But he totally heard someone say it on Bay 12 once! Also there was this one scientific study that showed that gay people are better parents, and this is propaganda because
what's with you and the hitler implications. come on. the government doesn't exactly need strengthening or additional legitimacy (since it can just do all the nice things you claim them to do - stuff the ballots, crush opponents with government spending, i won't dispute these simply because not even most russians have reliable evidence for these being a thing)
I don't see any real argument to respond to here. What, once a dictatorship has seized power you may as well just support it because its position is rock solid?
on that note, could you please tell me your opinons on the post loudwhispers made just a while ago since it seems you're not going to quote it, here it is for your viewing pleasure
It's a deflection and not really worth addressing at all ("Well they're bad, but the fact that other people are worse means we should ignore that they're bad"). Apart from the bolded part which is just wrong - the UK Olympics certainly helped boost the government's flagging popularity, for instance.
allow me to delve into my limited knowledge of how that stuff operates - people are going to get beaten regardless of their sexual orientation if a group decides they want to beat someone up, they just need a "reason" - ridiculous, flimsy, doesn't matter broke someone's nose
Your knowledge is indeed limited if you don't think that homophobia is an actual thing.
also russia dislikes activism, activism killed the soviet union brought on the shitstorm of the 90s which is still in living memory and we do not want that again do we
What
oh nothing, just a misguided attempt of pointing out your comparing the reality of today to the reality of more than seventy years ago and bringing everything down to hitler hitler hitler holocaust come on you're better than this
You haven't provided any actual argumentation against the comparison, and in any case the comparison is part of the original discussion since Fry made it. Thinking about it, it may be better to compare it to the Nazis' treatment of homosexuals - they started by cracking down on vocal gay rights groups in a pretty similar way.
i'm not exactly arguing because if i were arguing i'd put some effort in the posts i guess? i started off on the assumption that i'm not getting your position to move anywhere except further into whichever territory you are currently occupying so might as well prod you a few times and hear the opinions
so alright, from top bottom because clipping posts into tiny parts is very silly and i don't know why i actually did that part
oh boy dictatorships.
why. how did you jump to this conclusion? i asked what's it with you and comparing things to hitler, which you later answered, and that's nice. but sure, i'll bite - what sort of dictatorship is it? usually you'd support not because "i might just as well do that" but because "if i don't it'll either force me to support it or get rid of me", are you trying to delve into a higher-level political debate in here? or is this an assumption that russia is a dictatorship, in which case your argument about boosting popularity isn't a thing because the elections are a joke anyway. you'd really have to weigh a literal fuckton of variables, most of which you have no manner of quantifying as a run-of-the-mill citizen, to say if you should support the current dictator, or make a move towards supporting something else, which may or may not succeed in subverting the current system and replacing it with its own. and here's the shocker: most people don't have the time or the effort required to do that, hence why even the most recent batch of revolutions was "spontaneous" - arab spring ring a bell? now that you've got some of them through the point of civil war, like libya, you've got them having no idea what to actually do because democracy isn't the status quo, it's a network of delicate structures that you've got to set up one by one.
as to said structures, this guy said it best, mind what the article is supposed to be about thoughso yeah people have it worse off in places, big whoop right? you can go on a tirade of pointing at people and telling them their various privileges in the current world, now that there's some people who acknowledge that they are a thing. no siree, the point is,
let's focus on the shittiest ones first and work from the ground up. hence why i pointed our kyrgyzstan, which in retrospect is not the ground we should work up from but it works decently. what's the incentive for a bigot to "convert" to tolerance if they can just point somewhere else and say "well these guys are worse than me and you don't care about them, what do you have against me to act like this"
and okay sure let's call me a homophobe because i acknowledge that there are people who don't give a shit about homosexuality and just engage in wanton violence. i don't know what sort of fairytale country you are (actually i do, your part of england must be a nice place. you guys not being overwhelmed by used kitchen salesmen i hope) but have you pondered for the least significant amount of a time period that, you know, not everywhere is as safe and peachy as the area around you? while getting a visa is a bitch, and i'm willing to bet significant amounts of money you're not inclined towards it, go for a trip sometime. sankt petersburg-moscow will do, though if you take the transsiberian (or baikal-amur if you don't wish to travel near the chinese border for some reason, though you'd have to get to irkutsk either way) and you will probably know more of that strange and foreign land we all do here, since my knowledge is significantly outdated on some aspects. just make sure to not spend all your time in the biggest cities (a common complaint about moscow from non-muscovites is that other than the historical parts it's a giant village, not a city representing that should act as a capital)
on this note, a short and gloriously simplified history lesson as your "what" requests it - you remember the soviet union, right? the gerontocracy and all that fun stuff when brezhnev was still around and gorbachev was taking over. well he tried to reform that with
perestroika. meaning more or less a return to the directly post-war economic system as stalin saw it, and
glasnost, in short giving more information about the government to the people. while the first part was greatly successful, the second meant the people saw where their infallible government fucked up, so they demanded more power so the government wouldn't fuck up, and then they saw more fuckups, fast forward and you've got a thwarted hardliner coup and the republics start declaring independence and hoo boy everything doesn't exist anymore. i suggest further reading starting from the articles linked, wikipedia isn't the greatest source but hey the sources cited are good when you've got entry-level stuff covered
my constant objection to keeping nazis in the discussion is mainly because while fry went ahead and invoked godwin, you just keep godwin in and the guy just can't catch a break and let's not even start on how eager your stereotypical jew is to say something is comparable to the holocaust if they don't like it (stereotypical "oy vey!" optional) and in full disregard if it has any connection to any genocide, or specifically the holocaust, whatsoever, and he just now served to reinforce that stereotype thanks we really needed that in a world where antisemitism still exists.