The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.
Hell yeah good job everybody
tankies focus more on state-level political events
In other words, the authors have no idea what they’re talking about. We’re abstracting to the level of classes, not states. Maybe they focused on the intellectually deprived western Marxist discourse.
Really did feel like a deliberate missing of the whole point, didn’t it? Felt like a lot of their data stripped out any context that the posts they were ‘analyzing’ had; and drew deliberately-misleading takes from their sanitized data. Like, do you know any marxists who make a habit of attacking muslims? Meanwhile, most of the takedowns I see of Amerikans squawking about ‘muh chingchang’(i’ve deadass heard a white person pronounce it that way; imagine these crackers actually learning how to pronounce ‘Xinjiang’) winds up boiling down to "Oh yeah, 'cause the country that spent fifteen years murdering muslims wholesale in the middle-east, and leaving depleted uranium in the sand to mutate their babies really cares about the Muslims in Xinjiang allasudden."
Great points. If they bothered to do any actual analysis, though, they wouldn’t have been able to reach the conclusion that we’re extremists. “People who think the US should stop provoking and prosecuting wars that displace and kill millions” and “people who think children shouldn’t starve” don’t have the same ring as “far left extremism”; it wouldn’t let them do the enlightened centrist, ‘all extremes are bad’.
Jfc, chingchang? They can’t even hide their racism when their trying to pretend they’re not racist. These will be the same people who depict Xi as Winnie the Pooh while criticising the CPC’s approach to Xinjiang and pretend that they don’t see the racist connotations. Wankers.
Yeah, any paper worth its weight in flour would at the very least have an appendix with illustrative examples of the comments they find interesting or have “high toxicity”. By just talking about all content in abstract with random asspull metrics they get to claim objectivity while presenting zero actual information. Typical for the kind of people who like to reduce countries to their GDP (per capita if you’re lucky).
Edit: I didn’t notice that they actually did include some in their appendix after 5 pages with 135 citations. So much bloat and there’s even a couple Washington Post articles there. They definitely didn’t even read a lot of those beyond the abstract. Either way the examples are just strewn around in the text and did not include their “toxicity level” so the point still stands. Actually worst “qualitative analysis” I’ve ever read tbh, and that’s usually already the worst in data science. More like “pseudoscientific cherrypicking”.
“If you look here at figure X you can see a selection of the most frequent vocabulary. In figure Y you can see several possibilities of our own design that show the arrangement of the words in figure X into some rather mean and hurtful sentences. Disgraceful. Coincidentally when we sent this paper for peer review both reviewer 1 and reviewer 2 had come to similar conclusions and used a mixture of the words in our paper, the vocabulary database, and some choice additions to say, in similarly mean and hurtful tones, that our work was shit. We can’t work out what it means right now but we’re going to run the reviews through our system for a meta analysis before concluding that the reviewers we’re Lemmygrad users.”
Can’t post the image because of the maintenance but basically we are the biggest Marxist forum, since the other web sites are stuff that’s mostly not even Leninist, stuff like marxist.org, archive.vn, and news sites.
Marxists.org being tankie is the hot take I didn’t really need. First they came for Stalin, then Lenin, then Marx. Eventually even Trotsky Encyclopaedia and raddle will join their ranks in the tanks.
Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Trotsky, Engels, Luxemburg - all tankies. Leo Iljitsch Stalinzedong and Karl Engels von Liebknecht killed 30 Billions people.
No joke, I remember writing absolute bullshit on facebook years ago to troll liberals. I said things like that Lenin kept slaves and bribed the workes with beer, to gain support. Guess what, their only problem were, that I said, that communism killed 5 billion people. This number was “a little bit to high” lol
Cringe compilation: Apparently you can measure how toxic comments are on a graph. This says we are racist against almost every race besides Native Americans. It says Vaush isn’t leftist (true) but then calls his subreddit “far-left.”
It relies on this website to calculate both.
The measurements still seem somewhat subjective. You can test how “toxic” comments are here: https://perspectiveapi.com/
The part saying that they ‘observe that tankies attack the identities of Asians, Arabs, Hindus, Mexicans, Africans, and Whites in more than 20% posts mentioning these identities’ was what irritated me the most, because it is a serious accusation and yet it’s so poorly substantiated. (Notice how no quotes are given as examples.) It’s almost as if they relied on a computer programme to do all of their homework for them.
I suspect that the way they came to that conclusion was: any post mentioning one of those groups, that also had a negative sentiment rating, meant that sentiment was directed at that group. Which is horribly dishonest. What’s more likely is someone to be angry (which registers as negative sentiment) about those groups being mistreated or what have you. By the naive approach they seem to have taken, that’s indistinguishable from being mad at that group.
Also, the methodology they describe, and the conclusions they come to don’t align. They don’t describe any methodology by which they could determine that the identities are being attacked. It would be like if they concluded some cause-and-effect relationship but their methodology had absolutely no way of establishing a causal relationship in the data.
holy shit you weren’t joking, if you ctrl+f lemmygrad we appear in it lmao
edit: I still can’t believe this is real, which one of you wrote this paper??
no but it’s the funniest thing, it was written by 2 randos from some backwater uni in new york state (not the city), and a third co-author from Cyprus (??? why), and published on arxiv.org which is:
a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,294,594 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
Meaning they found whoever would publish them without asking questions.
Like this thing says the word tankie 71 times, which is an average of 2.5 per page, of course they would not have been published anywhere else lol. If I was their uni honestly I would give these students a talking to because it would reflect really badly on my reputation to let them publish this drivel.
Actually, the authors of this are professors from that university, lmao.
They were even given some grants and awards.
Arxiv and similar services are mostly used in actual academic circles to publish pre-prints or just to get articles out there while they’re still being reviewed by actual journals, so it’s possible that this will be published in a journal at some point.
