing face. If they try, mock and taunt them for not addressing the arguments; don't let up until they do.
      3. Demand sources for their claims when applicable. Most people don't have sources on hand and will have to go look for them, which will contribute to wearing them down so they stop replying. It also takes longer, which means that less eyes will see their reply as the thread fills up with comments and If they don't produce any sources, then pounce on them for that.
      4. Every bit of ignorance should be pounced on. Every bit of knowledge should be ignored. This mentality can easily fluster people whose knowledge of a topic came from a Wikipedia article they read 5 minutes ago (read: your typical Redditor).
      5. Try not to deviate from the talking points. Repetition helps build a sense of consensus that will seep into the minds of your audience as the same thing gets posted in thread after thread. The repetition also ensures some quality control that wouldn't be consistently possible otherwise.
      6. You don't have to win every argument; it's not the important part. You just need to get our points out there and get people thinking about them.
      7. The art of derailing can be useful to you. Maybe you don't want to continue arguing a certain point. Perhaps you don't want a particular topic discussed. A subtle way to derail conversations is to use an analogy to one of Reddit's controversial topics. Frequently on Reddit, when someone uses an analogy the debate will shift to arguing over that analogy; this is especially true when it's a topic that Reddit can't help but argue over (circumcision, privilege, feminism, anything related to social justice).

      You can also incorporate some stuff from Stormfront's rules that you think would be useful to you.

    • hexagon_bear [any]9•3 years ago

      Police are abusive.

      #Police domestic violence:

      • The famous 40% study: Findings are that between 24 and 40 per cent of officers have committed domestic abuse, self-admitted or partner-admitted. Data, however, dates back to the 90s, and hasn't been updated.

      • Fox in the Henhouse: A Study of Police Officers Arrested for Crimes Associated with Domestic and/or Family Violence (2013). Read it. It's good and nuanced. It doesn't provide definitive figures - or percentages - but rather provides empirical data on many reported cases of domestic violence. Especially relevant is the relatively low rate of separation of officers from the force:

        Data on final organizational outcomes were available for 233 of the cases (71.9%). About one-third of those cases (34.7%) involved officers who were separated from their job either through resignation (n = 43) or termination (n = 38). The majority of cases in which the final employment outcome was known resulted in a suspension without job separation (n = 152). Final employment outcomes could not be discerned in 91 cases; however, news items associated with many of those cases included specific refusals to provide information on case outcomes by police executives who characterized OIDV arrests as "confidential" and/or "personnel matters" that could not be divulged.

        And the fact that previous studies may not have taken into account child abuse, or abuse of non-married partners:

        More restrictive definitions of the phenomenon would have failed to uncover at least two-thirds of the cases of police-perpetrated domestic and/or family violence in our sample. Police scholars and policymakers should be cognizant of both the trend toward more expansive definitions in the research on family violence and the need to identify and help OIDV victims who experience abuse outside the boundaries of traditional spousal roles.

      #Cop dog murders:

      #Excessive force, brutality, deaths in custody:

      • First, there is no official recollection of excessive force incidents, despite it being mandated by law. This should tell you a lot.

      • In-depth, variously sourced, analysis of police violence. Some highlights:

        Director James B. Comey stated the following in a remarkable February 2015 speech: Not long after riots broke out in Ferguson late last summer, I asked my staff to tell me how many people shot by police were African-American in this country. I wanted to see trends. I wanted to see information. They couldn’t give it to me, and it wasn’t their fault. Demographic data regarding officer-involved shootings is not consistently reported to us through our Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Because reporting is voluntary, our data is incomplete and therefore, in the aggregate, unreliable.

        When police initiated the contact, blacks (5.2 percent) and Hispanics (5.1 percent) were more likely to experience the threat or use of physical force than whites (2.4 percent),

        In Missouri, where Mike Brown lived and died, black people are killed by law enforcement twice as frequently as white people. Nationwide, the rate at which black people are killed by law enforcement is 3 times higher than that of white people.

        The Bureau of Justice Statistics did publish a report in 2016 that found that about 1,900 people had died while in police custody during the prior year. That report, which offered details about the cause of death during a three-month period, found that nearly two-thirds of deaths in police custody between June and August of 2015 were homicides — including justifiable homicides by a law enforcement officer — while nearly one-fifth were suicides and just over one-tenth were accidental deaths.

        A 2012 study in the Criminal Justice Policy Review analyzed the patterns of behavior of one large police department — more than 1,000 officers — and found that a “small proportion of officers are responsible for a large proportion of force incidents, and that officers who frequently use force differ in important and significant ways from officers who use force less often (or not at all).”. Because ACAB, and the "good" ones cover for the "bad ones

        A widely publicized report in October 2014 by ProPublica concluded that young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than their white counterparts: “The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.”

    • hexagon_bear [any]9•3 years ago

      Torture doesn't work.

      From the conclusion of the 2015 study/book Does Torture Work?:

      Interrogational torture does not work. President Bush thought it worked. So did his Vice President, Dick Cheney, his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his CIA Director, Robert Gates. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia thinks it works. The creators of Jack Bauer and the television show 24 as well as the more recent film Zero Dark Thirty think it works. Many Americans think it works. Even many liberal college professors and others opposed to torture on other grounds think it works. For anyone who has ever had so much as a root canal, it sure seems like it should work.

      But it does not. Interrogational torture generates bad information. It results in false information by innocent detainees. It results in ambiguous information of unclear value. It results in no information at all.

      Shane O'Mara takes a neurological approach to the question of torture in their book Why Torture Doesn't Work:

      I also argue that the techniques that are supposed to "enhance" interrogation do precisely the opposite - they impair interrogation. I also argue that there is a large empirical literature demonstrating why this is so... [O]nce the decision to impose torture is reached, the consequences are that it will be ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes.

      From Ronnie Janoff-Bulman's Erroneous Assumptions: Popular Belief in the Effectiveness of Torture Interrogation:

      ...The long, bleak history of torture attests to its success in terrorizing populations —in getting people to make specific confessions, with a goal not of truth, but as a system of control. From the Inquisition and the great witch hunts of Europe to horrors perpetrated in Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and more recently by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, torture has been used against “heretics” and opponents of the state to instill terror and stifle opposition in the name of security. The elicitation of accurate information (not to mention truthful confessions) has clearly not been the goal of these torturers. When such accuracy is the goal of interrogation, as it is in intelligence collection, the coercive power of torture is likely to result in proffered misinformation, misdirection, and lies—ineffective outcomes by any measure.

      He goes on to conclude that:

      Those who argue for the use of torture can all too readily rely on people’s virtually automatic belief in its effectiveness. Given torture’s inordinate threat to moral standing, respect, and rights within and across institutions and cultures, we should feel obligated to reexamine our beliefs and subject our assumptions to greater scrutiny. The experience of senior military interrogators and years of research attest to the effectiveness of traditional social influence techniques in intelligence work; in contrast, belief in the effectiveness of torture derives largely from our collective false assumptions.

      In Darius Rejali's hefty tome Torture and Democracy he examines the idea that:

      Torture for information may be the clumsiest method, it may produce serious institutional damage, but it may also be better than sitting on one's own hands.

      The answer to this thought however is that:

      ...nothing is indeed far preferable to "anything". "Anything" needs to be verified, and as the Kubark manual explains, "A time-consuming delay results." In the meantime, the prisoner can think of new, more complex falsehoods should this bid for relief fail.

      He concludes that:

      For harvesting information, torture is the clumsiest method available to organisations, even clumsier in some cases than flipping coins or shooting randomly into crowds. The sources of error are systematic and ineradicable... In short, organised torture yields poor information, sweeps up many innocents, degrades organisational capabilities, and destroys interrogators. Limited time during battle or emergency intensifies all these problems.

      Torture does not work.

  • hotcouchguy [he/him]5•3 years ago

    I've always wondered how difficult astroturfing would be, seems like it's mostly about being organized, persistent, and not getting caught.

    Also what is that diagram? Can't tell if it's an ironic stock image or if it's related.

  • FRIENDLY_BUTTMUNCHER [she/her]5•3 years ago

    Posting is praxis. I try and link back to the megathread here whenever I make an important post on reddit.

    • scamboy [he/him,any]2•3 years ago

      Can't you just check from another device/browser if the posts are showing up? I don't know how sophisticated shadowbans are.

        • scamboy [he/him,any]2•3 years ago

          trying to use reddit to politically agitate normies is literally pointless.

          But redditors will believe any comment that is overly verbose.

    • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]2•3 years ago

      Shadowbans are a hurdle for this sort of effort, but won't stop it entirely. You regularly see leftist comments with significant traction, even on awful threads -- they're just in the minority most places. A coordinated effort to make them more common and more prominent could work.

    • KamalaHarrisPOTUS [he/him]1•3 years ago

      so where are better places to post comrade? I know very little about these things and appreciate any info you can point me towards