Hacker News Reader

Comment by kikokikokiko | Hacker News Reader

This whole Ukraine war teached me a thing I haven't noticed before: I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.

It's a sad state of affairs, but since the invasion started my only source of "news" related to the war is a few, and I a said a FEW, Youtube channels.

I'm brazilian and one channel I recommend is Fernando Ulrich's channel. He interviewed (in english) a lot people (ukrainians, russians), commented on the geopolitical causes for the war a month before it started for real etc.

Through his channel I found the lectures by John J Mearsheimer, and that's the only reason I can say that I "understand" what the hell is happening over there.

It's a real shame that a financial advice channel, from a 3rd world country, is the last bastion of thrust I can find in order to get informed about the most important geopolitical event of the last decade. The mainstream media/tech oligopoly are a disgrace to mankind.

View on HN

A very related problem is, that people often want to have information that simple doesn't exists or is not obtainable at this moment.

When I worked at a large news site, every time there was a significant event, people flocked to the usual sources immediately demanding answers NOW. Whoever gives any answer first or gives the most spectacular answer, wins. Be that traditional media, social networks, bloggers, politicians etc. Almost nobody cares about the veracity of the information if they feel good about themselves being informed and what they hear sounds right.

There is a ton a valid issues to be talked about when it comes about trustworthiness of different media. But I think also as societies we need to get better at living with ambiguity instead of basically asking to be click-baited constantly.

I replaced mainstream media with Breaking Points (https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints). I've found them to be far more reliable.

A fellow breaker! :) My go-to news source for context and perspective.

Yikes. Imagine replacing media outlets with a right-wing youtuber and thinking that's far more reliable.

Yikes. Imagine thinking Breaking Points is right-wing.

Can you please explain it, because I'm very curious what you believe is the truth.

> I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.

No, you can't. It really comes down to a choice of which unhinged violent group of psychopaths do you want to believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqKfSbhm6yo This is a great explanation of the anarchist perspective.

Great quote:

"Ukraine has been this mess for many many many years of people arguing about which of authoritarian control freaks should get violently dominate everybody. That is a question that doesn't have a right answer."

Choosing who sociopath to believe is way down the road (and in my opinion not necessary in the end to "believe" anyone, you ideally have your judgement to filter out the noise and get the however little information). The step we still have not gotten past is to be able to listen to all the psychopaths in the first place. At this moment, the psychopath with the most strength near you prohibits other psychopaths from being heard at all.

As the X-Files used to say, Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate

Liberals are trying to cancel Mearsheimer for his views on the causes of this war and his geopolitics in general. So fret not, soon you won't have ANY voice opposing American mainstream opinion.

> I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.

It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare: to create a feeling that you can't tell truth apart from fiction, and to force you into apathy and paralyze you, so you become unable to act and protect your interests. Russians are among the largest pushers of conspiracy theories from Covid to QAnon, and have been for a very long time, because it is cheap and very effective way to divide free societies into infighting groups. NYC station chief of Russian foreign intelligence used to visit public libraries to post conspiracy theories on Geocities in 1990s -- that's how important it was and remains.

They flood all available channels with utter nonsense to make people turn their brains off. Just today a general and the spokesperson for Russians Ministry of Defense tried to justify the war by saying that the United States was training migratory birds in secret Ukrainian laboratories to carry dangerous pathogens into Russia: https://redd.it/tb6sn8 Antivaxx groups have already switched to parroting such crap, because many of them are seeded by Russia.

By the way, Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe. You might as well read books by Nazis explaining why Germans had the right to Lebensraum in the East. Instead of precompiled knowledge provided by TV talking heads or authoritative-appearing "experts", I recommend building up knowledge from basic building blocks. Start by reading general histories of the regions you are interested in to understand historic difficulties that people in those places have faced over the past several centuries and what their current goals and motivations are. Then you don't need Mearsheimers to tell you what's going on, you can derive it from your knowledge. This applies to everything else too. If you know a thing or two about basic statistics, then you're much less likely to fall for bullshit narratives like Covid conspiracy theories from people who look trustworthy. Knowledge is power.

> Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe

Maybe they should have listened to that idiot when he suggested in 1993 that Ukraine retains some of its nuclear weapons to deter Russia from attacking it in the future.

And then what? Or do you mean the Americans should have listened to him? Eastern Europeans can't do anything but react to the USA's prodding in Mearsheimer and the like's view, they're just pawns to be played by the USA vs. the if-then AI known as Russia. The world is a 1 player game, everything that happens is ultimately due to the right or wrong decisions of the Americans

“ It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare”

were you born yesterday? do you not remember the iraq war? babies in incubators? vietnam? syrian gas attacks? russiagate? qanon? the 2014 ukraine coup? these are all things created by western TLAs. im not gonna read anything else you wrote but i noticed at the bottom you said

“knowledge is power”

wow thanks for that powerful insight!

Wow, thanks for an incredibly boring addition.

Except for Fox News, which breathlessly covered every new possible chemical weapons facility that the US captured, mainstream media pretty quickly concluded that there was no extant chemical weapons program in Iraq after the US entered. Russian media is still pretending that Ukraine is the aggressor, and there is no war.

Still waiting for the war crimes tribunal for the American military + Bush and friends.

There isn't going to be one for Russia either. That doesn't mean that the news media in the US is tightly controlled government propaganda or that the news media in Russia isn't.

> There isn't going to be one for Russia either.

I'm not so sure about this. What makes you believe so?

War crimes tribunals only happen for the loser after they submit to terms.

What makes you believe Russia will not end up losing?

Russia has far more resources than Ukraine, which has no interest in chasing the Russian army into Moscow and getting them to surrender anyway.

I was alive and watching the news back then, and this is bullshit. NYT didn't admit their screw-up until over a year after the war began. [0] I'm not sure CNN ever admitted it. Even worse, every time the previous ridiculous theory of war was exposed as nonsense, they were eager to transfer to the next ridiculous theory: WMDs, Saddam supposedly harboring aQ, fostering democracy, saving the Shiites, saving the women, saving the Kurds, saving the Yazidis, the surge, opposing MaS, opposing ISIS, opposing Iran, opposing corruption, stealing their oil, etc, blah, blah, blah.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

I was alive and watching the news, and you're completely wrong about TV news and the NY Times reporting, which freely admitted that Iraq didn't have a chemical weapons program (except for Fox News, which kept reporting that this time we found it without ever reporting that the last time wasn't what they suggested). The only thing that took a while was the apology for believing Bush administration sources in the run-up to the war.

The simple way to show that anyone on TV (besides e.g. "Democracy Now") got it right by a particular date would be to link to a recording or transcript of an example.

Simple. Every single news agency said as much. Here's one from two months after Baghdad was captured. http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/09/wmd.controversy/in...

Here's the NY Times less than a month into the invasion noting that no active chemical weapons program had been found and that the administration's words seemed to be shifting about whether they believed it would ever be found: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/world/a-nation-at-war-ill...

Meanwhile, those who watched Fox News were never told that the earlier finds were not ongoing chemical weapons programs: https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-republicans-wmds...

> Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe

Because .. you say so? His argumentation stands on its own. Yours on the other hand, doesn't. I suggest you practice what you preach after toning down calling your betters "idiots" and educate yourself.

> It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare

This was also overtly one of the goals of Trump's political messaging. In the past, American politicians merely hid or distorted unpleasant facts. Trump and his political strategists instead attacked the problem head-on, tapping into populist skepticism and anti-intellectualism in order to promulgate the idea that all truth is relative and that correctness is a matter of opinion.

Of course, all politicians benefit from this state of affairs. Hence all this empty "fact-checking" that actually just exacerbates the problem.

What you say about information warfare is certainly true, but one would be a fool to think only Russia does it.

Controlling opinions is a more terrifying weapon than even atomic bombs, because you can actually make use of it, every day, every minute, and it cannot be that easily regulated.

> It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare

They seem to have pretty smart people to be able to predict this behavior then. Doesn't mean this behavior should be condoned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com