you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]masterclass 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Yesterday I saw an interesting exchange around here of one user accusing the other of being a shill. When latter objected that he/she doesn't get paid for arguing what he/she argues, the accuser moved the goal-post and re-defined shill as anyone getting ANY KIND of gratification.

A shill is someone that misrepresents themselves for propaganda purposes, usually in an attempt to subvert, coopt, or astroturf. So you can have freelancer shills, and in fact most shills on sites like reddit, 4chan etc are probably just hobbyists.

Having said that, there definitely are highly organized/professional zionist shills. This is well known and has been well documented by both the left and right. The JIDF or whatever they are calling themselves these days isnt just some made up conspiracy. You can see videos and recruitment attempts with them laying out their goals and tactics. One of their biggest targets of concern is the left and the worry that woke leftism will metastasize from targeting whites in the west, to aggressively targeting Israel, with far left anti zionists leading the way. It's a legitimate concern and probably inevitable tbh. They are less concerned about establishment lefties(fashion lefties) because the mainstream media and big tech can usually steer them in the right direction. More concerning for them is the far left that doesnt always follow mainstream media sources, and so that's where the astroturfing and shilling comes in, and this is a classic example. Neocons/Zionists have long tried to conflate Muslim critics of Israel with Nazis, so this meme is exactly what they've been saying, the only difference being someone hilariously stamped "iron left" at the bottom.

One of the things the JIDF and similar zionist groups have plainly stated is that when shilling(of course they never call it that), one should attempt to first establish that you are a card carrying member of the group, and can be trusted. This might take some time and you may have to pretend to criticize that which you are shilling for at times. Once this is established you can begin steering it in directions you like, especially when you flood it with other co-shills and in some cases bots that can mass upvote, downvote, and even post, thereby exerting phony peer pressure. It's not rocket science. It's no more complicated than what high school girls sometimes do to each other, but it can be effective.

Really though, the whole left wing right wing thing is a joke that over simplifies reality and presents a false paradigm. The alt right generally refers to it as the kosher sandwich, and I cant think of a better description. Maybe at one time there seemed to be concrete differences, but hindsight proved that even that was largely an illusion. Now it's just meaningless branding. George Orwell discovered this a long time ago.