Me too!

These seems to imply that the piece of shit Aytolllah is seriously considering that his regime won’t hold.

Let’s hope his evacuation plane (with his son and family members) will be shot down when they try to run.

What a degenerate.

I personally think it doesn’t really matter if the Democrats win (I am not American, but I lived there for multiple years and have travelled extensively).

I can’t imagine the Democrats doing anything substantive to address criminality and corruption (which is arguably the root cause of Trump’s rise).

This is true of both party leadership (that always avoid prosecution of criminal elements) and much of the party’s electorate who are too well off to risk rocking the boat and generally do not see real anti-corruption reform as a priority.

Consider the fact that Meta was found to have gained $16 B (10% of their 2024 revenue) via a premeditated policy of gaining commissions from fraud on their platform. They even developed a “playbook” to manage this process; so they knew what they were doing.

It is comical to suggest that the Democrats will do anything beyond a nominal fine and asking Zuckerburg to promise to not get caught the next time he runs a scheme (if even that)

When a genuine desire to fight criminality would require Zuckerbeg and all senior employees being locked up for multiple decades while having all their asset seized (Zuckerburg directly profited from this mass scale fraud scheme via his ownership stake in Meta).

One can look at Obama’s inaction against financial oligarchy in the late 2000s to predict the behaviour of the US centre-right should they win elections. Funnily enough Obama is once again pushing his shallow and meaningless “What’s needed now is courage” rhetoric.

For everyone in the world that believes in liberal democracy, human rights and opposes corruption, it is reasonable to assume that corruption and criminality in the US will not be addressed any time soon. I hope I am wrong though, but I wouldn’t count on it.

There is no verbal acrobatics, senior figures in his movement openly admitted that Navaliy and his movement supported the annexation of Crimea because the overwhelming the russian population are committed supporters of what is as a matter of fact genocidal imperialism. I will also add that his broader support of chauvinism is well documented.

The “smart voting” approach was comically stupid. The non-United Russia candidates are all (almost without exception) shills for the regime as part of their Potemkin village “election” process.

I stand by my statements that a “putin lite” option like Navaliy (or really most of the mainstream russian “opposition”) will always lose to the real deal.

I don’t expect any super human efforts from the russians. Something as simple as recognizing that all the bad things in Russia are not the fault of someone else would be a start.

Can you find one mainstream opposition figure that goes beyond “it’s all putin’s and EU’s fault, we are innocent angels!” I am genuinely curious. I know some public figures who admit this, but they universally hated both by the alleged opposition and the genocidal imperialist that make the overwhelming majority of russian society.

Many countries have a lot of historical/systematic challenges, yet many often to do find a way (or at least keep trying). One can look at Iran (not just the current protests); arguably they are in an even more difficult position than the russians.

There is quite a lot to unpack, so let me ask a few more holistic questions.

Is there a point at which historical / systematic / external factors can no longer serve as a justification (however nuanced) for the pro-authoritarian, pro-imperialist direction of russian society (let’s say that if one disagrees with this characterization, we replace the word society with polity or “russia as a country”)?

If such a point does not exist outside of the most extreme cases, is there a semi-realistic scenario where such factors do not come into play and russian society is able to move beyond authoritarianism, imperialism and being “easy to manipulate”?

I personally disagree with what I see as a victim-hood narrative, a very measured and nuanced one as described in your post, but still fundamentally a victim-hood narrative (in my eyes).

Even Navalniy, the darling of the west, was openly supportive of imperialism and and a fundamentally chauvinistic outlook on international relations.

And this lack of desire to address such deep rooted and near universal chauvinism; (85% of russians supported the annexation of Crimea even with adjustments for preference falsification) is why russia cannot progress beyond thuggish monsters as leaders for life. Why choose Navalniy when you choose the real deal (i.e. putin)?

P.S. I lived in russia in the 90s and 2000s, our family speaks fluent russian even though we are not russian.

His speech is an experiment at testing limits / inciting to action.

That ship has sailed a long time ago. I lived in russia in the 90s and 2000s (I speak fluent russian, still have a mild moscow accent that people bring up if I am not speaking English/Ukrainian). It’s very clear that putin is a symptom and the cause is russian society (not every single person of course, but the overwhelming majority).

Forget about Ukraine for a second. If one truly want change in russian society, one has to look at the “results” shown by the russian opposition in the last ~25 years. Even with implicit support of imperialism (не бутерброд с колбасой), it has been a comical failure in every way imaginable.

Yeremeyev is just doing the same fucking thing. Yeremeyev (or whoever) wants change? Then raise at least 50 battalions of russian troops to join RVC/РДК. Anything less than that is either childishly naive or russian “liberal” bullshit that in reality is a lite form of imperialism (why choose a putin lite regime when you can have the real thing?).

Continuing the war would lead to the “moral degradation of both parties to the conflict” as propaganda and the daily murder of hundreds of citizens “become commonplace”

This “good russian” can fuck right off. There is no torture of POWs (such as castrations done by the russians) or mass scale summary executions of civilians by Ukraine.

What a typical russian “liberal”.

This is exactly how russia works.

Ivashov is just another imperialist russian.

Those “86%” Russian numbers were always plucked out of polling manipulation, trick questions, and carefully curated focus groups

This is actually not true. An overwhelming majority of russians are supportive of chauvinism and imperialism (and a strong majority are genocidal imperialists). This is a fact.

Believe it or not there are ways to evaluate preference falsification, you can read the papers (methodology, results and analysis) yourself.

Baseline research on support for the fullscale invasion:

https://www.levada.ru/en/2024/05/17/conflict-with-ukraine-assesments-for-march-2024/

The level of support for the Russian armed forces has not changed significantly since the beginning of the conflict – the majority of respondents (76%) support the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine, including 48% “definitely support” and another 28% “rather support” the action of Russian army. 16% are against.

Research with preference falsification adjustments with respect to support for the full scale invasion:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20531680221108328

when asked directly, 71% of respondents support [full scale invasion of Ukraine], while this share drops to 61% when using the list experiment

Baseline support for annexation of Crimea:

https://www.levada.ru/en/2021/05/19/crimea-3/

The vast majority of Russians (86%) consistently support the accession of Crimea to Russia – this indicator has fluctuated slightly since 2014. 9% do not support the accession.

Research with preference falsification adjustments with respect to support for annexation of Crimea:

https://www.jiia.or.jp/en/column/2022/09/russia-fy2022-01.html

Using the list-experiment technique, Timothy Frye and others showed that Putin’s approval rating after the annexation of Crimea was actually high, at around 80%. In their study, they made a list of famous Russian politicians and had respondents answer how many of these politicians they supported. They then estimated Putin’s approval rating by adding the name “Putin” to the list for only one group[*]3 and thus concluded that the high approval ratings after the annexation of Crimea were not very different from the findings of opinion pollsters.

A high level overview of russian support for the invasion of Ukraine (a summary, but with links to relevant research, albeit some sources will be in russian):

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/russia-tomorrow/reluctant-consensus-war-and-russias-public-opinion/

Younger people still support the war in high numbers, though their support is lower than that of the older generation: 75–80 percent of people fifty-five and older support the Russian army’s actions in Ukraine, while 61 percent of young respondents in Levada polls share this sentiment.

And this is just Ukraine, even the allegedly liberal russian “opposition” openly supports the occupation of Ichkeria and sees nothing wrong with mass scale killing of civilians committed by the russians in the 90s and 2000s.

I was referring to results accounting for preference falsification:

https://sh.itjust.works/post/52675124/22959080 (post a bit higher in this thread).

These are not russian statistics.

Preference falsification refers to people lying due to the sensitivity of the topic.

The funny thing is that the level of preference falsification (with respect to Crimea specifically) was found to be so low that it was within the margin of error (i.e. 85% was seen as a valid result because preference falsification was too insignificant too evaluate). That’s damning for russian society.

FWIW, support for the full scale invasion saw a preference falsification level of 10%; therefore we go from 75% to 65% support for the full scale invasion of Ukraine. That being said the authors stated that they believe the 65% figure is likely an underestimate.

The overwhelming majority of russians still support invading Ukraine and annexing our territories.

I can share multiple papers (and even counter arguments) on this topic if you want.

Crimea is Ukraine.

A bit too optimistic, the average russian isn’t willing to do anything and buys into putin’s chauvinist worldview (85% of russian support the annexation of Crimea even with adjustments for preference falsification).

I think you’re correct at a high level, but there is also the medium-term and long-term impact of not honouring treaties which is less predictable and makes the calculation around not honouring a treaty less straightforward (even if in the immediate sense the drawbacks are minimal).

WW1/WW2 also had their fair of treaty violations. Sudetenland annexation is an early example. Nazi Germany breaking the Molotov–Ribbentrop to split up Europe with the russians is perhaps a better known example. Italy was also supposed to join the central power in WW1 as per their treaty examples.

While long term impacts are always difficult to quantify by definition, they do have impact on how people think (especially people in power).

This is to be expected, Venezuela is not a strategic priority for either russia or China.

Not to mention that a US invasion of Venezuela would provide a good propaganda win for Russia and China particularly in the “global south” where at least the leadership of countries like Brazil and South Africa are openly supportive of russian genocidal imperialism.

Tankie source!

The scum that operates that website needs to be deported to russia (after having their citizenship cancelled).

I agree on all counts.

I am just pointing out that working for Press TV is just as bad what Google does.

While I wouldn’t trust Google on anything, the “journalist” cited in this article worked for Iranian foreign propaganda outlet Press TV. Even though what Google did was wrong, that’s a massive red flag. Working for Press TV is no different than Google working for the American far right oligarch regime.

Tankie / red fash source!

If workers went on strike in China, Russia or Venezuela they would be calling it a CIA op!