The Undeniable Street View

Not always, often they just say its an unfortunate consequence of the war.

I also think the use of "brainwashing" here is inappropriate. The issue here is divergent sources and selective sampling mostly, not some systematic rewriting of how they process evidence.

Give anyone access to just the information your average Russian is fed and they'll reach a similar conclusion.

So I completely disagree here, because it's not an either or. You're right that people brainwashed into supporting Russia will, in certain circumstances, accept that the destruction is real but attribute it to Ukraine. And I completely agree with your pessimism.

But the logic of propaganda, and of a brain consumed by propaganda, is a hall of mirrors full of contradictions. Where convenient, and where possible, the scale of destruction will be denied, and where it can't be denied, it will be explained away.

Propaganda can't be defeated by disputing individual one-off statements, the totality of the system of propaganda has to be shown to be so full of contradictions that it takes more effort to sustain than it does to accept the truth.

Dehumanisation of enemies is as old as the propaganda, and you are doing here exactly that. But to your defense, at least you used the term Zombie instead of Ann officially blessed Orc.

    Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.

    Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?

    Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?

    Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.

    Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

Avdiivka, Soledar, Bakhmut, Vuhledar, ... all the famous names of the current phase of the war look about the same, since they received about the same level of artillery pressure (kilotons, but of conventional explosives).

After they finish building all the new apartment blocks [1]. And Bakhmut currently looks way worse than Mariupol ever did, but I guess the West's attention has mostly shifted elsewhere.

[1] https://twitter.com/MKlarname/status/1635543087509323777

Russia is sending guys into nightclubs on weekend nights in Moscow and St Pete to snatch able-bodied men off of dance floors and forcibly toss them into the busses to replenish their slave armies.

I don't know how long that is a viable strategy. Then again, I don't know how long Ukraine's defense is viable.

My impression is that by now, both sides have heavily bombed some areas.

[1] That word depends on which newspaper you read.

| It's absolutely fantastic to me how people can just suspend reality and start believing the most absurd notions.

There are three specific components to this.

* It's important to understand, that brains are fundamentally survival machines, and agnostic to truth. If it gives delta-advantage, brains itself lie, hallucinate, and make up falsehoods to justify, and rationalize whatever that advantage is.

* Living in a society introduces linear dependencies on other people's beliefs. Knowing, or behaving-as-if-knowing a "truth" when that "truth" is being negatively selected for, leads to a disadvantage, leads to no one actively speaking up for it, leads to only ever hearing the "pro" side. This is doubly so, when the party line has boots attached to it.

* If you look at that list of lies above, you notice how extreme length they went. There is a bug in the brain, whereby when being told a big enough lie, internally the brain goes "surely this couldn't all be lies, right?", adjusts a little bit on the basis of "propaganda", then assumes the rest as "truth". This has been term'd "big lie": the use of a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

I think we will learn actual truths about this horrific war only after decades has passed and historians will be able to dig out all the Russian crimes, all civilian and militant’s death tolls.

I hope this war will stop as soon as possible, it creates nothing but piles of corpses and destroyed cities. I can’t imagine how Ukraine will build itself up after all this is over.

They do bomb them. Or do you think it's the Russian or rebel forces bombed Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014, and the Zaporizhia nuclear plant since the war started? There is a ton of blatant lies being told by the pro-Ukranian side before and after the start of the war. For example, the infamous "air conditioner explosion" was later confirmed to be a targeted strike of the Luhansk state administration building by the Ukrainian government.

Of course, it goes in both directions.

Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.

After the last few years of information war at home, it doesn’t surprise me that people are sucked into the false narratives of both sides rather than taking the time and effort to try and make sense and discern truth ourselves.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Ukraine bombing its own cities to make Russia “look bad” is such a claim. As is most conspiratorial claims regarding Covid, and so on ad nauseam.

I think that if you see “intelligent” people that have a hard time navigating a scientific and methodological way of finding out the truth, such as when you discard these extraordinary claims due to the lack of extraordinary evidence, maybe you need to re-evaluate what “intelligent” actually means, or how you qualify it.

The most intelligent people I’ve ever met are filled with doubt, because they have the skill I just mentioned. Faced with extraordinary claims they respond “that’s strange, I wonder if it can be substantiated” — they do not respond by fervently trying to convince anyone they meet that something REALLY crazy is going on and we all need to figure out the “real” state of things IMMEDIATELY without regard for method and process.

What I might agree with you in, is that conspiratorial thinking much like alcoholism or gambling addiction, obviously CAN “infect” very intelligent people, because they are at the end of the day just people.

But an intelligent person with a mental illness does not make them less intelligent, nor does it make that mental illness more “real”.

The real and fundamental problem underneath all of this is the so-called “post truth society” we’re increasingly moving into, where what’s actually true doesn’t seem to matter anymore, and people just feel like they’re combatants in a war of ideas, and the more they push their ideas regardless of their truthfulness, the more true that idea becomes.

That might be true for ideology, or cultural movements, but it’s not true for investigative journalism and scientific exploration.

Here is Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir Lenin in 1920: https://youtu.be/6TK9c-caEcw?t=65

  Lenin: Oh we're not establishing peasant proprietorship, it is, you see there are poor peasants and rich peasants and we stirred up the poor peasants against the rich peasants and they soon hang them from the nearest tree. *cackle*

It predates modern day Russian, Soviets, or even Bolsheviks. It goes back to Mensheviks who initially developed such psyops to get into and hold power. They had their own inspirations of course but this is really where this evil exploded. It isn't some big secret - the ends justify the means, so lie, make false equivalencies, get people all stirred up and questioning reality and sow distrust as much as possible. Once you get in power you'll put things in order what could possibly go wrong? Things are dire and can't get any worse, so get in power by all means necessary.

With the backdrop of the Cold War they turned it outwards, if you aren't familiar you can get a good feel for the vibe from any Adam Curtis documentary, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

The problem is that once trust collapses and nobody believes in the media, the institutions, and everybody is aware that people lie -- the trick really is to get you to lie also, even a little bit -- a society can get completely untethered from reality.

> It's absolutely fantastic to me how people can just suspend reality and start believing the most absurd notions.

A lot of conspiracies do end up true, coverups are a thing, who can you trust? What even is real?

It is not that your friends are bad people or lack critical reasoning skills. They got shaken out of solid ground and now are in a question-everything mindset.

Very effective. Tragically so.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/16/poland-preside...

So you know how I feel about people suggesting that Russia bombed the Nord Stream pipeline.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4774859/

The 2016 elections in the US were the culmination of years of work. The Russians used their weird news network and social media operations to magnify useful idiots, promote QAnon, and create maximum chaos.

This site allows you to select a number of streets and see a before/after picture. The site does not allow you to select the many streets that are entirely unchanged, or of which the changes are minimal or even positive (if those even exist).

Propaganda exists in every war, and comes from both sides. The intelligence test isn't to chose which side is right, it is to discern which bit of information is taken out of context, blown out of proportion, or factually incorrect. Is Russia wrong for starting a war? Yes. Is it completely its fault and totally unprovoked? Probably not. Is the Ukraine completely free of sin? Also probably not.

War sucks.

That being said: it's totally true that military forces aligned with Ukraine have shelled Ukrainian cities, in Donestk and Luhansk. Usually it is to strike at Russian military targets, but sometimes it is extremist factions like Azov who genuinely want to kill civilians and children. There is plenty of video evidence.

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’."

This has always happened, and it's still happening. Anybody remember the Ghost of Kyiv, or the 'fuck you' surrender?

No, 'everything we see out of Ukraine' is not a lie (which in itself is a false dichotomy: we've seen plenty of 'facts' framed in a way that's explicitly misleading), but the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence of the past ~year, not to mention the rest of human history, suggests that a lot of it probably is.

All our history is pretty much masses of people manipulated to hate other nations so that ruling class / political / spiritual leaders can get what they want.

Do you think Germans somehow evolved to a different, mean, heartless kind of being before and during WWII? No, they were normal people who were manipulated by people who were somehow skilled in manipulation.

In my opinion there are only two things that can meaningfully save nations from sliding into darkness. One is teaching empathy to other people regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, race, occupation, upbringing, age, religion, class or nationality. And another is teaching history of the world so that people can see connection between what is happening contemporarily and some stupid things humanity has done in the past.

Consider for example Mosul after the US-led campaign to recapture it in 2016 (https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2018/4/29/mosul-post-isil-...), which looks as devastated as any fought-over city in Ukraine; NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999 (https://balkaninsight.com/2012/06/11/nato-99-bombing-in-pict...), which seems to be well on par with Russia's bombing of Ukraine's backline cities in this war; and indeed Ukraine's own bombing of Donetsk since 2014 (referred to in words at https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis-idUKKBN0GK..., and captured on video in a documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JovKkDvAU9Y) that mostly seemed to be criticised only based on the author's politics).

In all of these cases, the criticism of the invasion itself was already much more ambivalent in Western society - I went to a protest against the Iraq war in 2003 as a schoolkid in Germany, and was accused of "childish anti-Americanism" for it by a teacher - and the attendant destruction was nearly universally shrugged off as somewhere between "sad, but that's just how war is" and "to save this city we had to destroy it". Suggestions that the US government or its allies should face repercussions or even a war crimes trial were widely dismissed as far-left ravings (and one should not forget that when this was actually tried, they sanctioned the ICC (https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-why-has-the-icc-excluded-t...)). Considering that the remedy for this particular case of violence implicitly suggested by the authors of OP's website seems to be to militarily empower the US and its allies further, I think the moral case being made looks rather less clear-cut.

Intelligence is a broad categorization. It is unlikely to apply exhaustively to any person.

Propaganda takes an obvious lie, and surrounds it with acceptable narratives. Those surrounding narratives are attached to emotional identity. Once a person accepts the surrounding narratives as part of their identity, they have implicitly accepted the obvious lie. Whether or not they accept the lie as stated directly is a matter of semantic argument, not logical deduction.

We are not machines. We do not follow a series of instructions based on logic and arithmetic. We are mammals.

A machine cannot accept vague narratives. It must be explicit about every logical connection, because everything it is and does is written in a "context-free grammar". Since all context-free grammars can be translated into pure mathematical functions, machine belief is pure logic.

Humans do not have that feature. We use "context-dependent grammar" to communicate. That means our narratives can, and often do, include ambiguous conclusions.

This is a powerful tool: we can express unknowns without resolving them. This allows us to extend our knowledge outside of what is already known. It allows us to work with vague data, draw impossible conclusions, then put those conclusions to the test. This is the foundation for science itself, yet science is not the only path ahead.

Ambiguity must be resolved with decision. Not only is it a lot of work to decide every time language gets ambiguous, making that decision at that step in the process makes the decision itself as arbitrary as possible.

Thankfully, we have an optimization: worldview. By constructing a system of beliefs, we essentially give ourselves a precomiled library of narratives. Whenever we interpret ambiguous language, we can quickly check our library for a narrative that resolves the ambiguity.

Of course, this really gets into the weeds: language is full of complex high-order patterns, and any one of them can contain or resolve ambiguity. Multiple narratives may resolve an ambiguity ambiguously: effectively moving the problem instead of solving it.

Because humans build a worldview out of narratives, that worldview can contain flawed logic, and even outright contradictions. It still works, because any time a person tries to resolve an ambiguity using a conflicted set of worldview narratives, they simply choose which narrative applies to that ambiguity. This choice is most easily determined by emotion: what result feels right.

People don't get their narratives exclusively from the outside. We also invent new narratives. I suspect that we do this by hallucinating fictional stories that bridge the narrative gaps in our worldview.

If you have ever talked with someone who has Autism Spectrum Disorder, you may have noticed a pattern of direct questions and dry logical answers. It's well known that people with ASD have difficulty directing their focus away from external stimulus. Studies have also shown that people with ASD report more hallucinated physical experiences than people without ASD. I suspect this leads to a fundamental need for logically categorized worldview: if you can't ignore a narrative, you probably need to find room for it in your existing worldview. If you are already bombarded with both real and hallucinated simulation, you will probably feel too worn out to hallucinate your own narratives, which would make narrative gaps and contradictions stressful.

If you have ever talked to (or read about) someone who has taken a trip on LSD, psilocybin, etc., you may have noticed a pattern of wildly fictional stories, some of which continue well after the trip as a part of the person's worldview. Hallucinagens are known to cause many arbitrary and random connections across the brain; where connections would normally follow the "grooves" that were carved by lived experience. The experience of a trip is well known to help restructure unwanted patterns of behavior (like addiction), and also to result in new unwanted behavior patterns (like fear and anxiety). Because hallucinagens don't replace cognition entirely with the noise of hallucination, having someone else guide the experience can be very effective. Without guidance, it's possible for negatively engaging hallucinations (like fear or anxiety) to become a focus of the experience, carve new grooves in the brain, and become a lingering experience after the trip has ended.

How can we intentionally curate our worldview?

Critical thinking allows us to reconsider the narratives we hold as beliefs objectively. We can copy those narratives into a place that is totally detached from emotion, and criticize them. By doing this intentionally, we can more easily accept the result, and change our worldview. This is like hallucination, but following the strict rules of logic.

We can also accept narratives from trusted sources. If we feel confident that someone else has already performed the critical thinking, it's easy to accept their result as a shortcut. The obvious problem here is that that person may be wrong, or even dishonest. The more insidious problem is that that person is not likely to share all of the narratives in their own worldview: instead they share only the narratives they changed. The worldview you apply that change to may be compatible but different, resulting in a completely different result.

We may also continue living without any intentional curation. A conflicted worldview does not inherently need resolution. Many stories contain contradictions that remain unsolved until the end: maybe you are living in the middle of your story, and find the conflicts exciting. Living this way is called "cognitive dissonance". Like two notes a half step apart create many harmonic voices, two contradicted narratives allow for a very large set of potential resolving narratives. A life lacking direction is full of possibilities.

Dissonance is uncomfortable: our reaction to it may be to resolve it with critical thinking, but simple avoidance is a much shorter path to comfort.

If we want to help people change their beliefs, we should focus on the narratives that construct those beliefs. In order to know what those are in the first place, we must practice empathy. It's hard work, and it feels like the wrong strategy. Even worse, it feels insidious, because intentional empathy is very similar to propaganda.

Are you American by any chance? Believe me, this elephant is noticed, was talked about daily by every European country almost every day of the past year, and is being acted upon all the time. What do you imagine the alternative is?