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You can look at all this data yourself, stop forcing a narrative based on your misguided beliefs. In a more blunt way: stop being a gullible ignorant...
> The best source for making some sense of reality will be unfiltered first hand accounts (such as social media).
This is what makes you gullible, believing the accounts you are seeing on social media are both unedited as well as first hand. You're seeing mirages.
Edit: and now you are repeating the "bird strike" lie. Fucks sake, the Russians really have a point on how easy it's to manipulate idiots...
We're fucked, aren't we? We take whatever post on social media fits our preconceptions and we run with it. No verifying who it is or how plausible it is. No cross-checking with other sources of information. Everybody, particularly all "mainstream media", is lying except this random person on the internet with no proof or verification.
Meanwhile, first thing I did when I saw images of the damaged surfaces was check other sources to verify that the damage shown was of the right aircraft and event, check what AA missile damage typically looks like from Russian missiles, check what kinds of missiles Russian systems use, and do a broad quick survey of all the available information at hand, then come to my own opinion and wait for an official investigation while remaining open to new and better information.
Why do these people do the first step of being skeptical, which is largely correct, but then they believe random bullshit elsewhere without any of that skepticism? I just don't get it.
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1871952188383309872?t=q...
My understanding is not even the Russians are denieing they shot it down. What could make one say it wasn't a missile strike, when we have a lot of evidence it was.
It is disgraceful that the proliferation of such lies is not forbidden on this forum.
Feels like a zombie movie.
I know, I know -- based on your comment history, you were probably expecting to be talking to an American and hoping to bait them into a Trump vs Biden ragebait. You see, posts like these are merely symptomatic. You created your account bang on during the US 2016 election period, spent all your time trying to systematically comment pro-whatever stuff, etc.
I don't care. Do whatever you want with your country - you'll be the main victim of what you do to it. I felt terrible for the US when Trump was first elected but this time around, I /really don't care/ because you guys did this to yourselves, and you're giving Europe a lot of incentives to get its shit together, which is well needed.
You see, your country is not at war. Your country has its own, deep, deep well of issues, but it is not at war. Mine is. My whole continent. And here, elections are not how we fight; elections are how we voice discontent, but they are easily interfered in by comrade Vlad as we've seen repeatedly in the past few years (most recently in Romania). Our elections are more and more often abused to install pro-russia propagandists in seats of power.
Of course, you probably don't care because people like you tend to look at people like Putin and idolize them. Something something he's a real man, he doesn't care about your feelings. I mean, he doesn't care about yours either, and your head will be on the chopping block all the same. Keep idolizing... his biggest fans are currently dying by the thousands, might not be a crowd you want to keep hanging with very long.
And I created my account during 2016 because that was yet another period of time when I happened to be looking for work, due to the volatility of this job market. Which this time is due to the high federal interest rates, which happened under Biden. I don't idolize any politicians, but I think some are definitely worse than others. And I barely spend time on here these days because the comment quality has gone way downhill.
The red wave happened all over the world, FYI.
While a necessary part of a healthy democratic system, voting by itself does nothing to fix systemic issues, especially when those issues have to do with the voting system. The US's two-party system is a very good example of this. Election interference in romania is another.
But suppose for the sake of argument that I was assigned the responsibility to figure it out. The approach I would take is to leave no stone unturned to find every method to maximize the propagation of quality information, like Google did before they became evil. Now they stand in the way of it.
Maybe instead of voting, one can lobby for ways to legislatively make this easier. And maybe it is possible to move the needle there as I've yet to come across such an effort that has been a source of inspiration. But maybe they just don't show up in the search results.