You cannot be serious with that kind of belief
If you mean poison as in disinformation, then you'd be wrong there as well. We literally "bombed" Iraq with pamphlets from airplanes encouraging them to rise up against Suddam and we'd be there to support them; we didn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...
NATO and Europe did quite a lot to normalize relations with Russia. Russia was invited and became participant of the NATO program Partnership For Peace [0].
The program contains 6 areas of cooperation, which aims to build relationships with partners through military-to-military cooperation on training, exercises, disaster planning and response, science and environmental issues, professionalization, policy planning, and relations with civilian government
- Population will demand political influence.
- Mindset. A criminal thinks in terms of I win, you lose. Might makes right. Complete opposite of what makes up the dna of the free world.
Notice how on our part, helped via tech oligarchs, there is an incessant bombardment to undermine support for those values. Kremlin troll factories are a thing, but the Chinese are speading up rapidly in the information sphere too. Especially youngsters are targeted.
The war has already begun, but we don´t want to see it. And that is dangerous.
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You may also want to be careful (or not):
- all countries engage in these things
- how things are seem like how they seem, but this is very often not the case...and rather than consciousness raising warnings for such situations, it very often does the opposite
As always, I recommend a meta-perspective on geopolitical stories, it is much more fun than being a Normative, poorly constrained imagination actor like the vast majority of people.
And thus the disinformation campaign has succeeded, as you've turned off your brain and refused to address the threat.
Geopolitical affairs are indeed difficult to follow. It requires deep internal domain(s!) knowledge, which does not fit your average corporate media business model. The niche outlets that do have a capable editorial board are threatened by takeovers [1, 2] from the likes of Axel Springer [3]. 1 Billion USD for Politico. An idiotic sum for a buyer that small, Wikipedia might pique your interest [3]. That is not to say that Politico is useless now, but you can count on journalistic degradation over time.
But sweeping statements are not of help to get a sharper picture. Instead they risk promoting false equivalence and may turn participants(!) of democracies into passive nihilists. Which is precisely the aim of the foreign influence we are talking about.
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1. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/axel-springer-politico-...
2. https://countercurrents.org/2021/09/a-right-wing-german-news...
And if you do now: do you wonder if this is 100% coincidence, or oversight? How often do you hear the idea even discussed, as compared to, say, how often we hear about "misinformation", and the need for more "critical thinking"?
I am glad this situation has a substantial humorous aspect to it, otherwise I'd probably get stressed out about it.
The post you're responding to, already predicted and addressed this claim:
> Bothsidisms and False Equivalency are some of the common tools in muddying the information sphere.
Does it? The post in question observed 2 things:
1. Russia invests a lot in disinformation campaigns and spreading (conflicting, but that is part of their doctrine) narratives.
2. Bothsidisms and False Equivalency are some of the common tools in muddying the information sphere.
Is your point of contention with the truthfulness of either of these observations, or with their proximity to each other?
One might think skill in logic would prevent such things, but I'd expect most of the HN crowd is well above average in logic, yet few can't avoid having their cognition controlled by these sorts of simple memes.
The point is to invalidate whatever criticism is being made of the imperium
To craft such a take you don't even have to lie, you can take a (half) truth and meme your way to hide what should not be discussed.
This just works and is far more effective than fighter jets pro ruble spend.
The worrying things in the US should certainly be discussed, this is rather an understated point. In other comments I mentioned the war on terror for instance.
For that, you are not served by simplistic sound bytes.
I am glad that I find the mess you people have made of the world funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
It takes one hour to listen. Take notes and verify the facts afterwards. No disinformation there, much less Russian.
Just one rebuttal, but there are many more to be found on the internet.
https://euideas.eui.eu/2022/07/11/john-mearsheimers-lecture-...
Can you cite anything that he has actually said that even resembles this?