As you should! It's actually exactly what authoritarian governments like Russia do. They silence and control information, blocking out other sources aside from their own propaganda. Everything else is said to be dangerous disinformation.
Personally I dont see how anout with more than a single IQ point can hold such a belief honestly in good faith, but clearly plenty do.
Essentially, they can't give you the details. Sometimes they lie, for national security, operational security, or even pathological, political reasons.
I guess the one takeaway that's stuck in my mind from this morass is that the people who led us to war in Iraq should have gone to jail. That would have been the only way to maintain the integrity of the security apparatus they misused to trick their nations into going along with it.
Just FYI as how the east is looking at this.
Sure, and I think that's why Russia more or less got away with Crimea and Donbas. But this kind of open invasion seems like a different level, something we haven't seen (post-9/11 notwithstanding) since Serbia/Kosovo, and indeed that's the parallel Russia often draws - but the justification for that was a well-documented massacre of civilians. Is that kind of thing evidenced in what the Azov Battalion et al are accused of? (Genuine question, I'm interested to hear what's being said on every side).
I don’t disagree with this, but I don’t think the burden should entirely be on us common folk. We are the ones being lied to. We can’t only focus on “staying informed,” it is critical that we start demanding the truth from the institutions we’re supposed to trust. If they don’t change, we need new institutions.
I agree we need new and federated institutions — particularly around things like intelligence.
There isn't much in the way of alternatives either. When they do pop up, they are coincidentally labeled as "misinformation," and censored.
The west is not remotely like Russia in this matter.
No, not such as that, because there are other places you can talk about it and reporters are free to report it in their own publications.
Meanwhile in Russia, mentioning things that go against the official line gets you actually imprisoned for years.
Get a grip. You are not being oppressed. You may need to spend less time consuming social media though, and realise that what facebook or twitter allow is not the whole world, just a noisy subset. You are allowed to post your hunter biden conspiracy theories elsewhere, you can even stand up your own website and post it all there, and the worst that will happen is people will laugh at you. In Russia you are not.