Defence agency says Moscow is using the protests in Stockholm to stir tensions between Arab countries and the west

  • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            No argument was actually made. I was the one making the argument, which was that Russia’s meddling is smaller and less damaging than Western meddling.

            • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Your response was to how “Russia meddles” as you put it yourself. And instead of making an argument, you say “so did the West”.

              Which is whataboutism, ad hominem and a red herring.

              You never put forward an actual argument in your comment starting with “Any Western reporting” Which I referred to earlier.

              I find it very hard to understand how you believe you are actually making a point here?

        • M0oP0o@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I am honestly looking for my defence of any “west” and coming up empty. And I think you might have just done whataboutism recursion. Neat!

          • hark@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.”

              • hark@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I wasn’t claiming the fallacy was invented that recently, obviously. I thought the term was, but apparently I got the timing wrong on that. My bad.

            • M0oP0o@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • hark@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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?

                • M0oP0o@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

                  • hark@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    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.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          No it is whataboutism when it is a thread about a Russian doing X and someone mentions the West also doing X.

          Two wrongs do not make a right, condemning one person doesn’t mean approving of another.

          • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            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.

            It’s not whataboutism.

          • hark@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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?

    • bossito@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        The West is the most dysfunctional, 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 to “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.