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.
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.
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.)
“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.”
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.
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 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.
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 has had their hand in the pot since the 80s. Are they the sole cause? No, but they’re absolutely involved.
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.
https://archive.is/PoUMo
from Bannon:
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.
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 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.