this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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From the CBS article on this:
Who out there thinks anyone but Russia is the 'main obstacle to peace'? I don't even think that Russian bots believe they're not the aggressor. What the fuck happened to rationality or even common sense?
@krashmo @Sunshine
"I donβt even think that Russian bots believe theyβre not the aggressor."
You should watch street interviews in russia. They live on another planet. Out of touch with reality.
I would not be surprised by the bots being brainwashd, too.
Don't forget that official Russian media (like any other) is heavily censored and influenced by the government's interests, so they won't show people who don't think that way on purpose. Plus those who disagree might just outright tell reporters to go fuck themselves, instead of telling them their honest opinion, which would obviously not go live.
As for those brainwashd, in my experience, - most of them actually think very low of Ukraine and think that attacking it was absolutely, positively a good thing.
But the problem of grouping people appears again...
I am sure there are true believers out there but I mean among the general population of other countries, especially reporters. I put about as much stock in interviews with average Russians as I do the North Korean equivalent. There's enough social pressure to conform that even those who disagree with the narrative are unlikely to say so on camera.
While hitchhiking to China, SEA and India in 2015, I spent 2 months in Ukraine. It became such a long time because I fell in love there and started a relationship with a girl living there. Then, I bought her plane tickets to India and continued my way by hitchhiking. So, I spent several weeks hitchhiking in the Russia after having been a considerable time in Ukraine.
More than every other driver who gave me a ride told me about how Ukraine is a "dangerous place", "full of bandits on all roads" and especially how "Russian-speakers are treated very badly". I kept telling them that my girlfriend was a Russian-speaker, that I lived a normal everyday life in a city where quite precisely half of the people were Ukrainian-speakers and my friends lived their life exclusively in Russian language, with zero problems ever. Even when I was visiting Zakarpattja, where less than 5% of people speak Russian as their mother tongue, there was no problem at all from my friends speaking Russian.
But the Russian drivers... When I told them that my experience contradicts what they were telling, not even one of them said anything along the lines of "oh, interesting to know!" Instead, they kept telling me that I was wrong. I was told numerous times that the Ukrainians had only shown me what they wanted me to see. When I told them that I had spent a lot of time doing things by myself, and travelled between cities by myself, they said: "They didn't let you see everything". It was very clear that they were defending their own sanity by refusing to see things in any other way than the official truth. It was not that they were afraid to speak their mind, it was very clearly that they were afraid to accept incorrect thinking creep in their minds!
Sounds a lot like the MAGA people I know. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Propaganda is such an unbelievably strong tool. Just look at the Western world with its seemingly unlimited access to information, knowledge and education and how easily people are convinced of some bullshit.
Russia was never a "free" country but stumbled from one autocracy into the next while the uneducated peasants stayed mostly uneducated peasants through the centuries.
In retrospect, the "information age" should be renamed to the "disinformation age."
I think it just was all too fast and we got overtaken by the amount we suddenly had access to. And while extremists have no issue walking over corpses to use this new stuff for their causes and can therefore act much quicker and more decisive than the more reasonable parts of society who still have/want to care about their weakest links and have to be much more careful.
Also, it has shown that at least my German goverment hates progress and everything that would actually needs them to be decisive and get out of their comfort zone in any way, shape or form.
I'm not sure speed was the issue, except possibly in terms of Free Software development struggling to keep parity with proprietary software development.
I think the major problem was lax antitrust and consumer protection laws, and/or failure to enforce them, especially by old and computer-illiterate legislators. Perhaps even worse, when they did try to get informed, the "experts" they decided to listen to tended to be exploitative tech bros instead of academics and others with more egalitarian/altruistic points of view.
Some of the policies we should have adopted, but didn't:
Your points do make sense for a layman like me but I have honestly never thought this much about it.