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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I’m gonna interpret this libs as libertarians cuz theres no fucking liberals who support Russia.
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?
It was the librarians all along
Shhh
ook
Russia support is definitely on the conservative/MAGA side.
Cross post this to an .ml community.
Banned: rule 2
🔥
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.
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…
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.
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.
western libs
Whatchu talkin’ bout, Boris?
90s were good because the economy grew a lot and that growth impacted most everyone positively.
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.
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.
ridiculous take. 90s were good because great money was made in the west through Yeltsin corruption of Russia.
When no longer a client state, CIA/west took usual nazi diminishment attitutes towards it, and any Russian blind eye to neonazi click farms for GOP voting action, is simply not Russia’s obligation to stop western implosion.
time when western libs finally understand Russia is not their friend.
It is neoliberal majority that supports war on Russia, and embraces the propaganda, that the US ever stopped hating/diminishing Russia. The new definition of tankie is that supremacist war on Russia is deserved, and not even the point that it is a losing proposition matters. You’re a tankie even if you just don’t want to bankrupt the west, or the signal of losing a demonic war will embolden more resistance to warmongering justifies collapse for trying.
The amount of money made by “the West” in Russia from Yeltsin era corruption was not significant. Things like increased worker productivity and deflationary effects from offshoring and technological advancement were primarily responsible for the booming 90s economy.
Your redefinition of “tankie” also doesn’t make sense. Tankies would never believe a war on Russia was deserved, that’s the exact opposite of what they are about.
You think the theft and sale of like 30 cents worth of Soviet garbage was what drove the economy of the 90s?
The 90s were wealthy because the 80s were wealthy and they had the Internet now.
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.
*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.
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
“Civil wars, child sexual slavery and devastating poverty are good, actually”
Edit: if you’re wondering why the OC OP blames liberals, it’s because this is literally nazi propaganda
