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.
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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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?
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.
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.
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.
Russia has had their hand in the pot since the 80s. Are they the sole cause? No, but they're absolutely involved.
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.
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
🔥
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.