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.
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.
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.
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.
The russian federation makes Japan look like a communist utopia in comparison. It is crazy that people still can not seem to figure out that russian federation ≠ the USSR.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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! "
There’s some pretty powerful air rifles out there. The one from the article appears to be a varmit air rifle (at least that’s what I would call it). Here’s a review I found:
I don't think that that's necessarily a huge issue, though, because their aim wasn't to address that.
That experiment briefly achieved what’s known as fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy output after the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target, the Energy Department said.
In other words, it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it, the department said.
A 2020 article, before the current success or the prior one at the same facility:
No current device has been able to generate more fusion power than the heating energy required to start the reaction. Scientists measure this assessment with a value known as fusion gain (expressed as the symbol Q), which is the ratio of fusion power to the input power required to maintain the reaction. Q = 1 represents the breakeven point, but because of heat losses, burning plasmas are not reached until about Q = 5. Current tokamaks have achieved around Q = 0.6 with DT reactions. Fusion power plants will need to achieve Q values well above 10 to be economic.
So if I understand this aright, on the specific thing they're working on, they're at 1.54 as of OP's article, that is (3.15/2.05), up from 0.6 in 2020. The target is somewhere "well above 10" for a commercially-viable fusion power plant. Still other problems to solve, but for the specific thing they're working on, that maybe gives some idea of where they are.
To my understanding, here they use lasers to create fusion and the 2 megajoules are emitted by the lasers.
Hence they need waaay more power than is generated to drive their lasers.
That is also why this research is not actually aiming at power geration, but at fusion weapons. However, the power framing creates much better press and thus better chances for future funding.
Most fusion reactions release at least some of their energy in a form that cannot be captured within the plasma, so a system at Q = 1 will cool without external heating. With typical fuels, self-heating in fusion reactors is not expected to match the external sources until at least Q ≈ 5. If Q increases past this point, increasing self-heating eventually removes the need for external heating. At this point the reaction becomes self-sustaining, a condition called ignition, and is generally regarded as highly desirable for practical reactor designs. Ignition corresponds to infinite Q.
So it sounds like additional power requirements effectively means getting from their current 1.54 to 5.
That is also why this research is not actually aiming at power geration, but at fusion weapons.
I am confident that that is not the case. The US knows how to do fusion weapons and has for decades -- that's what a thermonuclear bomb is, the second stage. That's a much simpler problem than fusion power generation. You don't involve lasers or magnets or other things that you use in fusion power generation if you just want a fusion weapon; you only need to force the material together with a great deal of force for a very brief period of time, and then you're done.
Our laser pulls over 300 megajoules off the grid to do these experiments and then converts that into 2 megajoules of laser light and that gave us 3 megajoules of fusion energy.
This historic, first-of-its kind achievement will provide unprecedented capability to support NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy…
That’s why I’m also proud to announce today that I’ve helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough.
Here’s a handy trick that I use on sites such as this one. Between when the article loads and the paywall restricts it, hit a button to display the article in a Reader mode. Safari has this. I believe Firefox does. I think you can get extensions to add such a feature.
When the article loads and then gets paywalled, this works. When the paywall is immediate it doesn’t.
The intentional shooting itself is all I need to know that the little kid has really significant issues that need to be treated. The fact that he bragged about it isn’t news; he’s six, I’m not expecting him to act maturely about anything.
My mom works in a school as a therapist for very mentally ill children. There are a few that have been sent to the bad kids school because of violence. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told me one of the kids shot someone.
Prosecutors have said Wei, who was born in China, was first approached by a Chinese intelligence officer in February 2022 while he was applying to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, and admitted to the officer that he knew the arrangement could affect his application. Even so, prosecutors say he provided the officer detailed information on the weapons systems and aircraft aboard the Essex and other amphibious assault ships that act as small aircraft carriers.
I don’t understand. This passage makes it sound like the guy was already allowed to serve in the armed forces, even though he wasn’t yet a U.S. citizen. AFAIK, that’s not allowed. Am I wrong or what’s going on here?
To my knowledge, US Citizenship is not required for service in the US Military. I’m remembering some controversy when Trump deported US veterans that were not yet citizens. Here’s some effort working to undo that Trump damage
What is really wrong is that after they complete their contract (3 or 4 or 5 year contract) , they don’t become citizens. To me if they served honorably then they should get their citizenship. To me throughout their time in service they should be told “ go to that office and do certain paperwork to continue the process of getting you citizenship, if you don’t want your citizenship then you will have to fill out a form that states that you don’t want it “.
To me the process should literally be part of their time in service. So that the day their contract is done, or the day they re enlist they become citizens. They earned it. If they can be trusted to launch jets off an aircraft carrier, then they should be trusted to be citizens.
Wells Fargo makes BILLIONS of dollars per year. $125m is pocket change to them. Lock up some of the top executives–and not in one of those nice minimum security prisons, either–and see how quickly they change their tone.
In my city something similar is going on, three homeless people have already been stabbed while sleeping at night. I honestly don‘t understand the depravity humans get up to.
She did it knowing that her family would be lambasted by the public as well. Maybe dont try to shame them or group them together–she did the right thing. The next mom might not if everyone dogpiles onto this one.
They look scary. You can easily find pics online (amanita phalloides). They supposedly don’t taste all that great. I would not try this myself, but it is supposedly safe to taste a teeny little bit, then spit it out and rinse your mouth out, and some mycologists have done that. For science, you know. Let me go a bit further and say don’t try it yourself.
I racked up $12k in credit card debt after college. It was the result of a low paying, dead end job (GameStop), wanting to be independent and live on my own, and no financial education beyond my parents telling the the very basics.
That all changed when I decided I didn’t want to live paycheck to paycheck the rest of my life. Got some licensing and a career type job, met my wife, and the rest is history.
I paid off my credit card debt within the first year at the job, we both paid off our student loan debt (totalling ~$90k within the first 5 years) and now the only debt we have is our mortgage which is fixed at 2.75%. We could pay it down rather aggressively if we wanted but at that rate we we’re simply maxing retirement accounts and putting the remainder into taxable investments instead.
Fuck credit card debt. I believe every high school in America should have a required financial literacy class. Not just balancing a checkbook, but how to build good credit, the dangera of credit card debt, predatory loans, the benefits of saving for retirement early, basic investment principals, and anything else that would make a young person financially literate early in life.
While I don't celebrate the man's death, I am thankful that the FBI acted to stop him before he hurt anyone else.
I fully believe in free speech and open political discourse, but deadly threats of violence need to be taken seriously and acted upon quickly.
If you threaten to kill someone, you're denying their right to free speech. There's no free speech when you're dead. It's my belief that a person should not be protected under the same rights that they deny to others.
It's not. Remember that's what all oppressors want you to think. All that evil requires to exist is for good people to do nothing, which is why those who would do evil do all they can to convince you that your efforts against them mean naught.
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