Do you have any actual evidence?
No, it’s just me and my assumptions here, but you can find a lot of cases showing Russian financial backing, for the Brexit campaign as well as connections between the Tories and Russia.
Also please address your statement that a pro-russian party is about to win in the UK
Sorry, you lost me there. I have no idea what party is currently predicted to win.
The attack on Ukraine may have shaken things up, but before that, the Tories seemed quite close with Russia and, forgive this non-Brit for making assumptions, to me it looks like the entire Brexit thing was started and then heavily pushed by Russia as part of a larger plan to splinter the EU and cause infighting (from a quick web search: Wikipedia, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Guardian).
Probably not needed, but just to be sure… the entire graphic is satire and all statistics it shows are made up :)
I’d like to believe that our intelligence communities do, but I don’t know.
What I do know that that Russian propaganda tries to “immunize” their marks against mismatching views. One method is to pull them out of the shared media ecosystem by seeding distrust against non-aligned media. Another is to associate any undesirable viewpoints with weakness, idiocy or perversion.
Last but not least, Russia already tested a complete internet disconnect of their country so they could isolate their own population from anything not state controlled, should the tide turn or an emergency happen.
Same. The Russian IRA follows a simple, time-tested method: do whatever you can right now, little by little.
Most of it is just simple opinion shaping (try to connect the anger of internet strangers to the EU, US, liberals or the left). The interest slowly accumulates. Spreading bedbug hysteria causes just a little harm to France’s reputation, causes just a small bit of disillusion in its people and reduces Olympic revenue by maybe just some 10’000 euros – but ever so slowly, it alters the overall course.
Thanks, good one.
I’m always happy seeing memes that turn the tables and give the connies a dose of their own medicine. This is what we need! :)
To add to what others have already answered, if Ukraine accepted such a “deal”, more war would be coming to Europe.
I have every reason to believe that Russia will just move on to the next target and that things would be far worse in Europe already if Ukraine wasn’t keeping a large portion of Russian resources aimed at them.
Also consider that any time Russia offered a ceasefire (such agreements were accepted several times), they always used it to safely rush supplies to the front lines and broke the ceasefire immediately after, often just hours after it was instated.
It’s like when YouTube influencers get invited, all expenses covered plus pocket money, to a sweatshop in China, given a guided tour showing all the utterly happy workers and absolutely fantastic work conditions.
And said influencers then return home and gush over said sweatshop, don’t disclose the paid expenses and perhaps even dunk on real journalists that infiltrated the company and collected evidence for months (the real case I’m referring to: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1184974003/shein-influencers-china-factory-trip-backlash).
I’m happy when actual investigative journalists report from Russia, but those tend to live dangerously and won’t get interviews with the regime’s higher-ups or the tyrant himself. Media in Russia are under complete government control, so Tucker even getting that interview is a clear tell.
…and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they’ll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.
The problem I have with the “hypocrisy” argument is that, here, it’s used as a cheap attack on the messenger.
As in the old meme:
(poor peasant doing labor: “we should improve society somewhat”, grinning contemporary person: “yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent.”)
I can accept it when influential people, even those that cause a whole lot of emissions themselves, advocate for climate programs. We won’t get anywhere if, whoever wants to talk about the environment, first has to become a cave dweller and give up their reach before they’re allowed to speak up.
On the other hand, when Fox News, a channel that generally panders to the coal lobby, car industry and oil barons, suddenly becomes concerned about someone’s CO2 emissions just to serve up another smear, that is hypocrisy, plain and simple.
And said tax cut will work like this:
Step 1: Before it happens, you’re asked to publicly dream about what an extra $4000 will do for you on social media. Step 2: Once it passes, you get a 0.1% tax cut. Enough for one extra pizza. Per year. The bill will also includes 3 tax raises only for the poor, one every 4 years that follow. Step 3: The corporation you work for, meanwhile, gets a 16% tax cut. With it, they’ll announce a $2000 one-time payment to all workers. Which will be rescinded as soon as it’s been reported about on local news. The bill also includes 3 further, even bigger tax cuts for the rich, one every 4 years.
End result: taxes raised on the poor, taxes lowered for the rich, but lots of social media euphoria from the working class, lots of newspaper clippings of bosses giving their workers generous one-time payments (that never materialized). And next election cycle, Fox News can dig up all the happy reports and the truth of the matter has never even entered the attention span of the royally-effed-over working class voters.
That has been Russia’s game for more than a decade now: stoke existing tensions. Brexit, political polarization in the USA and internal division in nearly all European countries.
Bringing the already uneasy situation between Israel/Palestine to a boiling point in order to distract from Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a big stretch.
You must have better friends than I.
Every conservative I know or knew is walking around with pent-up anger, seemingly ready explode over whatever their handlers in the media have railed them up against that day. I guess that is what keeps them active at the ballot box and prevents them from taking a step back, calming down, thinking and questioning the narrative. Either way, it became pretty much impossible to have any kind of outing with these people present.
It’s gotten really tiresome to even look for common ground anymore. Things that were fine just yesterday suddenly make them foam at the mouth. And lately, the persecution complex, too.
I am very skeptical about this.
Secret plans by the EU to hurt one of its own member countries? And the proof is a document seen by FT?
And rather than sanction Orban and his accomplices, or making it harder for his country to work against the EU, the plan supposedly is to harm from the bottom up? And in secret, even though decisions/resolutions are made by an open parliament of countries?
To me, this report sounds a little bit too much like those Russian “news” that you’d find on Sputnik & co. Perhaps even like preparation for another Brexit scenario where they fan resentment through misinformation and social media seeding (remember these terms? “red tape,” “Brussel bureaucrats,” “autonomy,” “it’s unreformable,” …).
I think the caveman wouldn’t fare any better :)
There was a (possibly unethical) experiment where scientists tried to induce stress symptoms (lack of appetite, depression, panic, etc.) in rats.
They found that sudden scares or bringing the rats face-to-face with predators had little long term effect. But placing them on a floor with a constant, slightly uncomfortable electric current (low-level stress over a longer period) did cause them to develop all the symptoms.
So perhaps we’re just not naturally equipped to deal with permanent time pressure, upcoming appointments and deadlines in the way modern society gives them to us.