The guy illegally attempted to overturn an election. Spread a deadly lie about our institutions that incited an insurrection. Stole classified documents and refused to return them when asked. Stated he trusted Russian intelligence over U.S. intelligence on live television.
The man is quite literally a traitor to the United States of America.
And, as a nation, we decided that not only was it not a big enough deal to do anything about, but that we should totally let him be president again.
No one should be surprised about this, or any of the insane shit we’ll be hearing over the next 4 years.
Welcome to the new normal. It’s going to be bad. And it’s going to get worse. And it’ll probably continue after Trump is gone because that’s what happens when this kind of stuff gets normalized.
America is failing, and this is probably just the beginning.
Yup, failing, or already failed and we’re just waiting for the ashes to settle. I don’t think democracy can work when the public is intentionally being misinformed, and no country can be stable when it’s governed by a shitstorm of lies.
Y’all weren’t that misinformed. He got up on stage and rambled. He got up on stage and said nothing while he barely gyrated his hips for 40 minutes. He grabbed em by the pussy.
The whole election campaign was so laughably bad that it became a flex of how he is going to get away with everything. If you voted him in knowing all this than who gives a fuck what he does.
The fires have been lit, but we haven’t completely burned down quite yet… It’s really only a matter of time, though.
11 days until the real fun starts!
Just wait till you see the price of eggs…
Putin’s poodle is a pushover again.
It’s also a distraction tactic, so the Trump admin can ban trans people from sports, to ease people for the eventual banning of trans people.
I kind of suspect treating people poorly is the distraction. He’s trying to make sure people don’t notice that putin’s hand is up his ass.
Yeah he doesn’t care about trans people, he cares about sweet sweet corruption.
With greenland you get all of the mineral rights that are melting out of it, you get the fishing rights around it and access to the northwest passage route as the north pole melts.
Send this to my dad so he can write, “Russiagate” and then go listen to reruns of rush.
I have no idea how we get through to these people.
The US is a client state of the russian mafia. And Americans at large are too stupid to care
We got a Russian sock puppet as president again. Yay.
Again? Who was the ot- Oh you mean when he was president the first time.
Booooooo!!!
Donald Trump is Putin’s bitch
I want to make t-shirts, billboards, bumper stickers with that slogan… Put them everywhere - putin holding trump’s leash who is lifting a leg and pissing on the US.
I wonder if that would get under his thin, spray painted skin like the ‘President Musk’ stuff did.
Panama is also currently investigating the Trump Org for tax evasion
i hadn’t heard that one. but woohoo get 'em boys. do a noriega–come here and drag his fat diaper-covered ass back there for judgement.
If only we could have seen this coming like 10 fucking years ago.
I need an “I’m with stupid” shirt pointing all around me.
How about
I 🇺🇸 STUPID
I should make some bumper stickers for this.
I feel like such a shirt would look kinda off. Like, you can’t have one arrow pointing up obviously. And going in all directions to the side is gonna get you questions like “are you missing a few friends?”
Of course. Wouldn’t work in actual application.
Many people did. Plenty of people raised the alarm about escalating US aggression in Europe, following the 2014 Maiden Coup and installation of the far-right puppet government, but everyone insisted on denial.
That’s the joke
But it seems like some people think it started with Trump, when a lot of this started during the Obama admin.
We can’t stop this madness, if we only attack it from one angle.
Woosh
The crazy part is, this isn’t “all of the sudden”. It’s just another crazy talking point people forgot about from his last term.
And Biden was also annexing regions in the arctic.
Boring, kooky, and now repetitive. I’ve scratched my head all day trying to make sense of your many, many posts on this page, and all I’ve got is a fresh bald spot.
Time for a time out.
And I wipe from back to front. What’s your point?
Very sad Putin derangement syndrome in post.
Greenland is needed for US to attack Europe. He doesn’t want it to put Russian bomber/nuke bases there, he wants it out of Europe control.
Panama is obedient US slave for its sanctions on Russia. Panama is not threatening to remove sanctions before US and other colonies remove them. Russia does not do much transit through there. It already has access to both oceans. Pure propaganda to say US control of Panama canal is for Russian interests. It is to block Chinese use.
Russia is not interested in developing far away Canadian offshore resources. Like Greenland, there is no infrastructure there to bring them to customers/users. Russia has many decades of resources/development projects on its own sparsely populated, largest by far coastline, Arctic waters. Explosive level of delusion to think Trump wants to give Russia access to “New USA” coast for projects.
War on Russia is extremely stupid and unwinnable. You don’t need to be paid by Putin to not understand the stupidity and evil. Much better to take over Canada, Europe and Americas for successful evil. The derangement level in this post deflects from the actual obvious evil of US empire, as if you morons should go fight Russia instead.
I’ve talked before about how I have a working theory about how when the top comments section looks “wrong,” some of the propaganda accounts will make new top-level comments and top-level replies, in a sudden flurry of activity to a previously pretty dormant comments section, until it looks “right” again and the conversation they’re trying to downplay, in this case surph_ninja getting ridiculed for being transparent propaganda, is shifted to way down the page.
Timestamps of the top-level comments on this post:
- Original post, Jan 8 6:38 PM
- Flurry of new-post replies, ending with:
- Jan 8, 7:43 PM
- Jan 8, 8:55 PM
- Jan 8, 9:02 PM (last comment before things die down)
- Jan 9, 9:51 AM
- Jan 9, 10:14 AM (surph_ninja’s comment with a massive replies section which over the last couple of hours started going poorly for him): https://lemmy.world/comment/14379661
- Jan 9, 12:52 PM
- Jan 9, 12:43 PM
- Jan 9, 1:00 PM
- Jan 9, 1:13 PM
- Jan 9, 1:18 PM
- Jan 9, 1:24 PM (this comment I’m replying to)
I feel bad that this comments section has now completely been taken over by conversations about propaganda. It’s meaner and less fun to talk about than the original political subject matter. On the other hand, for as long as people are posting propaganda, I guess it’s important for us to be talking about how people are posting propaganda. I will give kudos to the parent comment for being a lot higher caliber of propaganda comment than surph_ninja’s attempt.
This just reached my frontpage. There are alternated explanations to your madness. Propagandist evil deflections bordering on absurd just because “Putin is evil because Stalin was evil” but Yeltsin was a glorious “freedom and democracy” CIA sockpuppet who privatized the country with western financing, and then everything Trump does is because Putin has a pee tape, is a meme narrative that you are significantly overstretching here. All of these threats are pro US empire threats. That reaction against the threats gives colonies a rationality wake up call to no longer treat US as a friend is the open question that most colonial leaders are already too invested in corruption/capture to contemplate.
Putin is evil because Stalin was evil
Yeltsin was a glorious “freedom and democracy”
everything Trump does is because Putin has a pee tape
Boy howdy, that sure is exactly what I said. I’m amazed at your ability to cut through the apparent meaning of my messages and discern that at the core, I’m talking about Putin mostly in terms of Stalin, and also how I sure do love Boris Yeltsin. You can reach back to literally the only thing I ever remember saying recently about the Yeltsin era, that post I did of an article from a State Department person who was active in the 90s, and reference back to what stupendously great things for freedom and democracy I think the US and the Russian government were doing during that time.
Your original post distracts from Trump punishing allies for extreme sycophancy to Biden, by demanding extra tribute from the colonies. If you want to offer a different explanation for your Putin derangement syndrome than historical US hatred for Russia, you can go ahead. Russia is not going to welcome all NATO expansion, and no, NATO is not a purely defensive alliance.
You think you’re playing chess, while you keep playing checkers.
You can only DARVO and spell out your own strategy over and over so many times before people realize you’re projecting.
Maybe not every person critical of US foreign policy is a bot.
You think you’re playing chess, while you keep playing checkers.
You win today’s Thomas Friedman award for nonsensical metaphors.
It’s not competitive on the same level as “When you’re in a hole, stop digging. When you’re in three holes, bring a lot of shovels.” But then, what is?’
Edit: I got the quote wrong.
Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying-and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.
Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute.
Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May: “The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.” First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense?
It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.
Courtesy of the formerly-glorious Matt Taibbi.
+1 for slamming Thomas Friedman.
It is mind-boggling that he was taken seriously for decades as an economic and foreign policy thinker. He’s a pre-LLM argument for the idea that being able to put any number of sentences together so they scan is not an indication that there’s any intelligence behind the text. He’s a walking wrong answer. He was unerringly backwards about so many things, on such a basic level that even a very casual critical reading could identify the flaws, and no one noticed at what was supposed to be the highest levels of American journalism, save for a handful of heretics who had to shout from the margins and were basically ignored for basically his entire career.
Enjoy. I started rereading it just now, and it’s just as great as it was back when everyone was reading Judy Miller and Paul Krugman.
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.
Trump doesn’t have anywhere near the power he thinks he has. This is all just bluster like 90% of everything else that comes out of his mouth.
bro literally did something that would get him on the chair in any country that knows what freedom and liberty means, and americans put him back in the office right after supreme court threw out all his charges saying “president can do whatever”. One can now only hope he is more talk than walk.
I hope you’re right.
I am expecting the worst. We are going to be turned into shithole Russia very fast.
This reads like a conspiracy theory. But this whole site is basically nothing but.
Greenland is a good move, strategically, for the US.
Just like Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were good moves, strategically, for Germany. It doesn’t make it OK.
The way you go to a ridiculous extreme is why people don’t take you seriously.
What’s ridiculous about interpreting the man telling us daily how he’s going to take over some or all of our country as meaning he plans to take over some or all of our country? He has said this repeatedly about Canada, Greenland, Panama and Mexico. Is it ridiculous and extreme to suppose he might mean it?
Yes. Yes it is.
Honestly I think the “Trump as an agent of Russia” take is an extremely uninformed take on geopolitics. Trump is an agent of the U.S. empire. That’s why he supports all the U.S. fascist militarism, xenophobia, giveaways to arms manufacturers, oil/gas/etc. companies, giveaways to Wall Street, all of that. Russia is a whole separate power structure whose interests are largely opposed to those of the U.S. empire. So where does that leave you? It seems this is meant more for Democrat ingestion and boogeymanism/scapegoating to detract attention away from the actual workings of the system here.
Ooh, this is interesting.
I’ve talked before about how I have a working theory about how when the top comments section looks “wrong,” some of the propaganda accounts will make new top-level comments and top-level replies, in a sudden flurry of activity to a previously pretty dormant comments section, until it looks “right” again and the conversation they’re trying to downplay, in this case suprh_ninja getting ridiculed for being transparent propaganda, is shifted to way down the page.
That might sound like some tinfoil hat stuff except for how low-effort and bizarre this comment is. Trump was proven after extensive investigation to be an agent of Russia. He’s pretty open about it. He is actively hostile to the US empire, both the good and bad parts, although he is also aligned with a lot of domestic fascist elements. Are you saying Trump is happy about spending $60 billion dollars on aid for Ukraine, because it’s part of “all the giveaways to arms manufacturers”?
I believe Russia has influence operations for purposes of making US divisive, fanning both neo-nazi/hatred, and victim attention/reaction against right wing hate. You can consider Russian influence assistance to the GOP agenda of pillaging America, but there is no debt/subservience to Russia by US politicians, and GOP messaging would not differ in the slightest. It just gains volume. Russia DGAFs about Canada, Greenland, Panama changes.
There should be a reaction from “allies”/world to pivot to much lesser evil Russia/China from new US warmongering freedom, but even Biden’s war on Russia was simply a perpetual weapons and oil profits scheme meant to subjugate Europe. That Trump offers bigger military budget and harsher terms for EU existence is just a continuation of simps who promise to be simps under all circumstances being punished more harshly for their alliance.
He’s “actively hostile” to the U.S. empire? Show me where he decreased its budget:
It’s ridiculous to just start throwing around “propaganda” accusations at any random user you disagree with. Evidence first, smears later.
What “extensive investigation”? What is the specific evidence that was shown to the public, and what does it establish?
Trump is a war criminal and a fascist, focus on what you can actually prove that he’s done wrong, so you’re not chasing red herrings that validate him to his supporters when you can’t prove them.
And now there are three more top-level comments.
Timestamps of all the top-level comments on this post:
- Original post, Jan 8 6:38 PM
- Flurry of new-post replies, ending with:
- Jan 8, 7:43 PM
- Jan 8, 8:55 PM
- Jan 8, 9:02 PM (last comment before things die down)
- Jan 9, 9:51 AM
- Jan 9, 10:14 AM (this is surph_ninja’s comment with a massive replies section which over the last couple of hours started going poorly for him)
- Jan 9, 12:52 PM
- Jan 9, 12:43 PM
- Jan 9, 1:00 PM
- Jan 9, 1:13 PM
- Jan 9, 1:18 PM
Why just now did it become active again, and all with top-level replies, not people responding to anything in the conversation below?
This is actually the first time I’ve seen some real confirmation for my theory about specific activity to bury conversations that people don’t want to have at the top of the comments. Before this, it was just a feeling, but this seems pretty hard to explain any other way.
real confirmation
Sure about that one kiddo?
^ Beware of confirmation bias.
Dude figured out how the ‘Hot’ sorting algorithm works, and thinks he’s uncovered a conspiracy. LoL.
That’s actually, in all seriousness, a really good point. I think it’s “Active” that works that way, not “Hot,” but I get your point. It still doesn’t explain why they’re all top-level comments, or why there was a sudden rush of new ones all with similar totally bizarre lazy takes, like “Trump loves expanding the US empire and doing the bidding of the US foreign-policy establishment.”
It’s so cool watching conspiratorial thinking consume every level of society.
The russians are highly invested in swaying the tens of people on lemmy, theyre watching this post like a hawk.
To be fair, there’s definitely astroturf and propaganda accounts/bots on here. They don’t set those propaganda budgets up for nothing.
But accusing every single criticism of US foreign policy of being a foreign bot just makes me think that account is a domestic bot. Or a deeply propagandized individual.
An empire builder would work with existing alliances, surely, rather than weakening them all systematically, threatening the allies, and undermining their governments until only the USA’s enemies remain strong, while simultaneously implementing policies that damage the USA’s own economy.
Empires are generally more about having puppet states - subsidiaries - then “allies” that they’re on equal footing with. It’s tempting to think of things in terms of countries being allies, since that’s how we’re used to thinking of the organization of the world, but economically - i.e., in terms of the bulk of how power is exercised - those boundaries are more like minor obstacles than defining features. I say “U.S. empire”, the U.S. is the seat, but states like the UK, Germany, and so on ad infinitum, are just under the same command structure. One “country”, the government and related machinery, undermining another, that looks more like a power struggle inside a corporation.
I’d also point out that Russia doesn’t have this kind of influence compared to the West. At all. The U.S. has over ten times the GDP of Russia. You factor in the other OECD countries, we’re talking 20-30 times as much. That’s one economic bloc. You throw in the other BRIC countries on the other side, it starts looking a little more balanced, but still not even close.
Y’all act like this is solely a Trump thing, but the US was expanding and annexing territory in the arctic during the Biden admin, while getting all of their “allies” to expend all of their military assets & ammunition reserves on a proxy war and a genocide.
It would be unwise to assume this is another crackpot Trump scheme, and not something the MIC & intelligence agencies have been preparing for years.
Reported for misinformation. Usually I think the propagandists can just be dealt with by disagreeing in the comments and letting people figure out who is and isn’t full of shit, but this has crossed into the territory of being pure annoying noise.
With @surph_ninja’s follow-up links, it’s not quite ‘misinformation’. More like, bonkers extrapolation, based on slivers of cherry-picked truth. The nuttiness exposes itself.
Claiming that CIRES thing amounts to “the US was expanding and annexing territory in the arctic during the Biden admin”? Thinking a propaganda quote from 2023 shows “all [war allies’] military assets & ammunition reserves” are being depleted?
Nah, I’ll let it stand. When gullible people show how they swallow whatever they swallow and regurgitate, it’s educational (just not in the way @surph_ninja thinks).
Sounds good to me. The comment itself isn’t all that bad. I think, as you said, it’s extrapolating from something objectively true to leap to an endpoint that’s totally nuts.
A lot of my reaction was from the combination of this particular conclusion being totally out there, and it being in service of a particular type of pro-Russian-viewpoint talking point, and the pattern of that type of thing being a very clear and consistent pattern from this user in the past. But I do agree with you. Usually, it’s better to just let people talk. It’s educational.
It’s not good. We let these people just throw shit at the wall constantly and no one has the time or ability to sort through it all. With plain text looking exactly the same no matter the argument the uninterested get snookered into thinking there might actually be a valid counter argument. You were right the first time. This shit is all noise drowning out the message and making people tune out.
Yeah. I’m not aware of a good solution. I don’t want to let every comments section have random “and THAT’s why NATO is terrible and China/Russia are by far the lesser evil in geopolitics as everyone knows” comments interjected into it unchallenged. I don’t want every comments section to get taken over by extensive arguments about who is and isn’t a Russian propagandist. And I don’t want every comments section to be picked through by some kind of arbiter of who are the “allowed” comments, so that anyone who’s provisionally identified as propaganda gets removed never to be seen again. Even if there were someone who had time to do that, which there isn’t, that’s not going to wind up being implemented perfectly if that were the system.
My MO is to call out the very severe propaganda when I see it, talk about how I see it as a problem and why, without getting drawn into the endless bickering into which the propaganda accounts inevitably like to draw anyone who responds to them. It doesn’t seem like an ideal solution, but it’s the best reaction I can see.
I do think it’s fair to ban the ones that are just laughably obvious, I guess, for the sake of all of our sanity, since they’re clearly bringing nothing anyone wants to the table. At the same time, all that is going to do is set a higher bar, which I’m sure they will be able to clear. And also, it sets a precedent for moderators aggressively policing comments sections and kicking out the “wrong” people, which the propaganda accounts are also able to manipulate to their advantage when that becomes the norm. That’s a whole other conversation. That’s why I mostly don’t go on lemmy.world, this community being one of a few rare and sensible exceptions.
I’ve started just blocking them on the off chance they are powered by AI. I’ll give one to two comments to see if they will attempt good faith but if there is no sign they are capable I don’t want to be a part of their disinformation strategy ever again.
I think the answer is to let people self identify. Something like a profile and then allowing users(and instances) to sort or filter incomplete profiles and keywords/phrases. Sure you can get an AI to create unique generic profiles but the second you look at them you’ll be able to decipher the quality of their content and distinguish immediately.
Of course this could lead to more insular communities but I’m actually for that. I am for like minded people finding each other and organizing. In this way these people can juice each other up to maybe take action without some infiltrator coming in and difusing the momentum.
Yeah. I think Mastodon’s model where there are no “communities,” just networks of trust with users choosing to follow or interact with each other and where there is no way to automatically get your stuff shown to everyone until trusted people have affirmatively given you approval for what you have to say, is just a better model. The reddit-like model is just too open to anonymous accounts in groups manipulating the conversation.
I am not “pro-Russia.” I am simply not anti-Russia enough to promote the lies & narratives to justify US aggression, and you accuse everything critical of US foreign policy of being pro-Russia.
I’m a particular thorn in your side because I come with receipts, and it makes your attempts to get it censored fall flat. Though I’m sure you get away with it anyway in the Politics community mods.
See, this is what I meant about the chess game. You can say I accuse everything critical of US foreign policy et cetera. I can send you a big wall of text of about 10 different times in the last 24 hours that I was critical about US foreign and domestic policy. And it will make absolutely no impact on what you say. You’ve just got your thing you want to say, and you’re going to keep broadcasting it at everyone, and what they say makes no difference.
Do you want me to? I did that a while back when someone made the same accusation. If you want, I’ll dig up the comment and send it to you, to illustrate that this is one more thing you’re saying that has no connection to reality.
Like I say, I think engaging in this conversation is a mistake for you. It’s highlighting something that you really should be wanting to downplay. I’m happy to talk about it if you’ve decided you want to, though.
Yes, Phil. We know. You already spelled out your strategy for making sock puppet accounts believable, in this very same comment section. A real grand master in that chess game!
Do you believe your tepid criticism cancels out your imperialism defense here? Or your reflexive accusation of ‘Russian bot’ every time someone criticizes US foreign policy, or raises the alarm about the US currently escalating to world war by attacking on multiple fronts across the globe as we speak?
You know what doesn’t help your credibility? Your continual jump between ‘what are you talking about? I’m not aware of any such thing’ to ‘I’m actually thoroughly informed, and here’s why what they did is justified’ the moment someone provides a source. You can’t play dumb and pretend you have a better understanding than anyone of the facts. Pick a lane.
For anyone who’s still reading this trainwreck of a conversation. Check this out:
https://lemmy.world/comment/14157938
There’s some further wider context here: https://lemmy.world/comment/14154055
I’m trying not to prolong this exchange, because it’s no longer adding anything. I feel like at this point pretty much everything that needs to be said has been. You can draw your conclusions. The only thing I’ll add is that, at the point of the above links, I don’t think I had pegged surph_ninja as conclusively a propaganda account, let alone a ‘Russian bot’ which I’ve never said. I just thought he was talking nonsense. I read his sources and then was talking with him about his argument at face value. After a while of doing that, and encountering a particular breed of total non-logic and a particular style of argumentation in service of a particular viewpoint, I formed a pretty strong conclusion that he is doing pro-Russian propaganda. But I think some of the conversation from above is from back before that happened.
Edit: Changed from double quotes to single, around ‘Russian bot’. Happy now?
How is that a “bonkers extrapolation”? The US expanded the regions they claim in the arctic under Biden. That’s a fact.
Do you apply the same apologist take to China expanding its claims farther out from the coasts?
It’s self-evident bonkers extrapolation, shown by simply comparing your claims with the links you’ve offered as support.
My trick for surviving in the wilds of the internet is an early end to conversations with folks who seem immune to words, logic, common sense, etc. It would be nice if that wasn’t you.
It’s not evident to me.
I’m open to be swayed. Why is this expansion of US claims acceptable and not an annexation?
And why is this expansion considered forgettable, but we label every expansion done by China in the exact same way considered an aggression?
Do you bother trying to look into anything, or do you just immediately label anything you don’t like as misinformation?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66984944.amp
Denmark donated all of their F-16s to Ukraine, and aren’t expecting the replacement F-35s for years, leaving them in a worse defensive position for Greenland: https://www.reuters.com/world/f-16-jets-being-sent-ukraine-denmark-netherlands-blinken-says-2024-07-10/
This is exactly how the US toppled the USSR, by getting them to throw everything they had at expensive proxy wars. You think these psychos happily tolerate competition from the EU? We have plenty of leaked State Dept cables and email proving they’ve been spying on our “allies” and interfering in their elections for decades.
I label anyone who uses “blue MAGA,” says Biden and Trump have equal levels of corruption, uses the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and says that Ukraine is Nazis, misinformation, yes.
I’m not even slightly interesting in a conversation about how “annexing territory in the arctic” equals invading Greenland or how we’re expending all our military assets sending aid to Ukraine. I wish we were expending our military assets sending aid to Ukraine. If we were actually emptying the warehouses completely sending them whatever they need, and not putting silly bureaucratic restrictions on how they can use it while fighting for their lives, then they might be winning the war. Instead, they get just enough to continue a long, bloody, pointless stalemate which has been a catastrophe for both Russia and Ukraine.
So, even your favorite warmonger has been just making a perpetual to the last Ukrainian war for weapons sales purposes. There is theater in that both US and Russia make money from the war, but US wants to avoid getting nuked, and so Russia will win in Ukraine, while US wins over Europe. You are saying you want US to be nuked, and give up EU domination instead?
Yes, you also repeatedly deny knowledge of the very world events you continually post articles promoting and spreading propaganda for (here we go again).
You’re an astroturfing propagandist.
Stupid and gullible I’ll tolerate here, but you’re starting to smell like a troll. Change my mind.
I gotta say, since I already spent way too much time re-reading this conversation. As much as I don’t agree with @surph_ninja@lemmy.world’s extrapolation of previous facts into how they apply for this conversation today. They make a clear arguement, based in the reality we all live in and back it up with how they got there. Even looking over their post history, I find plenty of strong arguments they bring to conversations that I tend to agree with from my understanding of the world today. Once again, I don’t agree with what they are saying here, but I don’t believe this behavior is “trolling”. If we want open discourse people need to be able to have strong opinions regardless of how much everyone else agrees.
That’s my take, too, except for the part about looking at @surph_ninja’s (or anyone’s) post history. Life is too short and this thread too unimportant for such investigations.
Trolls don’t provide sources.
Some trolls don’t. Other trolls provide links that don’t remotely support the conclusions they purport as facts. You’re the latter.
Yes they absolutely do. (Source)
You’ve got the ‘outrgageous’ mastered, but can you say something amusing, interesting, or profound?
So your claim is that sending a few science vessels into the north impacted our ability to help in Ukraine?
I would not advise trying to engage in a back-and-forth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA
The whole series is an interesting and somehow still relevant look at how dishonest debate on the internet tends to work. It’s a little bit dated because it comes from the era of freelancers, not today’s polished professionals, but a lot of the techniques of argument are the same. There is simply no good result, by engaging with them in a factual discussion, any more than you can win a chess game against someone who insists on moving pieces wherever they feel like moving them and keeps insisting that you’re breaking the rules and they’re winning.
Surprise, surprise. Philip doesn’t like pushback against his NATO propaganda, and wants people to look away.
I provided sources, Phil. They can decide for themselves. And your desperate plea for them to look away just gives away the game you’re playing.
Here’s what I think you should do:
- Stop using the buzzwords. I get what you’re trying to do by introducing “blue MAGA” and “Trump Derangement Syndrome” into the conversation, but to people who are paying attention, it’s a massive red flag about what you’re trying to do. It will overshadow any more authentic-seeming point you’re trying to make.
- Don’t tangle up multiple issues. You can say that the Biden administration supported a genocide in Gaza, or try to make this particular point about how invading Greenland is somehow consistent with previous US foreign policy, or that Ukraine is Nazis, or that Wikipedia is selling out their editors to fascist governments (that was you, right?). But combining all of them together into one account makes you stand out like a beacon. I think you want to silo your talking points more. Use one or at most two per account.
- If someone calls you out for being a propagandist, take that as a learning opportunity. What did you do that gave the game away? In this case, it was some kind of previous interaction I had with you. I don’t remember what it was, although I think it was about Wikipedia, but it was something totally nutty that you were saying that you were insisting made sense. It meant I was dead certain that I could open your profile to the first page and find lots of material to point out about where you’re coming from. If someone does call you out, definitely don’t double down and amplify the volume of that conversation. Just dismiss it and go back to what you wanted to talk about.
- I think you want to involve more general discussion and chatter into your accounts. Be yourself! Remember, you can have normal conversations. Not everything has to be about NATO. If you like hunting and riding four-wheelers, talk about that. If you’re just this guy who loves ATVs and being out in nature, but also thinks the US government is crazy for sending all this money to Zelensky when we have nothing to do with what’s going on in Ukraine, that’s going to blend in a lot better. Right now you’re acting almost like a caricature of a propaganda account, where everything has to tie back to Biden, NATO, and European geopolitics, all the variety of issues are all mushed together, and almost half your comments tie back to some talking point. A lot of the propagandists take this really low-effort style of commenting about their smokescreen of non-talking-point issues, but I think that’s a mistake, because someone who’s paying attention can see through it and it becomes a way to detect you.
I think you’re doing really well though! In particular, I think you did a pretty good job with the deflection to taking some factual claim you made in service of that larger Frankenstein’s monster of bad reasoning, and insisting that the original claim is factual, you backed it up and showed sources, everyone’s just trying to cover it up because they hate the truth. That part was good. It redirected (or tried to, if I had taken the bait) away from the larger issue and into weird minutiae where you can defend that one detail point. So you have the argumentation down pretty well. You just need to introduce more cover to make it a more realistic account, and do a better job of what issues to focus on how much, and I think you can do really well.
Philip, this is a frickin’ masterpiece. You ought to charge admission.
The joy of reading it justifies not (yet) expelling @surph_ninja.
Folks, this is called DARVO.
Shut up loser
In my tedious mod-duties, I generally frown on insults. They add nothing to the conversation, lower the discourse, etc. And “loser” is so Trumpian.
One of the many reports received about this thread described @surph_ninja as an “odious cockwaffle.” Now, that’s an insult. If we must stoop so low, let’s at least be creative about it.
Added more links. Ammunition stockpiles and military assets have been depleted across Europe.
That doesn’t at all address what I said. How do us science boats in the North impact our help in Ukraine. That was your claim.
You need to re-read it. That was never the claim. The US annexed more area off the continental shelf. At the same time, the US has Europe burning through ammunition and military reserves.
One did not cause the other, but they are both part of increasing US expansionism.
You think that helping Ukraine defend against invasion is expansionism?
I think I’m in a chess pigeon situation…
Victoria Nuland, in her glorious victory plots over 2014 coup in Ukraine, and selecting puppet regime office holders, also said “Fuck the EU”. Economy of Russia and US have done much better since war, and Greenland is definitely only military value to threaten EU with planes and missiles, not a place to invest in expensive/infrastructureless resource projects.
Exactly. We have all of these leaked cables and emails from a decade ago spelling out that they planned all of this, and people still refuse to even consider maybe the US aren’t the good guys here.
I mean, we straight up destroyed a critical pipeline and caused one of the worst environmental disasters in history right off their coast, and coaxed them into participating in full-on genocide, but the EU remains on the US’ leash. Absolute madness.
bOtH sIdEs
Yes, that is what my sources show. Disprove it with your own.
Or I could not bother. I’m happy with that outcome because you’re so intent on “proving” yourself right. Loser.
I could do that, but I don’t wanna.
Sure you could.
For all the people reporting this comment (half a dozen so far, maybe more), my mod-answer is here. Certainly, @surph_ninja seems to be a fool and an insufferable twat, but life is full of fools and insufferable twats.
How many of those people are Philip’s alts? He wrote a straight up guide on running bot accounts in these comments, and this isn’t even the first time he’s done this.
This is ridiculous. Glad I could find some unscrubbed articles. Not sure why Phil doesn’t have to do the same for his unsourced claims and accusations.
