It's probably better to know that you are only allowed to consume the official state opinion, and use that context in understanding it, than to be fed the state opinion and believe that you are well informed by an independant, non-biased source.

When the US & Canada invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 I was banned from a video game forum because I wasn't enthusiastic enough about bombing arabs.

The majority of most countries have no problem believing their news…state or otherwise.

You are kidding yourself if you believe any broadcast media hasn’t gotten the blessing of whatever state it’s in.

Remember when all major American media wouldn’t make a peep about the illegal Iraq invasion or war crimes lest they lose their precious military imbedding or state department privileges.

Just today I was listening to NPR describe Russia invading Ukraine as "the worst act of military aggression in the 21st century"

NPR supported the invasion of Iraq which resulted in the death of over one million Iraqi people.

>>>NPR supported the invasion of Iraq which resulted in the death of over one million Iraqi people.

You got a source for that?

I'm always suspicious when someone portrays a large and diverse news organization as if it was a single entity speaking with one voice. The right loves to do that, to take a single opinion piece in the New York Times, and report it as "according to the NEW YORK TIMES...", and thereby discredit whole blocks of the mainstream media.

I did more than the usual 10 minutes of searching, about a half hour, and the most information I could find on this is was a wikipedia article on "Media Coverage of the Iraq War."

https://tinyurl.com/ytn4ceah

Didn't read the whole thing, but I did find a reference to a University of Maryland Study of Public Opinion. They polled various groups to see who believed that Iraq was somehow linked to the terrorists who had attacked America in 2001.

>>>In the composite analysis of the PIPA study, 80% of Fox News watchers had one or more of these perceptions, in contrast to 71% for CBS and 27% who tuned to NPR/PBS.

Here's a link to the study:

https://tinyurl.com/9jkvh7zt

Of course, correlation is not direct causation.

>>>Just today I was listening to NPR describe Russia invading Ukraine as "the worst act of military aggression in the 21st century"

Did you? Did NPR actually give an opinion, the whole organization speaking in one voice, or did some individual human being on NPR make the statement, or did you hear a new announcer quoting an individual human being?

I wonder if he even understands we are not dealing with the USSR, which for good or ill no longer exists. What currently operates in that space is decidedly -facist- and very far right leaning.

Do we have any historical examples of nations purging all examples of a culture because it serves a political goal?

Are any of those examples good? Or is this again another ‘we know it’s bad, we know it doesn’t work, but we’re the good guys so this time it will be a good thing?’ American double-think?

I figure it won't be much more than the Kiev mule. Just like freedom fried and liberty cabbage.

I guess you didn’t actually read the article but decided you know better anyhow, because ‘Murica.

It's a shit article from a shit site. TL;DR up your ass.

For fucks sake, it's a conservative Christian news site.

Jericho, Russians ate borscht long before and after the USSR.

I like how your dumb remembering of cultural purges from the Iraq invasion was renaming cafeteria food from one white country that opposed the war, while forgetting the massive spike in hate crimes against anyone “mooslem” looking.

It's interesting that I'm supposed to believe the Russians are the fascists here when only one country has a full-on swastika-armband-wearing military unit and it's the one that just banned any political party or news outlet that is to the left of the current (US-installed) president.

Denazification in postwar Germany was I think an example of purging a culture, albeit in-situ as opposed to an external enemy. Like anything I'm sure there were injustices carried out in its name, but for the most part I think it was a valid ethical movement.

The spike in hate crimes against Muslims was a product of post 9/11 hysteria just the like invasion of Iraq.

@jfcaron

Denazification I’d argue was a political purge, less so than full cultural. Nazis cherry-picked white/aryan culture and mythos from around the world to back their propaganda and that underlying culture was not purged, just the guys with the swastika armbands. (At least the ones who sucked at rocket science.)

Cena, I completely misread your post as "Oh no, not more borscht!" I thought that was your pet name for SolRo.

I had a migraine at the time. That's my excuse.

It's just an opinion piece from right wing Christian site. It really wasn't worth reading. I didn't read it. I just voted it up so I could shit on it.

Author; ‘it’s dangerous when people act as though they have perfect moral clarity about who’s good and evil’

Cena; ‘I don’t need to read this dumb shit because I have perfect moral clarity’

Ah yes, it takes perfect moral clarity to know that violent military invasions are bad.

And you’re once again conflating Putin as all Russians, like the patriotic little troglodyte you are.

Cena: The best way to win arguments is to stick to positions that have strong support and not be baited into gray areas or complexities. That's my general strategy and it seems to be what you're doing here. You are correct that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is morally reprehensible. The fact that the US has done similar things doesn't change this.

However, no one (I think) is really disputing this? The points I've been trying to make are as follows. They're not attempts to justify the Russian invasion, nor do they rely on it being justified.

1. NATO expansion in Eastern Europe is a major factor in provoking the invasion. Russia's behavior here is pretty predicable based on their security interests and past behavior. We could have prevented this invasion by denying NATO membership to Ukraine, but we chose to gamble with the lives of Ukrainians in order to prevent Russia from acting like the US.

2. Arming Ukraine and prolonging a war that we’re not willing to actually put anything on the line for in order to bleed Russia at the cost of Ukrainian lives, and the cheerleading that goes along with this, is gross and evil.

3. Americans putting blue and yellow flags in their facebook profile pics while totally ignoring, say, Yemen or Palestine, is gross and evil. And–yes–racist. This is understandable, though, given the media coverage, which has been terrible.

4. There seem to be a lot of people who really want to start WWIII. This is a bad idea.

Why am I not surprised that our most reactionary and vocal patriotic morons refuse to actually READ anything that doesn’t confirm their biases and only look for excuses to ignore voices from outside their information bubbles.

The writer of the article is a professor of Slavic literature. He needs to chill, no one is cancelling Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, as nobody reads them anyways.

Good troll. Top kek.