Bad theory. Russia isn’t to blame for everything going wrong in the west. We’ve done much of it to ourselves. A lot of current day problems can be directly traced back to the economic era ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher. Nothing works anymore.
They’re faning the flames of the fire we built.
I’d give them 15% of the credit.They got trump elected, I give them 80% credit.
If Russia magically stopped existing before 2016, we’d still have Trump. He’s a homegrown phenomenon. There was and still is lot of resentment of establishment politics since the '08 collapse. Almost all the “recovery” from that was concentrated in the top 20% of income earners.
Trump is a crook helping himself and his rich friends, but he presents himself on television as anti-establishment. Gameshow Host President plus the American Public. You really need 80% foreign intervention to do the math on that one?
I mean they can both be true. The collapse of American education and media laid the groundwork for Trump. For him to even come anywhere close to power reveals a stark and horrifying collapse of everything that’s supposed to keep us understanding reality and keep the whole train on the rails. But, also, Russia’s formidable power at narrative-shaping in Western countries is a factor is the proximate cause of how bad it is. We haven’t even really got our heads around the nature of how bad it really is, having the whole top levels of government hollowed out and destroyed like they currently are being. We’ll find out the next time there is an actual crisis.
Do you really think Russia has done more to “shape the narrative” than Rupert Murdoch has? I’m sure they’ve got battalions of soldiers on Facebook or Tweeting tweets or whatever, but that’s got to amount to chump change when compared against 24 hour Fox News.
I do think Fox News has more power, but Russia’s goal is unapologetically simply to do as much damage as possible. Fox is trying to hand America over to their friends and destroy their opposition and if they do some damage, oh well, but they’re trying to still have a working country to hand over to the friends. Russia is simply trying to steer the bus off the cliff.
Intentions have little barring on the effects of actions. The Murdoch media empire may not intend to destabilize english speaking nations, but that’s very much what it’s doing.
I completely disagree with that assessment. What the Republicans want is the complete domination of the American proletariat by the bourgeoisie (i.e, themselves). All the Russians want is to impede the government’s ability to project power halfway around the globe. Russia doesn’t care about American labor laws, unions, strikes, tax policy, etc, if anything, all things being equal, they’d probably prefer that the workers have more power, as that could be more disruptive to the state.
If you’re more preoccupied the with the geopolitical influence of the state than you are with the things I mentioned, then I think your priorities are very out of order. Those are bourgeois concerns, they want to play “The Great Game” because they’ll reap the spoils and take the resources of wherever they “bring democracy” to. If their interests are in jeopardy, let them go scramble to look after them, if anything, that’s good because they’ll be more focused on that than on fucking us over. We should be looking after the interests of our own class.
The American right is, by far, the greatest threat to the American people that exists in the world.
If Russia magically stopped existing before 2016, we’d still have Trump
That’s because the campaign to get him, or someone like him, electable started in the 80s.
That’s one of the things the West still can’t wrap its collective head around - russia doesn’t operate like western countries. Its long-term goals are not “how can we bring plumbing and indoor toilets to our citizens in the next 40 years”, but rather “how can we sow misinformation and discontent in the West to divide nations and cause them to tumble into chaos”.
I’m sure the estate of Tom Clancy is still looking for new ghost writers.
It’s always funny how literally ALL ex-Soviet and USSR-satellite states are saying the exact same thing since the 90s, and the entire West goes “lol, don’t be dramatic”. And then russia does exactly what the West was warned about, and the West goes “huh, who could’ve seen that coming?”
It’s tiring.
So the plot to get Trump elected started in the 80’s, under the Soviet Union? Lmao. Yeah, I’m sure they maintained that plot consistently through the entire collapse, through the massive changes in leadership structure and everything.
At a certain point, this shit is just racist. I’m sorry, you can say, “I just hate the government, not the people,” but it you hate every government they’ve ever had, even when it’s gone through drastic, fundamental changes, then it’s not really about the government anymore, is it? It sounds like you’re trying to argue that the Russian people are inherently duplicitous and evil.
So the plot to get Trump elected started in the 80’s, under the Soviet Union?
Do you have a condition that prevents you from reading entire sentences? That’s not what I wrote.
Yeah, I’m sure they maintained that plot consistently through the entire collapse, through the massive changes in leadership structure and everything.
All those ops were done by the KGB. As far as they were concerned, the only changes the collapse brought were a rename to FSB, and one of their officers becoming the dictator. So, yes, the campaigns have continued without issues.
At a certain point, this shit is just racist
Can’t be racist towards a country.
I’m sorry, you can say, “I just hate the government, not the people,” but it you hate every government they’ve ever had
They had TWO governments in the last 40 years.
fundamental changes
LOL, that’s cute.
It sounds like you’re trying to argue that the Russian people are inherently duplicitous and evil.
I’m sure there are those that aren’t, but it’s a bit hard to find them these days. Just look at what’s happening in Ukraine. I’m also not seeing massive anti-Putin protests organised by those russians who fled to the west.
I blame the Democrats for that.
They were so stupid, the last several cycles, I can’t blame anyone else.Of course you do.
Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream – people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).
The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
(All of the stuff above is basically the “standard” for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you’re above a certain size.)
from Bannon:
“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”
So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.
“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review
The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away. They’ll downvote the shit out of you, but who tf cares about upvotes and downvotes. If someone is getting downvoted heavily, read what they said carefully before piling on.
I don’t know what you’re trying to say with those quotes.
There’s a few turbo libs who refuse to accept Dem accountability and think everyone saying anything negative about them is a Russian/Chinese troll.
Now I get it… I think.
But yah. I’ve gotten a lot of shit from my own team, since they railroaded Sanders in 2015.
I completely agree with this statement and is my theory as well. Everything has been going down the shitter since then. Reagan/Bush Sr. + Thatcher + Mulroney set the foundation upon which everything is collapsing right now.
Plus a lot of the good social policies beforehand seem mostly to have been urged by a fear that Socialism/Communism might spread if the US was seen as having bad systemic problems by their citizens. Notice how Reaganism and Thatcher basically instituted their policies around the fall of the USSR.
Russia has had their hand in the pot since the 80s. Are they the sole cause? No, but they’re absolutely involved.
Not to mention that Russia didn’t stop in the 90s. They had the Chechnya wars, they kept Transnistria, they sold off all of their assets to a handful of oligarchs, and they never embraced democracy. It’s the same ol’, same ol’ with them.
Russia may not be to blame but the lack of the USSR certainly made citizens of NATO nations so relieved after the petsistent fear of a nuclear exchange of either side screwed up relations.
I’d say the good times were over after 9/11 made people aware that just because there was no enemy “superpower”, didn’t mean there’s no risk.
I’m gonna interpret this libs as libertarians cuz theres no fucking liberals who support Russia.
It was the librarians all along
Shhh
ook
Librariatarians
Russia support is definitely on the conservative/MAGA side.
It’s literally only the far right and far left that support Russia, and the reason for that is because they are both funded by them.
Even Biden, perhaps the most turbo of libs, hated russia. Hell, one of the big things .ml criticized him for during his term was being “disgustingly biased” against russia. Where the hell are they finding these pro-russian libs?
Cross post this to an .ml community.
Banned: rule 2
After all, it was rule 1
What did I expect 😄
🔥
How do you tag yogthos?
There is a kernel of truth to this. After the cold war ended, it really did feel like the world was finally at peace, for a little while. There were still conflicts and wars going on, but they seemed manageable by comparison.
I believe one of the spy museums in DC even wrote that after the fall of Russia, the US was considering ending it’s intelligence groups. That was scaled back, especially after Bush’s monumental failure in 2001. But it was interesting to see the optimism at the time.
True, and I would say it wasn’t so much the resurgence of Putin that kicked off a downward feeling, but 9/11 and the aftermath. Geopolitical violence at “home” no longer seemed an obvious worry until then, in the western world.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if that had never occurred and the western powers did more to help the struggling Russia in their post Soviet transition…
western libs
Whatchu talkin’ bout, Boris?
Everyone’s focusing on the whole Russia thing. What the fuck, though, the 90s were not good. Reagan had just got done declaring war on the entire American working class and fucking up their lives quite a lot, and Clinton pretty much continued the program, just at about 50% strength.
Listen to any of the media of the time, that’s when Rage Against the Machine got their start, it was the backdrop for Fight Club. It’s all hopelessness and anger. The money started coming back once the circa-2000 tech boom started, and things were still riding high a little bit off the 20th century before times, but the 90s weren’t fucking good. It was latchkey kids because both parents had to work for the first time, Rodney King, Fox News starting to take over people’s brains, layoffs, the battle of Seattle, shipping jobs overseas, corporate mergers, the steady death of a lot of the institutions everyone had been depending on up until then.
Why did Russia offshore my job, cause the 2008 global financial crisis, attack Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush, and tattoo me under my foreskin? Damn Russians
Yeah this is all Russia’s fault or something. Definitely not the consequences of a system that prioritizes profit over human lives and rewards immense selfishness and greed. We are naturally great and pure of heart, all of our flaws are because of those damn foreigners. You’re falling for the same shit the Republicans are.
I automatically subtrack 50 IQ points for anyone who uses the word “libs” as a pejorative because it’s ALWAYS either some brain dead Marxist or conservative.
No liberal is pro Russia, they’re the one most vocal about their actions. The only ones who support them are Marxists and conservatives.
If you think Russia has to do with the direct quality of American living, positive or negative you are a fully hypnotize good ol American.
90s were good because the economy grew a lot and that growth impacted most everyone positively.
If anything, making a singular country the world’s global factory has had a hell of a lot more impact than the USSR dissolving in the 90s, IMO.
Which western libs does this idiot think are pro-Russia?
At that point you might as well just start talking about the Judeo-Bolshivik plot again, because you’re already at that level of “blame foreigners for everything”. Or hell, go all the way back to the ur-version and start ranting about Gog and Magog.
For everybody new to a Lemmyleftist calling liberals bad: yeah its a thing. We’ve talked about it a lot. And they still refuse to understand why we’re pissed about it.
Pro Tip: odds are in the high 80-90% they’re not American.
Also we’re the bourgeoise who refuse to see capitalism’s chains or that the solution is to seize the means of production from the oppressor class. For more information, say you think liberals are good and wait for the dateline to swing by again.
I like poking them with a stick every now and then, but I don’t have the patience to go out of my way to jab them every time I see them, indefinitely – some of them can go on for weeks. Bless those of you who do.
watch this, I’m gonna toss this one out and it is gonna make one (Or five. Or twenty :3c) of them so mad: You can be opposed to moving towards the center and also realize that bullshit purity tests of leftism do nothing but help nazis in a time where the republicans are happy to welcome every kind of single-issue voter – gun rights, your family all votes this way, anti-abortion, hate women, hate blacks, hate mexicans, anti-lgbtq, maybe you’re a jesus freak, maybe you’re a business owner, maybe you’re an outright neo-nazi, maybe all you care about is that rich people are never taxed anything ever (regardless of your own income) – they’re all too happy to welcome all these various flavors of people under a big tent that tells them THEY BELONG.
I’m all for trying to talk these people out of their mediocre centrist shit takes, but that can wait for after we defeat the actual factual nazis, no? For now, we need to vote in every election we can to try and take the path of least harm – if the DSA runs more candidates in primaries, fucking vote for them, but if one isn’t the nominee, don’t let perfect be the enemy of “better than what we’ve got”.
now, sit back and watch the fireworks. I adore hearing from “true leftists”, they’re a laugh riot.
You sound like one of those trolls who tried to rile vegans up by deliberately talking about eating meat.
well, you sound like someone about to prove me right. go on.
Okay liboomer.
attaboy
*gasp*! Vote?! for Democrats?!?! You incomprehensible monster!
Don’t you know voting is the cause of all evil?! Also, no one can really prove how it works! Plus it’s bad. Like the Democrats! They deserve our unconscionable inaction because Bernie didn’t win. It’s true, i read it in jacobin.
