Most people understand that. But I don’t want to be associated with Putin even as a joke. Fuck him, he doesn’t deserve the honor of even being depicted as gay.
I’m not saying no one can make this joke, but it seems kinda lazy and relies too much on stereotypes to be funny imo
Again, I understand the point is that he doesn’t like the image. My point is that there is more than one way to interpret the image, and they’re not all positive. And when some one points that out, they’re downvoted and mocked.
I say it’s lazy because I’ve been hearing people call straight people gay since elementary school. To piss them off. I don’t see how this is much different even if the intent was to criticize his homophobia. The effect is still the same
Also makes your question how accepted LGBT people actually are in the West, even among “liberals”, if this is what they think an insult is.
It reads as “Being gay is fine and good so long as you support our positions; but the minute you start opposing us, we will use your sexual identity as a weapon against you. Remember that.”
He doesn’t care about the image, and it is incredibly delusional to pretend that such a depiction has any significance to anyone but terminally online and chronically underemployed white Americans under 40.
Also, it is homophobic. If there is nothing wrong with being gay and crossdressing, then it is bigoted to portray our enemies as such as an insult.
Being gay isn’t an insult. Crossdressing isn’t an insult. Being trans isn’t an insult. Depicting Putin as such isn’t an insult.
All this does is further stigma against LGBT persons in the West. Is that your goal? Because that’s what is being done. And, ironically, it serves to further a goal that Putin supports - the increased stigmatization of LGBT life. You’re doing his work for him and are too narrow-minded to even realize it
It’s not illegal to be a man anywhere in the world. There’s a deep sense of community with lgbt+ because it is, and has been, a struggle for most gay people. So when someone takes a photo of the very person who is discriminating against our community and makes it look like he’s a part of the community, it can hit a sore spot with some people.
Again, I’m not trying to tell people to stop and I get that some people see it differently. But every time I’ve seen someone post that image, someone will say how that image can be interpreted as being gay is a joke, or that saying someone is gay when they’re not is bad form. And everyone dog piles and mocks them or calls them sensitive, etc. I’m mostly disappointed that it’s the same here and most people don’t care to hear a different perspective
I’m tired of hearing people cry about being offended from every little thing. You’re literally being offended right now by a drag queen gay looking mockup of Putin, that Putin banned because it pisses him off. Grow some skin.
And there it is. I knew someone would say that. If you see me as a crying offended sjw with thin skin, then there’s no point in having this conversation. I laid out my differing perspective without being harsh or judgemental, all while feeling no offense.
Personally I’m tired of the right wing talking points that dismiss any different perspective as weak. I’m tired of communities like Lemmy becoming more divisive, with users seeing each other as enemies and not giving others the benefit of the doubt. I’m tired of typing out long comments that I put thought into, hoping people will respond like decent humans, and getting brain dead insults and defensive arguments.
I’ll make a deal with you, I’ll grow thicker skin if you grow some empathy.
Not the one you replied to, but I’ve read all your comments and they are well thought out and right. Just seemed like you deserved to and maybe needed to hear that.
I really appreciate that. I know it’s not the most popular opinion and it really isn’t a big deal, but I’m honestly surprised by the response here. I’ve been losing hope that this was a good place for open discussions, but maybe I just need a break from social media in general lol
I mean… yeah. Are you not? I don’t usually hear people on the left call others too sensitive in that way. That’s pretty much verbatim what you hear on Fox News five times a day every day
The humour hits when you imagine how pissed off Putin would be about this image. Then you get to laugh again at his feeble attempt to ban an image on the intent when you learn about that part.
Yeah I can see how that’s funny. And I get the irony of the picture. I personally think it’s not in good taste, but I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum or cancel someone’s humor. Just explain why some of us don’t like it and try to understand why so many people downvoted the original person who disagreed.
It really seems to be getting more divisive and less welcoming on Lemmy the longer I’m here
It really seems to be getting more divisive and less welcoming on Lemmy the longer I’m here
Never tolerate intolerance.
If you don’t like people making fun of a dictator on a massive killing/kidnapping spree, this place is most definitely not for you…
What?? That’s the weirdest way to twist my words I’ve seen. Please, make fun of him. I don’t tolerate his bigotry.
I’m saying there are good ways and bad ways to make fun of him. Some people, including me, think this isn’t the best way to do it. Some people think it is. But yeah, maybe this place isn’t for me. It’s becoming too much like reddit imo
Theyre using homophobia to mock a dictator. Which is still homophobia.
Using racism to depict Xi as a stereotypical Chinaman would still be racism, even if he is a dictator. Using antisemitic caricatures to depict Netanyahu as inherently untrustworthy would be antisemitic even if he is running a genocide with US weapons.
Stereotypes and slurs don’t become acceptable just because they’re used against our enemies. This image of Putin should be banned and any posts containing it should be removed under hate speech and anti-homophobia rules
But that’s the thing, I’m not sharing a sexuality with him. Someone made him look like a gay stereotype because he hates people like me.
And the whole point is the picture IS to associate him with the LGBT+ community, in an ironic way, to piss him off.
If he made being blonde illegal and threw blondes in jail, that would be a fair analogy. But he didn’t, so that’s a terrible analogy. I mean, there are people that discriminate based on appearance and they’re called racists. So if this was a picture of Trump but photoshopped to look stereotypically Chinese, maybe that would be more of an equivalent analogy
Not voting would have been the only answer, as the other parties are basically controlled opposition. Yet, not voting would also count as a unpatriotic move, thus exposing you? I don’t know. Sure enough, Russia has a story of antidemocratic centralised powers, be they Tzars or party leaders. And for any neighboring country, that has always been a problem.
invalidating the ballot. Not not voting. There is a big difference. I am not sure how the terms are in English and whether there is a parallel, but you can “vote against everyone” - your count will count to the total percentage vs your vote is lost.
And yes, some people were absolutely forced to vote. But make no mistake, even if the elections were “free”, the actual result does not matter at all. Numbers were drawn no matter what happened during the election.
What actually matters and I am very disappointed to hardly see any coverage in the media - a ton of people showed up to Noon Against Putin. Even in Russia. Navalny’s last wish was for people to go vote on the last day at noon and the lines were impressive. (It is not a meeting, you are literally just standing in line to vote, they can’t arrest you.) If you’re unhappy with the current state of affairs, just show up. Even if you have already voted, just show up on the voting point at noon. And people did. And they saw that there are many.
Needless to say, with few places you were able to vote abroad, and less persecution to be feared, the lines were humongous. Surely, the Berlin embassy made sure how to cause a disgraceful bottleneck to keep people from voting before it closed.
Btw, you can see exit polls from Russians outside of Russia made by independent volunteers on voteabroad.info . But keep the bottlenecks in mind and that many people stood in line for 9+ hours and didn’t get to vote, so they are not represented in the results.
88% is so typical - for Nazis it means the eight letter of the alphabet twice, which means “Heil Hitler”. Given that the Z symbol of his genocidal war looks like a half Swastika we can now finally agree: Putin is the reincarnation of Hitler.
I made a joke about that percentage the day before this farce – I can’t call them elections – but I never thought that would become a reality. Secondly, are we going to accept ‘‘elections’’ held in a territory occupied by military forces. Nobody should be that naive.
Nah, it means that an arbitrary number was chosen to make it seem like there was competition on the ballot. A happy little math error.
You know, kinda like back in the day when Boris Yeltsin got 1 million votes from Chechnya even tho the war he himself instigated left the voting-eligible population at around 500k. Reportedly, exactly 70.0% out of those 500,000 voted for Yeltsin, and 70% of 500k is about a million because math.
No, that is unacceptable discourse! You may disagree strongly with them, but by dehumanizing them with such statements you prove yourself no better than them. They are not animals or things, they are people with very different views, with emphasis on people.
yes but we need to ackowledge them as people. Because no matter how much their views disgust us they’re still built of the same flesh and blood as we are, they are a warning, to you and people around you, to not fall into the same ideological trap as they did. If you just consider them “not human” you put yourself at risk of following their steps.
All the cruel people in history we call monsters were humans. It’s an unnerving thought to share any likness with them, but it’s important we remember that nobody is born evil
because it doesnt exist, nobody on the left likes putin, the “tankie who loves putin” is just a guy that the reddit brained lemmy.worlders made up to be angry at.
That’s a disingenuous take to be sure. And to be fair there are a lot of those surrounding capitalism and Leninism both.
I literally had a lemmy.ml user yesterday try to justify Putin’s invasion of Crimea. Claiming that Putin (a fascist) was concerned about the fascist Azov brigade because they were fascist. (Hilarious Russian propaganda) And that this was all because of America and things only got bad because of America. If America had never been involved, Ukraine would have happily joined back with Russia, etc etc etc.
So it definitely does exist. Whether or not it makes up a significant amount. We can debate that. Or at least we can try. Because unfortunately more often than not. So many on ml domains are incapable of having a good faith discussion. Often responding with walls of text, macro images and other things completely unrelated to the discussion at hand. In an effort to deflect criticism, muddy the conversation and gish gallop the whole talk. They don’t have a Monopoly on it though to be sure. It’s something other authoritarians like fascists do as well.
Saying that Putin was justified (its debatable) is not the same as saying they like him. the vast majority see him as a necessary evil (some as a lesser evil) to counter the western imperialist hegemony.
You say ml people are incapable of good faith discussions but here you go immediately shutting down arguments going against your worldview as “hilarious propaganda” and those macro images only come out in response to such bad faith takes.
No, it is not debatable. He literally invaded. If he was justified in invading Crimea then the west and the United States in particular has basically been kinda justified in every action they’ve taken against every ml country/revolution ever. Either it’s bullshit for both or it’s okay for both.
And yeah it was literal propaganda. Much like the red scare BS perpetuated in the US since the late 40s. It’s not BS propaganda because it disagreed with my world views. You only prove my point by making that accusation. You have no idea what my world views are. You’re simply getting emotional and defensive because yours are fairly obvious and I impuned them. But if you want to know know I’m pragmatically libertarian Marxist/ anarcho communist. So even though I agree with ml on a number of economic issues, I generally find them as distasteful as fascist because of their social policy.
my guy have you been to hexbear or lemmygrad? every other post on those forums are just people whining about westerners treating china and russia like they’re totalitarian/dictatorships and genocidal (because they are) and then saying that the US is even worse with less freedom of speech and more authoritarian. and obviously the constant uyghur genocide denial saying they’re just being “(re)educated” and they’re “integrating” with the mainland communities/culture more, then deflecting and rationalizing that even if it is genocide then it’s good because US wage slavery & prison labour is bad.
plus calling ukraine nazis and in general being anti-ukraine, saying that ukrainians want to be part of russia and that ukraine was better off as part of the soviet empire, claiming that putin was justified in invading “because NATO” even though there was no way in hell of ukraine joining NATO (they don’t accept unstable countries or countries with foreign non-NATO military/rebel presence) and even after NATO started backing away from ukraine in order to please russia (tankie claims which are silly and a sick joke)…
it’s not nearly as bad on lemmy.ml, it’s mostly limited to the minority here, but the other two are definitely filled to the brim with imperialists/red nazis in denial…
Just to establish some ethos in your mind here: I am banned from Lemmygrad for “trying to lib up the grad” after discussions about Russia. Even so, I would say it is both disingenuous and wrong to claim that they are all drooling over Putin. Most of them, at least those worth listening to, are critically supportive of Russia due to them being in opposition to Western hegemony. That said, many of them are also unfortunately very much under the impression that all Ukrainians are nazis, which is obviously not true.
To properly evaluate them for what they are, and not as an infantile “they are genocide loving, totalitarian, red-fash tankies”, one needs to understand how dystopical their view on the current world order is. If anything, this should be the take away from their dissonant voices, because their dystopic view of the Western world unfortunately bears a lot of merit (which does not equivocate to many of the alternatives being much better).
You are forgetting the actual Russian trolls who infest leftist spaces, and who get protection because they make good campists noises. You are simply lying if you claim there aren’t people all over hexbear, .ml and lemmygrad who openly root for Russia against Ukraine.
I have literally caught bans just for saying that Ukraine resembles genocide. You know, because communism is when mass deportation of children, or something.
It’s called campism. It’s basically people who are obsessed with relitigating the Cold War more than actually discussing leftist politics. They believe that communism never took off because the west kept communism down, so now anything which stands opposed to the west is ostensibly helping some future communist movement.
Really it’s mostly just about the fan service though. Being edgy is easier than actually studying politics with the bonus that you can just blindly cast judgement on anything since you’ll never actually have to put your ideas into practice and be judged by theor outcomes.
The irony of someone making blanket statements about an entire country of people while simultaneously posturing as someone that should be above such behavior.
However, if you’re a communist- American or not- I’m smarter than you. Period. End of story.
If you get your way, you just might have to some day. It’s with hope that you’ll grow up long before then though so you can stand against it with the rest of us.
They seem to be thinking that this is just a phase, and once Putin is gone, everyone who voted for him or his party is going to start voting for communists and thus Soviet Union will be soon restored.
Also in another thread some person was being feeling deep cognitive dissonance (to the point of crying alone and feeling nobody understands them) when their history professor gently gave them facts about the atrocities Soviet Union committed.
I cannot be mad at these people, but I am very worried how their bubble is feeding into their delusions. That cannot be healthy. I’m willing to bet that there’s a shooter or two brewing in those circles.
They’ve been pushing “both options suck so why bother” rhetoric really hard too. They know they can’t get people to vote for trump so their best bet is to get them not to vote
Australia solved this. We have to vote.
They also made it easy to vote - our main voting day is always a Saturday If you won’t be able to vote on that day for some reason, there are small polling places open for a couple of weeks ahead of that date.
If you won’t be able to vote on that day for some reason, there are small polling places open for a couple of weeks ahead of that date.
For the record, early voting is an option in many US states, too, and it’s really expanded since COVID. In my state, you could go to any poll location to cast an early vote. It used to be you could only cast an early vote if you were going to be away from home in election day for a specific reason (college or military are the ones I remember, but there were other reasons, too), but it’s expanded so pretty much anyone can do early voting now. On election day, you have to go to your assigned poll location in order to vote if you don’t do early voting.
This varies by state, though. In any case, it’s getting easier to vote, and there are more options to be able to vote, but it’s not nationwide (yet, hopefully).
This is fantastic to hear. Now, you just need to be able to vote at any elementary school and get your democracy sausage and you’ll be voting like the professionals!
Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not (the sausage thing seems to imply you are), but all public schools (elementary, middle, and high school) are closed on election day so that they can act as polling locations. Many libraries also act as polling locations on election day.
It’s all to keep up appearances. You keep up the propaganda and fake news and some people will be no the wiser. I’m sure there’s many who know that this is fake but there’s also some who just accept the propaganda.
100%. Like how many conservatives in America assume everyone else does or wants the horrible things they want to do. So that basically all of their accusations end up being projection and confessions. There is a not insignificant number in Russia that believes that America is just as dysfunctional as they are. And at Western criticism is hypocritical. They have a point to a small extent. But they are in many ways a bit worse off. Though I may not be able to say that next year.
I was told by a Russian that they venerate beaurocracy. The documents show the objective truth and it doesn’t matter that everyone involves knows that the contents is bullshit as long as the process has been followed to the letter.
Reminds me of the joker from Christofer Nolan’s Batman. If things go according to plan, nobody cares. Even if its clearly fake, keeping up the resemblance of a working system raises less concerned citizens.
The true power of any country always lies with the people. For example, every previous chinese dynasty ended due to civilian uprising.
The entire point is to spread cynicism about democracy as a process. That way autocrats can say “look, it doesn’t actually matter, voting is as free here as it is in the west.” It’s not to convince you that they are free, it’s to make people question the value of Western freedoms.
The reality is that democracy obviously doesn’t work without civil liberties to go along with it. But this is more nuanced than your average person will grasp without explanation.
Exactly this: I remember meeting some Russians that had moved to Belgium a few years ago, and we got to talking about this topic. These were well educated young people, yet they told me the thing that surprised them the most when moving to Belgium was that people actually cared about elections, and that elections actually mattered. They had been completely convinced that elections in the west were just like the “elections” they were used to from Russia.
If he’s going to lie he should lie big, like his pal in North Korea. Tell everyone he won with 189% of the total votes. Nobody outside his cult is going to believe him either way.
This time it might actually be a coincidence, someone at the political bureau tried to pick the closest number to 100 that wouldn’t look made up, 73 they were promptly excited for sedition my their boss who added 3 to the number and routed it to his boss,. Repeat the process 5 times and there you go “88”.
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