re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Well, when both sides have shown to be lying and manipulating information all of it needs to be looked upon as possible propaganda.

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wait you think i have went off the deep end because of what i posted

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Yes along with many of your other posts

You are legit on the spectrum

Good post and from a meta-perspective a good description about trying to use evidence critically to judge the reliability of sources.

We don't have to just throw up our hands and say "it's all propaganda" or just subscribe to a tribal epistemology and accept all proclamations from one war ministry or other to be true. Orwell said "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle" and that's what it's like trying to understand what's going on in the war.

STD still thinks that the Moskva fire was started by a sailor taking a smoke break in the wrong section because that is what Putin told him.

Don't waste your time with him. He will demand proof, pictures, etc, then still reject any news even after you give that to him. To him Russia is winning massively against Nazis.

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STD still thinks that the Moskva fire was started by a sailor taking a smoke break in the wrong section because that is what Putin told him

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Please provide a link where i have ever said such a thing

STD will be banned again, sooner rather than later.

A change of pace. Going back to the question of when and why will the parties come to the negotiation table I have maintained that as long as both sides feel they can gain leverage through the battlefield they will continue to fight. That actually comes with the caveat that "they" must also maintain the support of their populace. I had posted a link to the 1420 YT channel a thousand or so pages back but a new video popped up that I think gives salient insight to the Russian man on the street view of their resolve. The interviews are done in and around Moscow by a 20-something and in this video it becomes clear the majority think there is basically no way for Russia to lose the conflict. It is also clear from his videos (you see some of it in this video) that older women are remarkably hardline.

YT

Elon tweets to Dmitry Medvedev "Btw, how's it going in Bakhmut?"

Medvedev responds, "See you in Moscow on Victory Day!"

smh

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I have maintained that as long as both sides feel they can gain leverage through the battlefield they will continue to fight.

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I mean, that is standard for any negotiation. Some of the people here can't understand why Putin negotiated a settlement after his Northern offensives collapsed in April and why the West wouldn't want to negotiate with someone who they believe is not a faithful negotiator. All logic goes out the window in this instance. Conflict is part and parcel of diplomacy.

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The interviews are done in and around Moscow by a 20-something and in this video it becomes clear the majority think there is basically no way for Russia to lose the conflict. It is also clear from his videos (you see some of it in this video) that older women are remarkably hardline.

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I've been thinking a bit about this lately, and this might be one of the blackpills of modern politics. Governments in power always try to limit how many 'keys' to power there are. Keys in this case is analogous to constituencies, which is why who votes is always an important question in elections. In doing so, they can become beholden to the most extreme elements of that constituencies in ways that most moderates, the absolute largest group in any society that votes, would be turned off. But since moderates are a contingent constituency each election, rhetoric only becomes moderated during elections. The loudest voices of each constituency have figured out ways of hacking the media landscape so they can always pretend their general view is the one held by most people, but I would also argue that most people don't think of the consequences of their views, and leave long-term thinking to the political class. That creates an issue where, without some opposition in the political structure, you can trap yourself inside an information feedback loop, and don't think of potential externalities and even worse, you don't think that your actions now could cause someone else to react to your actions in a way you didn't predict nor can control.

There was one recent paper that suggested what was causing polarization wasn't the disparate media landscape, but rather the encounters people had when exposed to different media sources (I should note that I'm butchering that description of the paper). People became more hardline when their views were questioned and examined, which makes some sense. In order to clearly define yourself, knowing that opposition exists and having a general (but generally not accurate) description of their politics helps define your own politics. I wonder if that is going to be the end result of the 'Global Village,' where the 'context collapse' of different narratives boils together to create a nonsensical stream of narratives, which requires significant media literacy to understand. The choices for people become either becoming media literate, which requires applying a critical method to each and every source, and where applicable, developing heuristics based on experience, becoming universally critical of cogent narratives that are pieced together by the media literate, or disbelieving one institutional apparatus by association while believing another institutional apparatus. The best latter example I can think of is distrusting any Western Intelligence Community analysis, usually by regarding them as wholly responsible for every bad thing the West has ever done, and then without irony quoting from Russian sources, including Putin, and taking them at their word.

I suppose there is an incorrect application of a heuristic there, as the Western IC is made up of several different bodies, factions and viewpoints, just like there exist for any institutional body, but somehow because the Western IC was wrong about Iraq (they were not, as several intelligence agencies told the US that their sources were compromised), they will always be wrong. It is a broad application of induction that is used to avoid taking a critical approach to every piece of information, a step that makes analysis easier and less time-intensive because you can write off sources entirely. I think everyone is guilty of this to a degree, unless you are constantly aware of your biases and how your own feelings inform your analysis all the time, which is generally impossible for humans.

In the Russian case, I suspect that in terms of popular support, because the information they are fed is part of a feedback loop, popular support will not falter until the people who have the least stake in seeing an opposition viewpoint see something tangible they cannot explain. If the ecosystem is tight enough, using denial as an ego defense might be sufficient to retain popular support. I don't know how that would look on a population level though.

I apologize for the long meandering post. I'm just trying to think the notion of popular support through a broader context out-loud and as fully as I can in as short a time as I can.