Yes, but you can clearly see a woman in her profile pic, combined with a girl's name, on a trans instance, and if any of that gives you pause enough to check her profile, you'll find it says, "sapphic. hater of capital letters. bunny and cat mum." Just because some random guy somewhere goes by KD does not make it ok to misgender someone who is very obviously a woman.
Whoever downvoted this, come out and say it my face, coward. Fuck transphobes.
That's not what the comic is saying at all. What do you think the message of the comic is? That feudalism is bad?
Corporate "allyship" at its finest.
Democrats were helping because its in US interests to help, the moral implications of defending a country from invaders is secondary.
When you talk about US interests, do you mean the state's interests, or the people's interests?
I'm not a republican (are there any on here?), but as a communist, I saw this an the inevitable conclusion from the start. You can get people invested in whatever if the news is on about it, but fundamentally, you're asking Americans to care about a conflict halfway around the globe that most people can't even find on a map, for an indefinite period of time, after we just got out of another conflict with no exit strategy that lasted 20 years and left everyone worse off, at a time when domestic material conditions are in decline.
Afghanistan, everyone said we couldn't leave because it meant Al Qaida would win and "if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here," but after 20 years of bloodshed we finally just went home and let the "bad guys" win and simply stopped thinking about it. Then the same people said the same thing about Ukraine. Maybe it could've dragged on as long as Afghanistan (and maybe it still will) but at the end of the day it's not an existential threat and we have too many problems at home for people to really care, hard to say there should be a blank check to Ukraine when people are struggling over here. Obviously, on lemmy people still care because of high political engagement and the demographics represented here.
As for the specific interaction, anyone who views our politicians as representative of the people should already have a rock-bottom opinion of us, if it took til Trump (not only that, but his second term) for someone to realize American politicians are vile, then their opinion seems pretty uninformed and I can't say I care much what they think.
The thing is that a lot of people have lost faith in the idea of "benevolent interventionism" without concern for pragmatism. One of Trump's secrets to success has been that he's been able to triangulate and appeal to people regardless of why they disagree with the idea, and liberals help him out with that by painting everyone who disagrees with it with the same brush. Honestly, after Afghanistan, I imagine pressing Zelensky on a time frame and an exit strategy will go over neutral at worst to the median voter, much as people on here might hate to hear it.
Historically speaking, in most cases where the state has had loose control the "justice" enforced by populations hasn't been pretty. The idea of decentralized community enforcement is only able to be romanticized because it is distant, and it's distant because it fucking sucks. Lynchings, witch burnings, and especially feuds and unending cycles of retributive violence - although the places they have happened in were not stateless, they primarily happened in areas where state control was loose.
Feuds are the natural consequence of a lack of centralized authority. If a Hatfield goes out and kills someone, then the McCoy's deliver "decentralized community justice" by killing the murderer. Except the Hatfield's say their guy was innocent and the accusation was a pretext, the McCoy's are the real killers, so they go out and deliver "decentralized community justice" by killing a McCoy. And so on and so on for generations until everybody's forgotten what even started it.
The only thing that actually puts a stop to that is the big bad state coming in and saying, "Anytime anyone murders anyone, it is an offense against me. No more "settling the score," the score is settled now because I say it is, and if either of you keep this up you will be charged."
But it's not just the historical examples, which I'm sure "won't count" for whatever reason - the effect is also observable in game theory.
In the case of the "Iterated Prisoner's Delimma," the most effective strategy is "tit for tat," where defection is punished with defection and cooperation is rewarded with cooperation, which tends to result in cooperation with others following the same strategy. But what happens when we expand beyond two players?
For example, a game with a hundred players where everyone can put money in a pot, and the pot is doubled and then redistributed equally to everyone. In this case, it's impossible to do "tit for tat" because punishing defection with defection means defecting against everyone else, who would them try to punish you for defecting, and so on. In this case, the most effective strategy is to contribute nothing, and it's only a matter of time before everyone stops contributing.
This is a basic collective action problem, applicable to many irl situations, and the way to solve it is, again, to have a big bad centralized authority come in and tell everyone they have to contribute to the pot whether they like it or not. "The pot" could mean social services, infrastructure, common defense, etc.
But we also have oligarchs and dark money, yeah? Even if they are bots, how could someone possibly know that they're specifically Russian bots? Have you considered the possibility that these bots could be funded by American billionaires, either true believers (because, again, there is a very old and deeply rooted mistrust of science especially in rural conservative areas) or for some ulterior motive, same as the Russians would be?
This is where, to me, to be frank, it makes more sense to treat the claim as more of a psychological coping mechanism. It has to be specifically Russian bots because the point is to externalize the problem as far as possible. American billionaires funding health misinfo would create the same psychological discomfort as if it didn't come from bots at all.
To be clear, I don't dispute that bots exist, or that bots have spread health misinfo. But I think the extent is exaggerrated, and I think it serves as an all too easy excuse to dismiss stuff that's incongruent with one's worldview. And I'm not inclined to think that people need some sort of external force to believe and spread health misinfo or distrust of science. Like, there's a full-on creationist museum in Kentucky, this isn't just some new online thing.
This was later well documented.
OK, so if it's well documented, then where is the documentation?
I don't really want to listen to a 25 minute podcast and I read your BBC source and it only talked about vaccines, there wasn't a single word about things like shampoo.
I'd be curious to know exactly how deep this goes, since science skepticism and anti-intellectualism goes way back. Was Russia behind the controversy over evolution, going back to the Scopes trial? Were they behind the Satanic Panic? Maybe Russia funded Jack Chick to talk about how Dungeons and Dragons is teaching children to practice real magic. I know, let's go even further back, the Catholic Church only took issue with Galileo because Russia paid them to.
Or maybe, there's a long history of anti-science sentiment, particularly in the US, and Americans have autonomy and can use to believe stupid things and do so all the time and have always done so.
I stg, it's bad enough blaming Trump on Russia but this is seriously taking it to the next level. How did Russia even manage to acquire the power to influence American culture to such a degree? And if they can do that while having significantly less money and being significantly more distant, then surely our own intelligence agencies can do the same, right? Please help me make sense of this.
Do you have any sort of evidence that connects the Russian government to things like not using shampoo?
The point is that it doesn't discredit the original criticism. The guy in the comic is trying to shift the focus from the systemic level to individual consumer habits, and to discredit anyone who doesn't adhere to perfection. This is a common tactic the right uses, and no matter what level of ethical consumption you do they'll either still say it anyway or switch to characterizing you as an extremist or some other tact, for instance, the various tactics used to attack vegans and veganism. There is good faith criticism to be made regarding ethical consumption, but there's also bad faith criticism where it's used to discredit legitimate criticism, which is what the comic is calling out.