Re:YDB – An open-source Distributed SQL Database
by lotusmars on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @12:23PM
(#31085307)
One of the catalysts were probably 1999 bombings of apartment buildings[1] that were very suspicious (including one where FSB were actually caught planting hexogen by a local militia) and led to dramatic rise of Putin.
Along with crackdown on media it created a narrative where you have a strata that must have their rights removed and be hated by society. First it were "terrorists" and then to a different degree "opposition", "journalists", "LGBT", foreigners and Ukrainians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
I'm not equivocating them --what is happening there is monstrous, as is what's happening to a lesser degree in China and other places, and we are no way there. But the setting of narrative is the same. They are using narrative to achieve different goals. However, the tool is propaganda exerted by undemocratic institutions.
I think we agree it's a dangerous tool that can be leveraged to do bad things. They are being used for bad things in Russia, we're not leveraging this tool for this purpose --but that does not prevent it from being used in the future for a bad purpose.