News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
It's plausible, but there are many ways to explain the status quo. And maybe all those are in play at once?
Russia would absolutely use and abuse any US political puppet they can get their hands on. After all, there's no point in getting into a shooting war with another nuclear power^1^. History has also shown that the USA united and moving in one direction at once is a force to be reckoned with. From Russia's perspective, it's way more economical to have your adversaries rip themselves apart for you. As the USA has had some pretty deep divisions since the Civil War, we are a clear target for this kind of strategy; we are already primed to disagree on things. The only real work to do is escalate the matter, and politics is a great lever for that. But I'll assert that there's no endgame necessary for this strategy: all they have to do is keep fueling chaos, keep the electorate divided, and keep everyone arguing while ignoring any common ground. From there, continued governmental dysfunction keeps us from being a bigger economical or political threat to others in the meantime.
That said, it's all conjecture. Let me take a less conspiratorial look for a second.
At the same time, it's cold comfort that some invisible hand is fomenting unrest and causing our biggest problems, rather than it being an inherently American dysfunction; classic self-coping denial. A bit like blaming your partner for why the relationship is in shambles, when everyone really needs to go to therapy and work on some root problems. Perhaps those causes are intractable, but as far as I can tell, nobody's working that out and focusing a lot of energy on wedge topics (symptoms, grievances) instead.
Edit: I am in no way implying that we need to validate all the obvious bad takes from the right wing. Far from it; call that shit out. Instead, I think it's crucial to look to how/why those takes get traction and focus there instead.
^1^ - proxy wars are weirdly okay, and have been for a long time. I'm still trying to figure that one out.