I really despise this line of thinking. Are you saying you can't care about objectively innocent peoples homes, cities, lives being destroyed unless you have in depth knowledge of the regions history and energy politics?
And honestly your assumption that most of these people don't remember Georgia or 2014 is ridiculous.
It's the rush to only parrot the list of acceptable ideas that the media tells you that people are allowed to think, emotionally overreact and go out of your way to try and not try and understand the conflict, trying to shut Russia out of the world that's going to really escalate this. It's important to understand this region better: Russia has been talking about NATO/EU encroaching on them for about 20 years. There's bad stuff going on all around the region and most people are ignorant about everything other than the current news cycle.
And yes, I stand firm on people not having a clue about recent history . Most people don't remember that they were in a state of mass panic about Omicron and Covid less than a month ago and have seamlessly transitioned to caring about the latest bad thing (TM) that they're told to consume.
I'm simply an individual trying to learn and reason through some of these issues because I think it's very important both to me and the world.
1) Given the existence of cancel culture, as somebody who holds unorthodox views, I think others' bad ideas represent a large threat to my well-being so it's reasonable for me to care deeply about how people arrive at their conclusions based on what information they take in and process.
2) There are indeed serious and important issues in the world: and solving one of them the wrong way would lead to really bad outcomes. The situation we have right now where one of least self-aware groups of people on the planet (journalists) are able to use emotional manipulation to influence the world into taking the complicated risk-management decision that they feel is best is very concerning to me.
I’m sorry you feel threatened by other people’s ideas.
> There are indeed serious and important issues in the world: and solving one of them the wrong way would lead to really bad outcomes
That sounds right to me about any important decision, at the individual or the global level.
> one of least self-aware groups of people on the planet (journalists)
That doesn’t sound like a fair or even knowable criticism to me, just bashing an entire profession.
At a fundamental level, the collection and distribution of information is important for decision making, so there’s probably an advantage for groups that can share information effectively. I personally would love access to quality, well sourced information. But everyone is biased. If you started writing articles, I don’t think it would be as easy to remove your personal bias as you might think. It’s easier than ever to be an independent journalist with a substack account, or a self-hosted WordPress blog, so you’re of course free to try and improve upon what we currently have.
Are there ways to objectively measure narrative penetration, and how far back did the previous approved narrative slid on some objective measures: "eyeballs time spent" or something?
Whatever narrative tugs at the heartstrings the most and gets the most clicks and shares becomes the only permitted reality that the mainstream public and government functions off of.
The public is wholly ignorant of that region’s history and energy politics and everything involved yet yet they think they’re experts. You have people who are literally crying about this conflict and trying to get involved solely because the media told them that they had to care: most of these people never even noticed Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine before because they were never told to care.