https://yle.fi/news/3-12345301
Flying is getting harder and harder so while the borders are still open (there is talk of martial law in Russia, which, even though it was just denied does not seem to have much effect on calming things down, in fact the denial seems to have the opposite effect), people are getting out via the land, either by car or by train.
I want to highlight this, because I think it illustrates my point about propaganda. I dug around for a source on that statement, and this appears the most reliable source[0]. An anonymous EU official picking up on "signs". Again, this also may be totally true, but it's presented in such a flimsy way, how can a reasonable person be expected to believe it at face value?
Am I saying the quiet part out loud? Should I not question the propaganda if it is something that I think helps the situation? It's not my nature, but it seems like that's what people are doing.
0. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-says-it-is-picking-u...
Maybe for you it is strange, but for me it is a fairly logical next step in a series of domestic escalations. The same happened in Poland in the 80's in response to the Solidarity movement, authorities used it to be able to use the military against their own civilians. Not that that worked, but that's besides the point, they did in fact try.
And just like with the invasion being a total fabrication of the West right up to the point that it was a fact you could of course do the same thing with martial law.
But some elements of martial law are already present today, some more may follow and who is to say when it becomes enough to say that it actually happened? Would you be satisfied with 8000 people jailed and a ban on the media to report the facts or will it take a Russian army battalion shooting at protestors? Maybe some kids protesting the war jailed? Oh, sorry, that already happened. Or do you believe that is Western propaganda?
One way is transparent, re-enforces critical thinking, while the other way is "believe this because we told you."
The main thing that right now seems to keep martial law at bay in Russia is because, besides being a tacit admission that not all is well and that there is an internal problem in Russia that that would require Putin to give the military more power, something that he is absolutely loathe to do because that very same power could be used against him. But if not for that I am pretty sure we'd already be there.
No you haven't discovered a vast EU-wide conspiracy or someone 'saying the quiet part out loud'. Nobody knows what is going on and naturally there is lots of speculation to fill the void.
(Not suggesting that that’s the case here; just that you shouldn’t forget how e.g. the US CIA engineers coups in other countries, when thinking about how other large states work.)
Someone in your way? Start a rumor that they do X and then attack them for not stepping down from power. Want to check if people agree or disagree with something? Start a rumor on Friday, monitor for responses, fight in rumors during the week-end and next week, if the rumors align, maybe start that something.
I don't see how rumors are never propaganda.
Yes there are rumours, are they propaganda? I don’t think so in this case - young male Russians are being questioned at the border, flights are being stopped, and the idea has been floated of forced conscription of anti-war protesters. Even mentioning the word war is a crime. Russia is very close to martial law already and I’m not surprised there is speculation about it.
Also, quite frankly no one in the west cares much if Putin imposes martial law, it’s already a pariah state and a dictatorship. As propaganda this rumour would be pretty useless.
Yes, in some sense. This is your own internal process of turning all the information into a picture of what is really going on.
When you start projecting it on other people and making judgements about whether they are “reasonable”, you’re going find out that they have a very different picture from you. There are a lot of people who have lived or worked in that part of the world, speak the local languages, and have a much higher ability to filter the news stream into an accurate picture of what’s actually happening on the ground.
https://tass.ru/politika/13980355
(Clearly very a pro-Russia site fyi)
Does anyone understand what this means: “Russia is considering the decriminalization of economic crimes, especially damages”?
Very interesting site to read! Perhaps you linked the wrong article though, that one is about Russia being kicked out of some EU groups and them saying they don’t care.
FTA: "Buses travelling from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga are also fully booked."
How do I prove:
- This is true without actually seeing the data that buses are fully booked
- Yle is a trustworthy media outlet and what they are saying is true
- The Finnish government isn't booking the buses and then telling the media that buses are booked
For the record - I believe that Russians are trying to do exactly what you said and what the article says. I trust this.
However, this is precisely the issue - what outlets do you really trust? Stuff that comes from BBC? CNN? New age "influencers" on YT/TikTok? This is the problem.
People say the same stuff about the number of Russian dead claimed by the Ukrainian defense forces. Are they exaggerating? Probably yes. Is it with a factor that changes the facts in a meaningful way? Probably not, given the portion that has been independently verified. Even if that's all there is then it is already enough to count as fact, and it very, very likely isn't all there is.
Something similar is happening here: the amount of evidence that Russian cosmopolitans are reading the writing on the wall is ample, it is reflected in the restrictions in how much capital Russians can take with them abroad, it is reflected in the number of trains running (those things are pretty hard to fake) and it is reflected in all of the personal stories and cries for help from Russians to try to get settled where ever they arrived.
Personally I won't give them quarter until the last of the Ukrainian refugees has been settled, but I do believe the fact that many Russians are fleeing Russia while they can. But they are fleeing for economic reasons, Ukrainians are fleeing so they can stay alive.
see: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
Or applying your comment to a domestic news event. Suppose fox news say there's a school shooting. How do you prove:
- This is true without actually going to the school to see the dead bodies
- The US government isn't hiring crisis actors and then telling the media that there's a shooting
The ruble has declined and the Russian stock market has been closed all week. Russia has been sanctioned. Russia is sending people to fight in a war. There are rumors (whether true or not) that Russia is planning to close borders, impose martial law, etc. Those are all verifiable facts.
In the face of the above, of course people are considering leaving Russia. That is just smart and human nature.
On one hand I do agree that there is a lot of propaganda on all sides, so one should be especially critical about data sources.
On the other hand, I think then that using Google Trends data for this is a pretty excellent source for this data, and a prime example of something that would be difficult to game. It's publicly available, so anyone can verify it. I guess a true conspiracist might think Google is faking the data, but that seems extremely unlikely and bizarre, given that there are whole swaths of terms you could search for to make similar points.
You may reach a different conclusion based on what a 4-5x increase in "Visa" searches means, but if anything this would be an example of data I would have a ton of confidence in.
The other thing that is great about Google Trends data is that is essentially a window into "things people are actually searching for when they think nobody is looking." Yes, I realize the irony in that every Google click is tracked, but you'll get much more "honest" results looking at Google Trends data vs. plain interviews. For example, the country with the highest volume of "gay porn" searches per capita is Kenya, a country that is pretty vehemently anti-gay. The reasoning behind that is open to interpretation (I suspect many people are just genuinely curious given images of gay relationships in the media are so much less acceptable there), but for a society that basically deems gay sex extremely deviant, there sure are a lot of folks interested in what it looks like.
EDIT>> This is wrong! I am able to confirm the Google Trends data now.
Are they all lying?
https://news.err.ee/1608521780/passenger-numbers-on-lux-expr...
Hopefully, I will get to come visit again once this all calms down.
So much uncertainty, that you don’t belive anything.
Not even truth.
It's a 'shocker' sequence, but then someone explains "one of the journalist was involved into staging false interviews before". So I thought it would be nice to share the article talking about the previous staged interviews, as a cautious tale for all to avoid responding to shocking civilian shot videos. Few minutes ago someone told me that the article may be staged by another group to spread lies about brit journalists.
"lies" all the way up
It's not that these checkpoints aren't prone to shooting at people. Here's a Twitter thread[1] by an American journalist where the unit he's embedded with kills people in an ambulance that didn't stop at a checkpoint. Again, the ambulance is labelled as Russian saboteurs.
Keep in mind 7 days ago the New York Times were reporting about intense gun battles in Kyiv[2], which again, were blamed on undercover Russian squads. "Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian news site, reported combat 400 yards from Maidan Square in central Kyiv." But there hasn't been much evidence of a Russian invasion of the city yet from what I can find, or that the city is crawling with Russian soldiers.
I think it's at least an open question right now of where the violence inside the city is coming from (and how much of it could be connected to flooding the civilian population with guns).
[1] https://twitter.com/terrelljstarr/status/1498067362595155968 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/25/world/russia-ukraine...
A troll would pretend to support Putin and so on.
Also I forgot TikTok. Plenty of vids there. Owned by the Chinese. You can check that out.
But hey, keep swallowing that Russian propaganda...
To what exactly are you referring? Everything I wrote in my comment is true. RT is factually banned on Telegram.
Just don't make conclusions like the entire country wants to leave.
No matter what any of the media say my conviction with this conflict is that Putin is a psychopath. You can make pretty good predictions about his intent and how the conflict will unfold, and who is doing what, and what atrocities which side are willing to commit, based on that fact alone. For example, everyone who thought he wouldn't invade and was shocked when he did saw him as a tactician rather than a psychopath. If you saw him as a psychopath his invasion of Ukraine was inevitable. The thing that shocked me was how slow-rolling the build-up to an invasion is, and how many people are not willing to call a spade a spade. I thought it had to be done in secret, but you can do it in the open if you just lie to people about your intentions. You have the history of his actions in Syria, Chechnya, and Crimea to know that at least what Western media is saying about Russia has a lot of precedent.
Now you could say I'm wrong about that but again that's my conviction and I'll need more than a little proof to sway me from it (because bad actors love to use just a little bit yet deceiving proof to sway people from their loosely held convictions)
"If you die with COVID they put you down as having died from COVID, therefore they're trying to inflate the numbers" is an explanation. If you aren't good at coming up with multiple alternatives and selecting the best one, you're likely to select the one that fits, or the one someone already gave you, and not the real one.
>More Russians are asking Google “how to leave Russia” than have done so in 18 years since such data became public.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Good point, here's the Russian translation of "how to leave Russia", which doesn't appear to be much different than the English version.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
EDIT>> This is wrong! My mistake, when I translated, I accidentally switched the source country back to USA.
This presentation is interesting because it is a data presentation that is large, direct, and open: Of Russian IPs using a Google, search terms associated with leaving are going up, even pre-war. Your own research can now be on alternative hypotheses like maybe Google became that much more popular in the last few months in spikey per-keyword patterns, or that the Russian population using Google is big (some X%) but has opposite beliefs of all non-Google users. For both, you can check against something like Yandex, which has a similar feature.
The first amendment is a double edged sword, but all false statements need to be challenged so that a free and Democratic society can function properly. The problem is that lies are cheap to produce, and the truth is expensive to prove.
That imbalance of cost is a real struggle to overcome.
You can question the lack of a perspective in reporting, or doubt the framing of provable information without losing faith in the system. It should almost be seen as your job as a responsible news-reader to look past the propaganda (i.e. systemic limits on information conveying) as best you can, while not becoming entirely jaded or entirely untrusting.
But I ignore him since the enlightened here told me it’s all propaganda.
This article sounds reasonable, even logical - and it may be, but I was manipulated by so much propaganda in the past weeks about the Ukraine situation that I no longer trust any source without verification from multiple sources that I seek out.
Propaganda is by far most effective on those who believe themselves immune to its effects. The first casualty of war is the truth.
For example, how many of you believe you are not manipulated by Ads and yet companies spent billions and billions to advertise to you. Why would they do that if it had no impact?
At the end of the day, all I can do is go off the track record of those sources, and that’s why for pretty much any media source the best we can say is tend and fairly accurate because even if they are telling the truth most of the time, there is a question on if it contains all the context and nuance.
The first amendment is absolutely not a double-edged sword. The alternative is STRICTLY worse. You end up with governments, like China's, who lie and challenging that lie is punishable.
Calling it a double-edged sword is not meant to say it’s not valuable. It absolutely is. It’s the bedrock of our democracy in the US. The question is only, how do we make sure the truth is more widely known than the lies?
> The question is only, how do we make sure the truth is more widely known than the lies?
Listen to alternative perspectives. Engage with ideas you don't agree with. Be aware of your biases, and other peoples' biases. Defend your perspectives using reason and evidence, not emotion or moral values (note: reason and evidence are the only things we can somewhat objectively agree on; though we still have to be aware of people doing shady stuff with studies and using statistics to misrepresent real-world phenomena).
The trend I'm starting to see is that a lot of disconnects stem from ignorance.
Whether it is by state decree (see Covid), state-subsidized media self-censorship (see Canada), de-platforming (see Google/Twitter/Facebook), or cancel culture - the effects of censorship are equally chilling.
Free speech is only legally protected from government intervention - and only in the US. Canada for example imposes strict limits on allowable speech.
I stand with Elon Musk as a free speech absolutist so I think it is high time we revisit free speech protections beyond their current boundaries. I struggle to call our current system truly free.
Would you say we should believe major russian news orgs? Healthy skepticism is required, especially during times of war. There is a reason why each side banned the other's media, social media, etc. So that they can spread propaganda without pushback. The first casualty in war is the truth.
trust is at an all time low and getting lower