Personally, I for one would really appreciate it if you provided the archive link in the OP especially if you’re posting paywalled articles. When the OP is the one who does it, then all the readers who want to follow the link that the OP posted won’t have to, and the people who don’t even know about archive sites will still get to read it when they wouldn’t have otherwise (and maybe even learn about what archive sites are as a result). In that sense, it’s not about entitlement, it’s about one person doing it one time rather than (for example) 30 people all having to do it while others may not even be aware they can do it.

Another thing is that while it may be ultimately just a drop in the bucket, it does help cut down on the amount of traffic that mainstream western media sites will get, which I think you would agree is better than helping increase it for them. It’s for that reason that just as a reader browsing, I almost always archive any MSM news articles I read, including the ones I see in posts here. On the occasion I do post, I always make a point to link the archive or frontend (like piped/invidious for youtube, redlib for reddit, used to do nitter for twitter, etc.) It’s a very minor annoyance to have to do, as either the reader or as the poster, but I’m all the more appreciative of posters who do do it and wish that more would.

It’s not like you have to, but it would be courteous and considerate if you did.

Wow. Unironically spouting nazi propaganda in a thread about the nazis being evil. What a load of ahistorical bullshit.

Yes, and it is booming. It keeps outperforming the sputtering western economies by leaps and bounds.

If all countries under discussion ramped up to full war time economies, like Russia is already doing, the West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two.

Well, sure. But you may as well say “if all countries under discussion magically whisked an army of robot supersoldiers into existence, they’d outpace Russia’s fighting ability by an order of magnitude.” It’s just a pipe dream that ignores the material reality of the entire situation. The countries under discussion can’t ramp up to “full war time economies” because they’ve long ago outsourced nearly all of their production capacity. If right now, they dropped everything else in order to rebuild their productive forces (that they willingly and knowingly dismantled for the sake of finance capital profits and honestly to also prevent domestic labor from having the kind of leverage it used to have) then it would take well more than a decade to get back to the kind of productive capacity necessary to outproduce Russia the way you’re talking about. And that’s if we’re being extremely generous. That’s simply not going to happen for numerous reasons ranging from the greed of finance capital to plain old logistics.

This is the economic imbalance that “Putin knows.” He has known it all along and never needed to undercut western support of Ukraine because of it. The waning support from the west is due to the fact that they’re now realizing what a lost cause Ukraine truly is and that no NATO Wunderwaffen or boomeranging giga-sanctions are going to save them.

subversion of the political process via corrupt politicians, keeping the US and others in a state of hand-wringing and infighting

This is just silly. Putin does not have that kind of ability.

believed any of his own propaganda, he would already actually be at war with NATO (instead of just claiming to be and not actually touching any NATO territory), and the West would coalesce around the clear immediate threat and begin the war time economic ramp up.

Fantasy land. Cloud cuckoo. Complete failure to understand how geopolitics even begins to work in the age of nuclear powers, or even the meaning of the term proxy war, let alone the material circumstances of the countries you’re talking about.

I personally feel these are the end days of what’s left of the freedom internet.

I hope you’re wrong. I guess that should go without saying. But I don’t know, it seems like they’ve been trying to crack down and been consistently failing at it, which is hopeful. Like youtube’s attempt to make adblockers not work anymore ending up just strengthening uBlock Origin and making it work even better than it did before. lol.

Obviously, google et al have all the power, but even so, they mostly keep losing battles, which is both hilarious and hopeful. I agree that we’re seeing the further enshitification of all the big social media giants and they’re corralling and enclosing the commons more all the time. But I haven’t given up on all the little things that spring up to address that enshitification, like the frontends, like searx, and hell, even lemmy. You were 100% right, we need to evolve, but I would say these things are good mutations that are part of the process of that necessary evolution.

I don’t know, I’m too high rn not to go off on tangents.

The only people I know of who don’t know what the word “liberal” means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don’t like most Americans, I’m not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying “liberal” and knows it’s a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn’t have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don’t already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what’s being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for “the average person.”

Removed by mod

Lemmygrad isn’t “hated” by most of the wider lemmyverse. There’s just a loud and obnoxious minority of people that will rail and rant about lemmygrad. They loudly rant about lemmygrad because they aren’t used to seeing their worldview get challenged and by its very nature as a radical leftist community, lemmygrad is a challenge to the typical background liberal perspective.

It’s no surprise we all end up seeing a lot of threads about “those mean tankies at lemmygrad” (and hexbear too) made by people who can’t take their worldview getting questioned, or even shown to be flawed, or just not standing up to their own scrutiny, and who get mad when that happens. There are also of course people with ideological reasons to demonize leftwing politics and will spread shit for that reason alone. But overall, I don’t think most people care enough except to think “oh yeah that’s that instance with those radical lefties, they’re weird but they do make some great memes sometimes.”

Thank you for this. Very helpful.

Definitely. And not just “out of touch,” it’s part of the reason why we have an ancient ghoul openly talking about how he has no empathy for the plight of younger people in that office right now.

The fuck are you talking about? There are all kinds of laws that make something legal or not based on someone’s age, and they often vary by state or even locale. Hell, there’s a minimum age for running for president for chryssake and it’s well past any definition of adulthood.

Yeah, I also don’t really understand what the OP is getting at with the age thing in the title. If anything, it would seem like the actual rulers (pictured) should be more likely to be ancient vampires than the the politicians chosen for the facade of democracy.

Sure, geopolitics doesn’t exist, it’s all just this craaaaaayzee guy twirling his evil mustache. It’s not like the Russian government has any say, or that almost everyone in it not only support the SMO but many of them think Putin is too soft on Ukraine and should commit much more of their military to it. It’s not like over 70% of the Russian public also supports the SMO and Putin’s decisions, saying they should never make concessions to return the Donbas to Ukraine. I mean, it’s not like most of the world aside from the propaganda-steeped NATO countries also side with Russia with respect to the conflict. Nope. None of that. Just that one maniacal power hungry madman!

https://www.eiu.com/n/russia-can-count-on-support-from-many-developing-countries/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/30/negative-views-of-russia-mainly-limited-to-western-liberal-democracies-poll-shows

lol. It’s so funny these fucking dweebs who can’t understand the world beyond a simplistic Saturday-morning-cartoon kind of analysis with Putin being this season’s villain.

Willing to engage? wtf I never stopped engaging. And the sources I sent aren’t from one country that’s making claims about their enemy. In case you didn’t notice, the Guardian and RollingStone are not from China. lol On top of that, they aren’t “my” sources, I literally just showed you something you could have googled for yourself and found out from American sources.

What a disappointment. I thought you might be a reasonable person for a while there, but that last comment just shows how obtuse you’re choosing to be, and how unwilling to recognize bias when it doesn’t suit you to do so. Typical, but still disappointing. Whatever, enjoy whatever picture you have in your head for how the world is as told to you by the apparatus that has power over you, I won’t try to challenge it. I’m going to bed anyway. bye.

I don’t trust western sources on China because they have a very strong vested interest in demonizing China now. Some of the things I’ve seen come from the nytimes in particular is straight up lies. I also wouldn’t trust Chinese state media reporting on how the US did everything it could to downplay Covid and get people back to work even as there were more waves of death from it. (I wouldn’t trust China if they were the ones telling me that, but I know it’s true because I lived through it.)

I would bet China does do some nefarious shit at times too, but they are open about it when they take down billionaires, which the US would never do in the first place. I flat do not believe anything the nytimes or the BBC says about China, though. I’ve seen too much unabashed propaganda from those outlets on things not even having to do with China. No way I’ll believe they’re telling the truth about their ideological and economic enemy.

To get down to the basis of what I think, yes, China probably does some pretty bad shit sometimes, but I don’t think it does anywhere near as bad as what the largest global super power, the bully on the world stage, the US does all the damn time. I hands down believe the US does far far worse, even if there is no country in the world that doesn’t have some blood on its own hands.

It was probably state or local cops who murdered the BLM founders, but it was clearly coordinated assassinations. But no offense, you’re still being a bit naive if you think those kinds of targeted assassinations don’t happen, sometimes (if not most of the time) with the go-ahead from the very top. Even when it’s not from the top, it’s still US government killings.

Fred Hampton’s murder is common knowledge, you can just google it (and keep in mind the US propaganda machine bias with that, but it’s even still not in question the cops just bust down the door and blew him away in bed). As for the BLM founders, a quick search also brought up https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/08/ferguson-protest-leader-darren-seals-shot-dead-burning-car and https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ferguson-death-mystery-black-lives-matter-michael-brown-809407/ There’s also Obama setting the precedent for having US citizens accused of being terrorists murdered without trial in drone strikes. And consider whistleblowers like Snowden and Assange, the latter will almost certainly be killed if extradited back to the US and has already been tortured severely. Look into even just the stuff the CIA has itself admitted to, it’s heinous.

Not according to the people I’ve known from China who have told me that the state almost never does anything like that to individuals (excepting billionaires who used their money to harm people) but will crack down on corporations, and that is just the opposite of what the US does. Look at the founding members of the BLM movement in Ferguson. Murdered. Wasn’t one ruled a suicide who had two shots to the back of their skull with their car set on fire while they were in it? Or Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers who was shot to death in his hotel room bed by cops? I think you have it a little backwards. But yes, both countries are flawed (one much more than the other if you’re just a regular person and not a billionaire).

As for your last question, that’s easy. Cuba.

Ok, well that is something. I think that’s good that you recognize the freedom for the average working class person in China to live as healthy of a life as possible without concern for how much money they have or without concern for becoming homeless (like people constantly do in the US). But that you think that is less free than the US, which is “unmistakably freer” because in China there’s a possibility you could get reprimanded for criticizing the state… well I think that speaks to some really fucked up priorities. But ok.

Well, let’s just say it wouldn’t have surprised me. But I wasn’t expecting you to just readily concede that the US’s “level of freedom” is no better than that of China. Especially right after you just used that as a reason why China was “bad,” specifically when compared to the US. But if you really are able to see that now, congrats, for real.