A court in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod has jailed a woman for wearing rainbow earrings, the human rights group Egida reported late Wednesday, marking the second case of its kind after Russia banned the so-called “LGBT movement” as an “extremist” organization in November.   According to Egida, law enforcement agents tasked with combating “extremism” detained the woman after a group of “aggressive people” approached her and her friend at a local cafe and filmed them on camera.

ngl russia is not making it easy to give critical support lol

  • @Kaplya18•5 months ago

    Have you read this report titled Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice & Neoconservatism? You might find it interesting.

    Excerpt:

    Key Findings:

    • The advocates of American primacy within the United States foreign policy establishment historically rely on prevailing ideological trends of the time to justify interventionism abroad. The new ‘woke’ face of American hegemony and projects of empire is designed to project the U.S. as an international moral police rather than a conventional great power—and the result is neo-imperialism with a moral face.
    • This is an iterative and systemic process with an internal logic, not one controlled by a global cabal: when the older rationalizations for primacy, hegemony, and interventionism appear antiquated or are no longer persuasive, a new rationale that better reflects the ruling class norms of the era is adopted as a substitute. This is because the new schema is useful for the maintenance of the existing system of power.
    • The rise of a ‘woke’ activist-driven, social justice-oriented politics—particularly among the members of academia, media, and the professional managerial class—has provided the latest ideological justification for interventionism, and it has become readily adopted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. These groups now have an even greater level of symbiotic relationship with state actors.
    • Professional selection and advancement under these conditions require elite signaling of loyalty to ‘progressive’ universalism as the trending state-sanctioned ideology, which further fuels the push towards interventionism. This combination of factors encourages a new institutional and elite consensus around trending shibboleths.
    • The emerging hegemonic posture and its moral imperialism are at odds with a sober and realistic appraisal of U.S. interests on the world stage, as they create untenable, maximalist, and utopian goals that clash with the concrete realities on which U.S. grand strategy must be based.
    • The liberal Atlanticist tendency to push moralism and social engineering globally has immense potential to create backlash in foreign, especially non-Western, societies that will come to identify the West as a whole with niche, late-modern progressive ideals—thus motivating new forms of anti-Westernism.
    • Carguacountii [none/use name]11•5 months ago

      I haven't - although I think having read the intro that I've seen it quoted without attribution. I will read it!

      Its reminiscent of a lecture I watched about the British Empire in India (I forget the name, but can probably find it again if you're interested), where the lecturer drew a parallel between the colonial concept of 'empty land' (like in Australia, ignoring the people who were living there, or indeed the US), and a similar concept used to justify conquest of obviously more populous and urbanised places like India, one example being with this kind of accusation about women - that the people there were 'savages and weren't treating their women properly' (betraying of course the accuser's view of women, as property without agency), and that a 'white coloniser' would have a better idea about how to 'treat women' (property, like land) than the native inhabitants. I suppose related to the liberal and religious concept of the civilising 'burden' of the coloniser. But we have seen this used very recently, with Afghanistan.

      In any case, thanks for the link!

      • @Kaplya11•5 months ago

        Yeah it’s written by one of those realist think tanks (personally I have some issues with the realist takes despite their seemingly rational argument but this paper is quite clinical and objective from a materialist standpoint and makes compelling argument for the case it is presenting).