The only public statement I've read is that the Russian Army is concerned the Ukrainians would use their Nuclear Power Plants as dirty bombs.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...
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.
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.
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.
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).
Completely off-topic, but what a strangley formatted document. The pages of the PDF are 9x8 in.
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.
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.
That does not say anything about English speaking people other then their language is rich and can express nuance.
Same can be said about the west. What matters is that there is free press, call it "picking your favorite lies", but it makes a big difference.
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.
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).
However the significant bit here is the fact that Bush was re-elected despite lying about the reasons going to war.
He could have left a great legacy, but his addiction to power has become his ruin. And quite possibly that of Ukraine and Russia.
...this time.
That's not a strategic lie, that's a pathological lie. That's someone who simply cannot tell the truth.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
> "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."
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-sa...
In case it's not obvious, the point of obstructing justice is to prevent facts from coming out.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/obstruction-justice-mueller-repo...
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.
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.
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.