Russia at the center of a whole hell of a lot of the tension and strife that the world has gone through over the last few years.
He is trying to destabilize the West in hundreds of different way and average folks just don't understand or actually would even believe. Far right candidates in Italy, France, the US and elsewhere. Stirring of the religious pot in Sweden and a few other Europeans countries. He has an army of Russian trolls online trying to spread misinformation and propaganda. The most obvious international meddling that he's done is invade Ukraine, but there is just so much more.
This list is from 5 years ago and so much more could be added, but much of the meddling we won't really know for years to come.
Russia at the center of a whole hell of a lot of the tension and strife that the world has gone through over the last few years.
He is trying to destabilize the West in hundreds of different way
"I'm going to attempt to derail the conversation and distract from the main topic by pointlessly bringing up the United States, as if that somehow makes what other bad actors are doing completely okay! How dare you criticize other countries for doing shitty things! "
Any Western reporting about how much Russia "meddles" in the affairs of others is laughable because the US and the Western European powers have done so much more, for so much longer, and far more effectively. If the goal is to stop meddling, try dismantling the West first, then go after the smaller threats.
Nah, you just happen to be using terminology that is used by western propagandists in order to criticize someone who is pointing out western hypocrisy. Any time the west is criticized, it's "whataboutism". The term, by the way, was created during the cold war to also dismiss when the west was criticized back then. It really should've stayed there, and I'm honestly kind of surprised at how quickly people bought into cold war mentality again to scream about Russia (and China). At least "commie/pinko" got changed to "tankie" so there's something new I guess.
Oh its much older then the cold war "Tu quoque" style arguments go way back. I would still call it out no matter where or who it was directed at.
This is a post about a country doing something shitty, to then excuse shitty actions with a "but look at what other country does" is not calling out hypocrisy but to in fact encourage and endorse those shitty actions.
I didn't claim that style of argument was invented then, just the term. Turns out I got the invention of the term wrong, but it definitely was used during the cold war. Still, I see endless articles about Russian disinformation campaigns as if it was something unique to them. Instead of talking about disinformation in a post about disinformation, the only acceptable way to go about it is to instead make separate endless posts of American disinformation campaigns?
This is a story about a Swedish claim on russian interference in their internal politics with the assumed attempt of disrupting Sweden bid for NATO.
I hate to have to say this but making everything about the US is how you get a US centric world. I assume as you seem to think the cold war is still on (meaning russia is still the USSR) you would not have missed that the news cycle is full of US fuck ups, global missplays and dastardly acts. You seem to think that when there is an active war on in Europe and a European nation makes a statement about another European nation doing a bit of a nasty this is some how not the time for European issues but that we must now talk about the evils the US of A or the "west" in general has done before.
A lot of news pieces about Russia are in service of US-centric views on Russia. It's called manufacturing consent and it's been going on long before Russia even invaded Ukraine. Like it or not, global politics is US-centric because of the outstretched influence that the US has, from the many military bases to the vast economic machinations stretching its way into every nook and cranny of the Earth and even space.
Pretty sure the Greeks figured out that logical fallacy 25 centuries ago. Wikipedia says the particular coining of that term comes from the 1970s to justify IRA tactics.
I want a citation that it was "created during the cold war to also dismiss when the west was criticized back then."
Someone claimed that, and I quote, "Russia at the center of a whole hell of a lot of the tension and strife that the world has gone through over the last few years."
How is pointing out a much, MUCH bigger force in global geopolitics whataboutism?
That's literally not how whataboutism works. Whataboutism is when you deflect by pointing to a DIFFERENT thing that someone else is doing. When it's the same thing, we just call it "naming hypocrisy". The article is hypocritical, because The Guardian literally spreads Western propaganda including lies ALL THE TIME. So when the lying liars who lie tell you that there are other lying liars who lie, then the we can say "you're a hypocrite."
But that's not even the important part. The important part is that the lying liars who lie in the West are lying are part of a very large and very long process of war mongering that has causes hundreds of millions to die for Western imperialism. So when the Western lying liars who lie tell you about other lying liars who lie, what they are doing is building a case for killing the lying liars who lie that are $OTHER, but they never agree that the same consequences should be applied to the lying liars who lie that are $WESTERN_COUNTRY_LIST[rand()]. So it's worse than merely hypocrisy, it's violent war mongering that kills innocent people.
Even better is when we compare the scope. The lying done by Russia is so small compared to the lying done by the West and has killed far fewer people than the lying done by the West. For example, the lying liars who lie from BRITAIN got 40% of China addicted to opium. When China decided to ban opium, the lying liars who lie from BRITAIN went back to BRITAIN where not only they run a drug dealership but they also own newspapers. They wrote lies about China and convinced the British Navy to attack China. The Opium Wars were literally launched by British drug dealers who owned newspapers and published lies. And who were these drug dealers? Ever heard of Forbes? Yes, Forbes magazine is part of the Forbes business empire that was built from fortunes made on building US railroads funded by the money accumulated by selling opium to China..
So fuck The Guardian and the lying liars they are. No one gives a shit about the lies of the Russians because the British and the rest of the West have been lying for 600 unbroken years and used those lies to kill 100s of millions of people around the globe and dominate 80% of the world's population for a long time. Yes, the Russians lie, because that's the fucking game that the West has put everyone in. It's the only way to beat the West and no one seriously thinks Russia's lies are worth getting upset about except the fucking war hawks. So when you repeat the propaganda, you're participating in the war machine.
You have no fucking idea what that terms means. Whataboutism is when you say "Johnny stole a cookie" and I use whataboutism to say "But you killed the dog 3 years ago." Whataboutism is not when you say "Johnny stole a cookie" and I say "But you invaded and occupied the bakery, killed the original owners, steal the ingredients to make your cookies, and issue predatory loans to hungry people so they can buy your cookies at price gouging prices."
It is not whataboutism to call out hypocrisy. It takes a special form of brain rot to not see this.
It's a wonder you can figure out how to navigate the world around you. The commenter was not making an argument, they were adding a list of facts about Russian meddling, none of which is up for debate. The argument is implied by the article to which the commenter was adding additional premises as supporting evidence. Again, no problem with those premises, they are supported by fact. The problem is with the argument made by the article, which is that we should care about Russian meddling and we should act, or support actions, to stop it.
This is argument is inherently relative and involves numerous relative claims. These claims can be that Russian meddling is distinct from other meddling, that it is particularly severe, that it leads to particular bad outcomes, that it is distinctly morally inferior, or meddling itself morally reprehensible and must be stopped.
But generally Western propaganda goes like this: that nation over there did a bad thing and we must stop them, we never do that bad thing, but if we do it's for good outcomes, but if the outcomes are bad it was an accident, but if it wasn't an accident than they deserved it. Basically the abusers psychological playbook. And West and their media arms play that game masterfully. In this case, Russian meddling is newsworthy and part of a larger trend of why we must defeat Russia, crush its economy, sanction its people, arm its enemies, and encircle it with military bases and nuclear capabilities.
Never mind the fact that Putin is in office because of US meddling. Never mind that US meddling has been more egregious, more comprehensive, has effected more countries, more of the world's population, more land, more wealth, more children, has caused more death, more environmental devastation, and has gone on for far longer than Russian meddling. The US media never says the international community should sanction US billionaires because of US meddling that led to Putin, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, death squads, drug epidemics, etc.
Nope. None of that. Because the US doesn't meddle in the affairs of sovereign nations, but if it does it's for their own good, and if harms them then it was accident, and if it wasn't an accident then they deserved it.
And you think I'm engaged in whataboutism? I think you're a myopic Western drone who's been indoctrinated since birth in a system that embeds orientalism, white supremacy, and global dominance into every single aspect of life from the time you were in grade school through all of your employable years, that your family raised you to succeed within that indoctrination because failing to do so would be worse for your economic and social outlook, and now, thanks to that indoctrination, you can't even reason effectively about a basic thing like whether or not someone is deflecting by asking "what about something else" or if they are fundamentally attacking the basic premises of an argument that culminates in a call for escalating a proxy war with a global nuclear power.
Get your fucking head on straight and think for a goddamned second instead of imaging that anyone accusing the Western war propagandists of hypocrisy is engaging in whataboutism.
The problem is with the argument made by the article, which is that we should care about Russian meddling and we should act, or support actions, to stop it.
So, by your logic no one should care about anything any country does or does not do and global politics should become a mind your own business type affair?
I would also guess that you might just try and argue about how some meddling (ie russian) is fine though, somehow.
Hey, look at the guy making slippery slope arguments! It's like he doesn't actually know what fallacies are! No, fuckhead. The argument is that if meddling is a problem, fucking shutdown the West before you start worrying about the rest of the world. The West does 10x the meddling for 10x the death toll and 100x the extraction. Don't focus on bit players. Worse, don't focus on the enemies of the big bad, because then you're just helping create the conditions for the things you claim to be against in the first place.
I got some clown named @bigMouthCommie who responded to me who thinks he's clever. It's a 5year old account with no other posts except to reply to me. He asked for citations thinking I wouldn't have any. I gave him a couple, but I know he'll never even look at them.
I remember when it first started Worldnews on reddit was swarmed with all these weird accounts like that. Multiple years old with no activity until that day and then 8 comments supporting Russia.
To the credit of reddit mods every account I reported for taken down.
Yeah I don't know how Lemmy works when it comes to that. I think with the upcoming US elections this kind of shit is going to explode here now that this site is getting more traffic. I really think people here are ill prepared for an onslaught of bad actors and I don't think mods here have any way to stop it.
I can't see them being able to do anything. Someone is going to have to add on something to the site that lets you mark accounts that are paid Russian shills that everyone else can see.
Worse than "edgy teen angst" is the "totally grown up" parroting of western propaganda as if it were the objective fact of the world. You remind me of the people who think conservatism is the new counterculture.
LOL. Entire families killed by US-trained death squads in El Salvador as a signal to indigenous people to stop political organizing inspires angst? OK.
So you want to dismantle the west, that is the most functional, equal and free region of the world and only then go after the "smaller threats" (that is f* Russia with its second biggest nuclear arsenal in the world, currently involved in a genocidal war to increase its territory, besides all the side conflicts from Syria to Niger). Just wow at your total delusion, that's what speaking from a point of privilege is.
The West is the most dysfunction, unequal, and unfree region of the world. You are the one who is delusional. All you need to do is look at the US prison population, the amount of land occupied by Western powers, which country is the only country to drop nukes on civilians, the Atlantic slave trade, the occupation of India, the Berlin Conference, the Opium Wars, the Open Door Policy, the indigenous genocide, etc.
Why are there white people in the Western hemisphere? Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression. Why are there white people on Australia and New Zealand. Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression. Why are Hong Kong and Taiwan going through so much turmoil? Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression.
Where did fascism emerge? Western Europe. Under what conditions? Western liberal democracy. Who is voting against the condemnation of Nazis? The US.
What is the 5 Eyes alliance?
The Victims of Communism propaganda project struggles to reach 100M killed by Communism. It includes Nazis killed by the Soviets during WW2 and it includes births that the researchers claim should have happened but didn't. The authors of the Black Book have denounced their own research. Meanwhile, the Western imperialist order has killed hundreds of millions. 70 - 80 million people indigenous the Americas alone. Millions died in a famine in India deliberately and knowingly created by the British occupiers.
The US has dropped so many bombs that the most bombed countries in the world are all bombed by the US. The US engineered multi-generational genocides through the use of nuclear and chemical weapons, mostly in the Pacific where it has no business being. The US illegally occupies Hawaii by it's own laws! It sterilized 1/3 of Puerto Rico as part of its eugenics project that didn't stop until the 1970s. It has never stopped forcibly kidnapping children and separating them from their families. They have been doing it since they landed on Plymouth Rock and they keep doing it to this day.
And then we have the sanctions regimes that have killed millions through collective punishment, starvation, denial of access to life saving medicines. For those it didn't kill it stunted their growth, made them incredibly ill, traumatized entire nations of people. And these sanctions are not small. They have hit hundreds of millions of people and they last decades.
The West is sociopathic. It is "free, equal, and functional" for barely 30% of its white cis het male population. And unlike other countries, its sociopathy extends far beyond its own borders. Sure, the West oppresses non-white, non-cis, queer, non-men within its own borders to the tune of millions including vigilantism, rape, torture, mass murder, genocide, lynchings, police brutality, domestic spying, theft of property, displacement, deaths of poverty and neglect, active state oppression, etc. But the West has been exporting that shit for 600 years to literally 80% of the world's population.
The West is the greatest scourge to humanity that has ever existed. It is the source of the supermajority of oppression that humanity has experienced. No one has done more harm to humanity and to the planet than the West.
And the fact that you think it's the most functional, equal, and free region of the world speaks to your privilege, not mine. The wealth of the West was stolen from the rest of the world. Trillions of dollars extracted from Africa alone. When the Haitian slave revolt won independence from France, what did the West do? They levied a multi-billion dollar debt on them, and they made the calculation based on the market value of each black body on the island. France literally said "you owe us the money we bought you with" and the Western banking system agreed. To this day that debt still stands, it is in the hands of Citi, and they continue to make profit from the interest on it.
Nothing will help humanity more than the dismantling of the Western imperialist world order.