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Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | Hacker News Reader

> a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions

I remember an informative presentation about Russian history and culture which seems to go along with this, in particular the bit about "two words for the truth and three for the lie".

https://youtu.be/kF9KretXqJw?t=2257 (time-stamped at the relevant portion but the whole talk is good)

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Well I don't know about Finns but in Western Europe Russians are often considered to be a bit too direct or even blunt. Kinda contradicts the "lying culture" hypothesis.

EDIT. I watched the video a bit more and I could not take it seriously after seeing the part about "technological backwardness" that apparently always was there. That's just charged propaganda and there is nothing to discuss.

Finns still sore about losing the Winter War. Which they lost. They were defeated. They had to tap out. It’s just that they were smart enough to concede and trade a good chunk of their territory for continued statehood. A lesson lost in time.

> a lesson lost in time

What exactly are you implying?

HN’s supposed to be a well-informed crowd but somehow the last half-year of Ukraine-related doom and gloom in Western mainstream media simply hasn’t registered. Since you’re asking.

Knowing when to quit—it’s a lesson for everyone, of course. Knowing that when you take a gamble you could lose it all.

I knew what you were implying of course, I just wanted to see it written explicitely.

It's funny to see a russian sockpuppet under an article about propaganda.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

PS: https://twitter.com/CatSmarterThanU/status/16631726141167616...

Can’t say I know any Poles irl but that certainly matches the impression one gets on-line.

Not going to disagree that the person is coming from a certain bias but the information I'm referring to is factual about words that are understood by Russians. I don't consider that all Russians are part of a lying culture but there are words which Russians use to distinguish the nuances of lying, and even the nuances of telling truths; that says something about the messages they tend to hear.

In English one could also use different words for that:

- that's right/true/сorrect

- that's wrong/false/incorrect

Does this imply anything? The synonyms he talks about are very similar e.g. a noun from "right" and a noun from "true".

> The synonyms he talks about are very similar e.g. a noun from "right" and a noun from "true".

If that's the case, I see where you're coming from. I was interpreting the meaning as similar to differences between "lie" and "bullshit" and "gaslight" in English. They all mean roughly "an untrue statement" but they still have their own nuances; "bullshitting" and "gaslighting" are just specific ways of "speaking untruths".

> Does this imply anything?

This does not imply to me that people who understand these words are bad or evil or anything like that. It suggests, instead, that they're used to being lied to in subtle ways such that they've developed tools for discussing these lies amongst each other in their native language. Similar to how citizens of English-speaking nations use words like "bullshit" and "gaslight".

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