anything is possible in war. if Ukraine was on the brink of losing everything and they had nuclear weapons, would they not use them against Russia? that's the whole point. if your state is about to cease to exist, you are desperate. for now, the war has not reached this point. if Ukraine where to try to use nuclear material now they would lose allies. but you don't know what the war will look like in 2 weeks. so I don't think it's fantasy.
No? Considering the nuclear power plants are in Ukraine, and whichever way the wind blows, it will at a minimum impact Ukrainians. And then you can't know where it will end up - maybe Russia, maybe Germany.
yes, whether Ukraine would actually launch such a bomb is debatable. it's not like it would change the tide of the war, it would be mostly for revenge. war is very unpredictable. I wouldn't rule out anything.
If the Ukranians are willing to sacrifice everything for the independence, chances are, they will get their independence, nukes or not. At least as long as they keep getting support from the west. If Russia keeps getting thousands or tens of thousands of body bags back each year, for 10, 20 or 30 years, eventually, they will tire of holding on to the Ukraine.
The cost may be millions of Ukrainian lives, so this all comes down to how much the Ukranian people is willing to endure for their eventual independence.
Every country has its propaganda and lies, but they're generally couched in half-truths. It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously. That's been a tradition for decades, as far as I know.
This is a deliberate part of KGB style propaganda. It's not designed to convince people of any specific lie, but rather so muddle things that people become cynical about knowing the truth period. There's a book on the topic where the title kinda tells the whole story: "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible"
With the internet and Google translate, you can easily go read for yourself. And it’s still pretty nutty with no western filter applied. The accidentally published victory unification speech is particularly crazy:
I think the gp was referring to the filter in your own brain, that was set up by watching western media.
The idea that you are somehow immune to this is unsustainable - I'm sure avid Putin fans feel the same, after all they have access to Google too.
It's just that we are privileged to live in a relatively free societies, where bias is self imposed groupthink as opposed to mandated by the government.
For an extreme version of this in action, you can see the early reporting in the American media of the Iraq invasion.
I was mostly referring to the filter outside the brain.
You are right that we also have filters inside our brains. But just like with the outside filter, we can make some efforts to get around them. Even if our efforts don't always lead to perfection.
To borrow your framing, collectively internal filters will manifest as emergent external filters. It can be considered emergent/systemic propaganda. Even the freest societies fall victims to this.
That's not at all to say we're doomed to be brainwashed; along what you're saying, with conscious awareness, effort, openness to reassess, and honesty (first and foremost to oneself) we can better ourselves and the social groups we're each part of.
Yes, I agree that it's pretty nutty. It's just that to actually verify that we have to do a bit more work, like you suggested; otherwise we might just be bullshitting ourselves.
It's certainly true for politicians too. Many politicians cherry-pick the facts that suit them best, but very few are so completely detached from reality as that guy was.
> It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously.
IIRC, the correct term is disinformation, and I believe the idea (at least sometimes) is more akin to "jamming" than any kind of persuasion (e.g. encourage passivity because it's too much effort to sort out the truth from the lies).
The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. And one of those (pravda) is a kind of a half-truth used to keep moving from the current situation.
Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.
>The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth.
I looked into this, and found this blog post [1]. The comments are quite interesting, but the main post points out this isn't much different from English. In English we use synonyms for truth/true (e.g. authentic, factual, legitimate, etc) and lie (e.g. fabrication, falsehood, misrepresentation, disinformation) with different meanings too.
Maybe we shouldn't use vocabulary of a language to draw/imply further conclusions about a culture.
Pravda means truth. Pravda was also name of state journal. The half-truth is said as half-pravda. English has many words for lie too: misinformation, lie, untruth, false, deceit, deception, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fabrication, falsehood, fiction, forgery, misrepresentation, perjury, slander, tale. I got them from synonyms dictionary.
That does not say anything about English speaking people other then their language is rich and can express nuance.
English has a lot of synonyms, redundancy, alternatives, ways-to-say, and overlapping constructs. In that context, the many English words for lie is an uninformative truth. English has so many words for lie because English has too many words for everything.
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, noted that people more easily believe colossal lies, totally out of whack with reality, exactly because, well, who would say such a wild thing if it were not the terrible truth?
But there's a real treath that he can become president again. The real problem is that there's big gap in how the democrats see the world vs how republicans see the world. From the outside it's really mindblowing how differently they see and interpret the world. And the same is happening all over the world.
When it comes to defense, republicans and democrats see the world similarly. It's the one topic which you could say there's no gap in their desires. Republicans and democrats place utmost value in the American hegemony.
That didn’t happen with Bush, who conjured up a premise with multiple lies in order to justify going to war. And then 3 years later, he got re-elected.
That was by far the most disappointing US election. Electing a bad president is clearly a risk of democracy, but re-electing a bad president, that's incomprehensible. And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.
> And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.
That election was 2004 of course. Reagan got 58.8% in 1984, so two decades prior (decades as you noted).
Obama got 52.9% in 2008. And prior to that for a Democrat? More than two decades prior, wherein Jimmy Carter barely scratched out a majority popular vote at 50.08% in 1976.
Lyndon Johnson of course got 61% in 1964. The monster that put us deep into Vietnam and wrecked the country got the highest popular vote percentage for the Democrats in the past century.
The two highest in modern US history, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. What does it say about the people of the 1960s and 1970s? It says a lot of terrible things about their ability to judge character and make rational decisions.
I think parent actually meant plurality, at least that’s how I read it.
However these numbers are quite interesting. Some people attribute Nixon’s second election to his promise of withdrawing from Vietnam and one can easily blame the war for the problematic 1968 election for the democrats. LBJ was probably even gonna be the first sitting president to loose in a primary before he announced his non-bid.
I’m guessing the 1964 for election he was pretty much just riding the popularity of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. (Plus the war hadn’t escalated at this point).
Definitely a strong case for term limits. If Putin had left after 8 years, he would now be considered a great president. He wasn't perfect, but he stabilised the Russian economy after the bankruptcy of the 1990s.
He could have left a great legacy, but his addiction to power has become his ruin. And quite possibly that of Ukraine and Russia.
I mean… Trump was lying about how many electoral votes he got. It was easily verifiable. Also such a stupid lie because he did have enough electoral votes to win the election anyway. But still! He fabricated that number. He was also truly in pathological liar territory.
Also consider his insistence that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama's, when the photos clearly showed that wasn't the case. It's a completely meaningless lie. He doesn't accomplish anything if people were to accept it as truth, and it was quite obviously at odd with reality, and yet he just kept going on about it.
That's not a strategic lie, that's a pathological lie. That's someone who simply cannot tell the truth.
No matter how much I consider Trump a dimwit liar, I can't completely shake off the other explanation, that of yesmen telling him whatever they thought he would like to hear. I suspect that in a position like that, even making up falsehoods is conveniently delegated. You don't lie, you just select convenient sources to parrot. Putin must have spent recent years in an even worse yesmen-bubble, the shift from him being considered dangerously competent to him being considered dangerously senile should really not come as surprising as it does.
I'll take the downvotes too. We had a president who idolized Putin and still praises him to this day. If we think this sort of thing can't happen here, or aren't clear eyed about the threat he and his enablers still pose, we are in even more danger.
Yes, propaganda and political lies is certainly not confined to Russia or backwater dictatorships. In America you also had that president's opponents concocting lies and peddling insane and baseless conspiracy theories for years about him colluding with Putin to hack the election and other such nonsense. That was even more infantile and simple than the propaganda that comes out of Russia.
Everything in the Mueller report was true. No republican has denied that, or come to any other conclusion in their committee reports. Trump was cleared in the impeachment not because of the contents of the report, but whether what happened technically constituted collusion, or whether republicans felt that convicting him was necessary for what he and his associates did in fact do.
This is what the last report from the republican majority senate intelligence committee wrote [0]:
> It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era.
The Mueller report clearly states they did not find evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded or conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. That nonsense was all a conspiracy theory. For example Adam Schiff never had the "ample evidence" for it, despite being on the house intelligence committee. That was bald faced and repeated lie peddling this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately many fall for these "stolen election" conspiracy theories. Probably as a coping mechanism more than anything.
I know you're not responding in good faith, but I want to respond with actual quotes from the Mueller report, since this is on a public forum.
> "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
> "[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment."
> “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” Mueller wrote. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
> "the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation."
You're the one not responding in good faith because I never said anything one way or the other about obstructing justice. That's clearly a far more complicated and nuanced question seeing as he was head of the executive at the time.
The idea he colluded with Putin to hack the election was always an utter baseless fantasy. There was no evidence for it ever. Not from Mueller, not from Schiff, not from 17 intelligence agencies. It was a conspiracy theory.
You ever wonder about people who fall for baseless conspiracy theories about stolen elections? How could they possibly fall for these politicians and other assorted nutjobs telling them the election was stolen, without ever providing the evidence? Dumb uneducateds! They're nothing like us enlightened intellectuals.
Your red herring arguments and whataboutism is noted. Stretching arguments about obvious ties to russia to being "election = stolen", while ignoring the actual 40℅ of the country who still believes trumps bullshit. I will also note that there were dozens of confirmed contacts between trump and Russia and you see the bromance still playing out to this day.
I'm clearly saying you didn't fall for the baseless idiotic conspiracy theories about Biden stealing the election or Trump colluding with Putin to hack the election, or being a "foreign agent". Not sure what you're all worked up about.
And I'm not talking about "obvious ties to Russia" whatever that means (everyone seems to have weird ties and uranium sales and gas company deals with Russia, Ukraine, etc). I'm talking about the delusional baseless conspiracy theory that Trump colluded or conspired with Putin to hack or otherwise influence the election. That was the conspiracy theory that so many were repeating and so so many gullible people fell for.
There were world-wide protests against that war [0]. You might consider that many of the people commenting here will have been involved in those protests, or are otherwise well aware that the justifications were a huge flight of fantasy. That doesn't mean that current news from the Russian media isn't also a huge flight of fantasy.
"Democratic" is used as a thought-terminating cliche. Just a few years ago Ukraine had an insurrection because of their election results and overturned the election to install a new leader. It's a corrupt kleptocratic state very similar to Russia, it's just more of the money comes from American interests than in Russia, and that upsets the Russian kleptocrats who don't want American influence in Ukraine.
Similarly, although Ukraine is clearly much more peaceful relative to Russia, there has been low-level conflict for years (including violence in the insurrection and fighting in the contested territories) and there are verifiable claims of them having committed atrocities.
All this can be true and Russia can still be engaged in morally (strategically may be a different story) unjustified aggression.
That's objectively and demonstrably false. The revolution (not an insurrection) didn't happen because of election results (the election was in 2010, the revolution started at the end of 2013 and continued into 2014). It started because the president decided to halt the integration of Ukraine with the EU and was peaceful until the government had decided to escalate.
And if you're talking about the Orange Revolution from 2004, that was peaceful all the way through, and lead to a second round of the election, not installing a new leader.
I agree that remembering these events is a crucial enterprise in a moment like this.
And, since both wars are based on bombastic lies, it seems consistent, given this act of remembering, to call the aggressor in each to account.
With these memories still fresh in terms of the cognition of the collective internet, perhaps now we can begin to get serious about a future in which the streams of fantasy which are reliably produced by hegemonic states (or mutually-assured-destructive states) are muted indefinitely, and the capacity for capricious warfare stemming from them dismantled.
This whataboutism has to stop. One bad thing doesn't excuse another. Would you suggest that it's OK to use nuclear weapons because the US used two of them in WW2? I hope not.
The invasion of Iraq was based on lies and this is terrible. The invasion of Ukraine is based on lies and it is also terrible.
Didn't read it as whataboutism. Was more a call to consider the "ridiculous stream of fantasy being spewed out of <country> leader and media" is rhetoric which is almost always applicable somewhere. The spewing's given some credit elsewhere, just not here because they've been pretty cleanly labelled as the enemy. Also maybe because it's batshit, but the people who are unsure of that will have a harder time having a discussion about it because so many people are jumping to emotional or canned responses.
One thing that I've seen is "preemptive whataboutism" - essentially, when Russian state media make a wild unreasonable claim, one that's not merely false but invokes a "WTF how and why would someone even think of something like that??" feeling, then sometimes it turns out that this is something that they are planning or doing at the time, and that is why they have considered that this is a plausible thing that others might do as well and can be reasonably accused of actually doing.
I also noticed for a long time, bad actors tend to project their behavior on to others to try influence negative public opinion toward their opponents.
Seems a popular strategy as it acts as a seed for those who don't question, it provides plenty of false arguments to raise when debating an issue.
I'm not sure I understand you. Of those two Ukraine is surely more likely to use a dirty bomb; purely because they don't have access to a traditional nuclear arsenal.
If Russia wants to use Nuclear weapons then they only need to enter the codes. That would probably be the final straw for western powers putting boots on the ground though.
Now Russia has control of the power plant and actual means to do it, if they decide that they want to depopulate that region a bit. Launching nukes might trigger a retaliatory strike, so I don't think that it was ever on the table.
