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Comment by wisemang | Hacker News Reader

Look up tankies[0] —- people who support these atrocities by imperialists and other problematic regimes because they’re so conditioned against the US / Western nations that they assume anyone acting against the west’s interests must be doing good.

[0] https://youtu.be/0lcBplljoD8

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Those people are idiots on the Internet, but they have no actual political power. The pro-Russia right is more of a concern, especially when they make common cause out of "anti woke".

Tulsi Gabbard may well be the next director of national intelligence...

I am aware of the phenomenon; the interesting part is the word “conditioned”. By whom? And, eventually, who paid for the conditioning? (I think it mostly ends with the usual suspects, Russia, China and Iran).

Possibly at least somewhat. I think it also comes from getting disillusioned by legitimately terrible things done by the US in the name of “democracy” e.g. Latin American death squads in the 70s/80s, Iraq war and war on terror, etc.

People can’t seem to hold the idea of multiple countries being problematic and doing objectionable things. Certainly information ops from your usual suspects feed into this.

Yes. It's really weird that posters here find it so hard to believe in people looking at their situation and making their own opinions without external influence. I don't need Russians or anyone else to see that my state is stealing half of my salary in exchange for insecurity (including terrorism and a friend gunned by it), failing healthcare, disfunctional administration, public media shitting on me daily on the basis of my sex, race and sexual orientation, supporting wars and war crimes abroad, canceling the ideas of 40% of the voters, etc.

Conditioning doesn't need to be something one does to another. You can condition yourself by just dabbling in something and then going down the rabbit hole.

Like Elon being conditioned by his own social media website.

I imagine a lot of that happened well before he got involved with Twitter. He was just better at hiding it and likely had a PR team covering for him

North Korea also has large scale, effective info-operations, though aimed mostly at US/SK/Japan. also more ideological overlap with the "tanky" world view than anyone else

Some people just have temperaments of fanatics, ready to become obsessed by any political idea and take it to the extreme. And if the idea happens to be a messianic religion which gives a great excuse to relish in hate and glorify violence, it's even better.

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