391–400 of 452 posts
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Belief From a country or countries where people are not free to inform themselves or to speech openly about opinions , that's where propaganda have are easily spread..
US banned Russian media for not spreading US narrative. Are you going to lecture the world about freeze peach?
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I have the same misgivings in reaction to your comment as the siblings comments mention about gatekeeping... but at the same time, I agree with you. And I'm one of the people you mention. Speaking solely for myself, your description of me, someone seeking smarter people than myself and mostly chiming in on political/business things, it is insightful and spot on. I don't contribute much, if any, to highly technical di…
I've been trying to correct that in myself as well, seeking out more technical conversations where my statements can be clearly evaluated to be true or false based on technical merits, and thus valuable to anyone reading it.
Unfortunately, a part of nurturing a certain type of community, is to make it slightly unapproachable to those you don't want in it. I think the very plain css of the site already does a great job of that, but I wonder if it's still not enough to curate the community long term.
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Russians lie, but history tells us that so does everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPe5f5dcrGE (Why Leaders Lie?)
The US lied* in 2003 to invade Iraq. Iraq was an autocracy that had previously invaded its neighbors multiple times and used chemical weapons against its own ethnic minorities. Ukraine is a democracy, and has no recent history of aggression. *At worst case. At best, they didn't verify too closely intelligence that said what they wanted it to say.
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For the most part I agree but the Soviets were integral. Without the Eastern front taking up so much of the enemy resources, the Western front would have been very different.
After they were forced to switch sides. Before, they did their own share of conquest and genocide in eastern Europe [1,2,..], and the Allies generously let them keep those countries after the war. But all is forgiven and forgotten if one ends up on the Right Side of History. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
If you want to categorize what the USSR did in that period as conquest and genocide would you say the same about the US annexing Hawai'i? I don't know where you're getting "forgiven and forgotten" from given that you can't talk about the USSR without someone bringing up historical events they don't understand. The Holodomor, Katyn massacre, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact are all common offenders here.
And it was the collapse of the USSR + subsequent privatization of state enterprises at bargain bin prices that created the oligarchs that today are Putin's power base. The US & UK also intervened to put Putin into power in 1999, continuing a long-standing tradition of destabilizing regions and not really caring until the consequences spill over into a country like Ukraine that "looks like us" and live in "a civilized country with McDonalds"
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Well, to be fair if you remove restrictions then it is the Western version of events that will rules as they have the established platforms and money to spread info. To see their power look at the French poll of who won them the World War. It became 20% in the recent decades from 57% for Russia https://www.france24.com/en/20190601-who-won-wwii-russias-ro...
The idea that the Soviet Union won WWII is itself propaganda and ignores the contributions of many, many nations, not to mention the entire Pacific war. Also, the liberation of France was exclusively the western allies.
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Just piggybacking on your great comment here. The U.S. also has biolabs in China, or funds them, or has enough involvement that it's equivalent to what they're doing in Ukraine so maybe Russia should invade China next using their own biolab justification.
> their own biolab justification. Except this is not a justification used for invasion.
Maybe they could invade China for some drummed up reason (reunite the communist world idk) and then find these labs and talk about them there too?
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No there isn’t, you’re spreading misinformation in a laughably obvious way.
Nervously laughable dis-misinformation, perhaps.
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After they were forced to switch sides. Before, they did their own share of conquest and genocide in eastern Europe [1,2,..], and the Allies generously let them keep those countries after the war. But all is forgiven and forgotten if one ends up on the Right Side of History. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
This really egregiously rewrites the history in which the nascent USSR was rebuked by every single European nation it tried to enter into a defense treaty with against Germany. I'm not going to spoon-feed, but here's a source from mainstream Western media: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/322... If you want to categorize what the USSR did in that period as conquest and genocide would you say t…
That does not imply eastern European states joined the Soviet union willingly.
> If you want to categorize what the USSR did in that period as conquest and genocide would you say the same about the US annexing Hawai'i?
Unless Hawai'i joined willingly, it is by definition conquest, yes. I'm not aware of any subsequent nationality or ethnicity based mass killings, but if they took place, that is, again, genocide by definition.
> you can't talk about the USSR without someone bringing up historical events they don't understand.
You are correct, I don't fully understand that part of history. Could you explain how using military force to expand the Soviet empire wasn't conquest, or how the Holodomor wasn't genocide?
> The US & UK also intervened to put Putin into power in 1999, continuing a long-standing tradition of destabilizing regions and not really caring until the consequences spill over into a country like Ukraine that "looks like us" and live in "a civilized country with McDonalds"
You disprove your point in the same sentence that you make it. Russians look very similar to Ukrainians, and they've had McDonald's since 1990, while Ukraine got its first in 1997, and has less than half as many McDonald's per capita as Russia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonal...
The propaganda is also very strong on Chinese social media (especially Wechat). I leave in France and I know a few Chinese person that keep telling me that this war was mainly caused by USA, that the Ukraine president is a dictator and so on...
It is overly simplification. I think the sentiment in China is really not about supporting Russia; it is about anti-US. Because quite a lot of people in China think US is organizing an Eastern NATO, to "destabilize" the whole region. For example, the nuclear-powered marine deal with Australia, etc. Biden’s first year was much harsher on China than Russia. In 1999, NATO bombed the Chinese embassy, killing 3, that cert…
SEATO used to exist, and had the exact opposite effect. The destabilizing influence is an expansionist PRC.
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No foreign policy expert but it seems more complicated than that. China still does recognise Ukraine as independent in the sense it continues to push for respect of "territorial integrity". It's a key part of Chinese foreign policy, and is what China uses to maintain its false claim over Taiwan (which it sees as Beijing territory, notwithstanding that Taiwanese people see themselves as independent). Yet it still refu…
> notwithstanding that Taiwanese people see themselves as independent. It isn’t that cut and dry. Most Taiwanese people prefer the status quo, surely by no small measure due to the fact that an outright declaration of independence would provoke China, but still, people who paint the picture as black and white like you have are either advancing an agenda or simply ignorant of the facts on the ground in Taiwan.
I think you're conflating whether Taiwanese people see themselves as independent, on the one hand, and whether they wish to formally declare that, on the other.
"The majority of Taiwanese believe that Taiwan is already an independent country called the Republic of China. ... more than 70 percent of Taiwanese agree with this statement." [0]
Note that I never said the people of Taiwan want to formally declare independence, which may risk starting a war. I'm prepared to accept that many Taiwanese are content with a "status quo" of diplomatic ambiguity, but I never suggested otherwise.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/0...