6 ms·

Every country has its propaganda and lies, but they're generally couched in half-truths. It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds j

by TillE 5y ago

Every country has its propaganda and lies, but they're generally couched in half-truths. It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously. That's been a tradition for decades, as far as I know.

nine_k 5y ago
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, noted that people more easily believe colossal lies, totally out of whack with reality, exactly because, well, who would say such a wild thing if it were not the terrible truth?
rjzzleep 5y ago
jeromegv 5y ago
I mean… Trump was lying about how many electoral votes he got. It was easily verifiable. Also such a stupid lie because he did have enough electoral votes to win the election anyway. But still! He fabricated that number. He was also truly in pathological liar territory.
- d23 5y ago
  I'll take the downvotes too. We had a president who idolized Putin and still praises him to this day. If we think this sort of thing can't happen here, or aren't clear eyed about the threat he and his enablers still pose, we are in even more danger.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Yes, propaganda and political lies is certainly not confined to Russia or backwater dictatorships. In America you also had that president's opponents concocting lies and peddling insane and baseless conspiracy theories for years about him colluding with Putin to hack the election and other such nonsense. That was even more infantile and simple than the propaganda that comes out of Russia.
    - VyperCard 5y ago
      We’ve got all the money we need from Russia
      - throwawaylinux 5y ago
        From the uranium we sold them?
    - croon 5y ago
      Everything in the Mueller report was true. No republican has denied that, or come to any other conclusion in their committee reports. Trump was cleared in the impeachment not because of the contents of the report, but whether what happened technically constituted collusion, or whether republicans felt that convicting him was necessary for what he and his associates did in fact do. This is what the last report from the republican majority senate intelligence committee wrote [0]: > It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
      - throwawaylinux 5y ago
        The Mueller report clearly states they did not find evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded or conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. That nonsense was all a conspiracy theory. For example Adam Schiff never had the "ample evidence" for it, despite being on the house intelligence committee. That was bald faced and repeated lie peddling this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately many fall for these "stolen election" conspiracy theories. Probably as a coping mechanism more than anything.
        d23 5y ago
- eru 5y ago
  Gave him free media attention without any more media dislike than he already suffered, I guess?
- mcv 5y ago
  Also consider his insistence that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama's, when the photos clearly showed that wasn't the case. It's a completely meaningless lie. He doesn't accomplish anything if people were to accept it as truth, and it was quite obviously at odd with reality, and yet he just kept going on about it. That's not a strategic lie, that's a pathological lie. That's someone who simply cannot tell the truth.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    No matter how much I consider Trump a dimwit liar, I can't completely shake off the other explanation, that of yesmen telling him whatever they thought he would like to hear. I suspect that in a position like that, even making up falsehoods is conveniently delegated. You don't lie, you just select convenient sources to parrot. Putin must have spent recent years in an even worse yesmen-bubble, the shift from him being considered dangerously competent to him being considered dangerously senile should really not come as surprising as it does.
bamboozled 5y ago
da39a3ee 5y ago
Unfortunately America has just shown us that it too can advance a wildly inappropriate and simply stupid individual to the highest levels of power.
- queuebert 5y ago
  We have a history of that, unfortunately.
- zeven7 5y ago
  But then he got replaced 4 years later. Unlike what happened in Russia.
  - mcv 5y ago
    Definitely a strong case for term limits. If Putin had left after 8 years, he would now be considered a great president. He wasn't perfect, but he stabilised the Russian economy after the bankruptcy of the 1990s. He could have left a great legacy, but his addiction to power has become his ruin. And quite possibly that of Ukraine and Russia.
    - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
      Didn’t Putin get his term limits removed? He did stick to them initially when his PM Medvedev was President.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Yes, because Trump is no Putin when it comes to maintaining power, and the US is a much more stable democracy with strong checks and balances.
  - ako 5y ago
    But there's a real treath that he can become president again. The real problem is that there's big gap in how the democrats see the world vs how republicans see the world. From the outside it's really mindblowing how differently they see and interpret the world. And the same is happening all over the world.
bcrosby95 5y ago
Makes me think of Baghdad Bob: https://www.liveabout.com/baghdad-bob-quotes-4068522 https://www.liveabout.com/baghdad-bob-quotes-4068522
eru 5y ago
Keep in mind that you are likely seeing the Russian propaganda through a filter of western propaganda and interpretation.
- anonymouswacker 5y ago
  [flagged]
- traviswt 5y ago
  With the internet and Google translate, you can easily go read for yourself. And it’s still pretty nutty with no western filter applied. The accidentally published victory unification speech is particularly crazy: https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...
  - eru 5y ago
    Thanks for the link! Yes, I agree that it's pretty nutty. It's just that to actually verify that we have to do a bit more work, like you suggested; otherwise we might just be bullshitting ourselves.
  - manholio 5y ago
    I think the gp was referring to the filter in your own brain, that was set up by watching western media. The idea that you are somehow immune to this is unsustainable - I'm sure avid Putin fans feel the same, after all they have access to Google too. It's just that we are privileged to live in a relatively free societies, where bias is self imposed groupthink as opposed to mandated by the government. For an extreme version of this in action, you can see the early reporting in the American media of the Iraq invasion.
    - eru 5y ago
      I was mostly referring to the filter outside the brain. You are right that we also have filters inside our brains. But just like with the outside filter, we can make some efforts to get around them. Even if our efforts don't always lead to perfection.
W-Stool 5y ago
Reminds me of a recent US President. Very recent ...
- mcv 5y ago
  It's certainly true for politicians too. Many politicians cherry-pick the facts that suit them best, but very few are so completely detached from reality as that guy was.
tablespoon 5y ago
> It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously. IIRC, the correct term is disinformation, and I believe the idea (at least sometimes) is more akin to "jamming" than any kind of persuasion (e.g. encourage passivity because it's too much effort to sort out the truth from the lies).
- malloryerik 5y ago
  The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model -- Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model -- Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html Completely off-topic, but what a strangley formatted document. The pages of the PDF are 9x8 in.
theshrike79 5y ago
The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. And one of those (pravda) is a kind of a half-truth used to keep moving from the current situation. Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.
- waffleiron 5y ago
  >The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. I looked into this, and found this blog post [1]. The comments are quite interesting, but the main post points out this isn't much different from English. In English we use synonyms for truth/true (e.g. authentic, factual, legitimate, etc) and lie (e.g. fabrication, falsehood, misrepresentation, disinformation) with different meanings too. Maybe we shouldn't use vocabulary of a language to draw/imply further conclusions about a culture. [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29814 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29814
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The eskimos have fifty five billion words for snow but only one word for Bitcoin.
- the_gipsy 5y ago
  > they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever. Same can be said about the west. What matters is that there is free press, call it "picking your favorite lies", but it makes a big difference.
- watwut 5y ago
  Pravda means truth. Pravda was also name of state journal. The half-truth is said as half-pravda. English has many words for lie too: misinformation, lie, untruth, false, deceit, deception, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fabrication, falsehood, fiction, forgery, misrepresentation, perjury, slander, tale. I got them from synonyms dictionary. That does not say anything about English speaking people other then their language is rich and can express nuance.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
This is a deliberate part of KGB style propaganda. It's not designed to convince people of any specific lie, but rather so muddle things that people become cynical about knowing the truth period. There's a book on the topic where the title kinda tells the whole story: "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible"

by TillE 5y ago

nine_k 5y ago

Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, noted that people more easily believe colossal lies, totally out of whack with reality, exactly because, well, who would say such a wild thing if it were not the terrible truth?

rjzzleep 5y ago

jeromegv 5y ago

I mean… Trump was lying about how many electoral votes he got. It was easily verifiable. Also such a stupid lie because he did have enough electoral votes to win the election anyway. But still! He fabricated that number. He was also truly in pathological liar territory.

d23 5y ago
I'll take the downvotes too. We had a president who idolized Putin and still praises him to this day. If we think this sort of thing can't happen here, or aren't clear eyed about the threat he and his enablers still pose, we are in even more danger.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Yes, propaganda and political lies is certainly not confined to Russia or backwater dictatorships. In America you also had that president's opponents concocting lies and peddling insane and baseless conspiracy theories for years about him colluding with Putin to hack the election and other such nonsense. That was even more infantile and simple than the propaganda that comes out of Russia.
  - VyperCard 5y ago
    We’ve got all the money we need from Russia
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      From the uranium we sold them?
  - croon 5y ago
    Everything in the Mueller report was true. No republican has denied that, or come to any other conclusion in their committee reports. Trump was cleared in the impeachment not because of the contents of the report, but whether what happened technically constituted collusion, or whether republicans felt that convicting him was necessary for what he and his associates did in fact do. This is what the last report from the republican majority senate intelligence committee wrote [0]: > It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      The Mueller report clearly states they did not find evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded or conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. That nonsense was all a conspiracy theory. For example Adam Schiff never had the "ample evidence" for it, despite being on the house intelligence committee. That was bald faced and repeated lie peddling this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately many fall for these "stolen election" conspiracy theories. Probably as a coping mechanism more than anything.
      - d23 5y ago
eru 5y ago
Gave him free media attention without any more media dislike than he already suffered, I guess?
mcv 5y ago
Also consider his insistence that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama's, when the photos clearly showed that wasn't the case. It's a completely meaningless lie. He doesn't accomplish anything if people were to accept it as truth, and it was quite obviously at odd with reality, and yet he just kept going on about it. That's not a strategic lie, that's a pathological lie. That's someone who simply cannot tell the truth.
- usrusr 5y ago
  No matter how much I consider Trump a dimwit liar, I can't completely shake off the other explanation, that of yesmen telling him whatever they thought he would like to hear. I suspect that in a position like that, even making up falsehoods is conveniently delegated. You don't lie, you just select convenient sources to parrot. Putin must have spent recent years in an even worse yesmen-bubble, the shift from him being considered dangerously competent to him being considered dangerously senile should really not come as surprising as it does.

bamboozled 5y ago

da39a3ee 5y ago

Unfortunately America has just shown us that it too can advance a wildly inappropriate and simply stupid individual to the highest levels of power.

queuebert 5y ago
We have a history of that, unfortunately.
zeven7 5y ago
But then he got replaced 4 years later. Unlike what happened in Russia.
- mcv 5y ago
  Definitely a strong case for term limits. If Putin had left after 8 years, he would now be considered a great president. He wasn't perfect, but he stabilised the Russian economy after the bankruptcy of the 1990s. He could have left a great legacy, but his addiction to power has become his ruin. And quite possibly that of Ukraine and Russia.
  - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
    Didn’t Putin get his term limits removed? He did stick to them initially when his PM Medvedev was President.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Yes, because Trump is no Putin when it comes to maintaining power, and the US is a much more stable democracy with strong checks and balances.
- ako 5y ago
  But there's a real treath that he can become president again. The real problem is that there's big gap in how the democrats see the world vs how republicans see the world. From the outside it's really mindblowing how differently they see and interpret the world. And the same is happening all over the world.

bcrosby95 5y ago

Makes me think of Baghdad Bob: https://www.liveabout.com/baghdad-bob-quotes-4068522 https://www.liveabout.com/baghdad-bob-quotes-4068522

eru 5y ago

Keep in mind that you are likely seeing the Russian propaganda through a filter of western propaganda and interpretation.

anonymouswacker 5y ago
[flagged]
traviswt 5y ago
With the internet and Google translate, you can easily go read for yourself. And it’s still pretty nutty with no western filter applied. The accidentally published victory unification speech is particularly crazy: https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...
- eru 5y ago
  Thanks for the link! Yes, I agree that it's pretty nutty. It's just that to actually verify that we have to do a bit more work, like you suggested; otherwise we might just be bullshitting ourselves.
- manholio 5y ago
  I think the gp was referring to the filter in your own brain, that was set up by watching western media. The idea that you are somehow immune to this is unsustainable - I'm sure avid Putin fans feel the same, after all they have access to Google too. It's just that we are privileged to live in a relatively free societies, where bias is self imposed groupthink as opposed to mandated by the government. For an extreme version of this in action, you can see the early reporting in the American media of the Iraq invasion.
  - eru 5y ago
    I was mostly referring to the filter outside the brain. You are right that we also have filters inside our brains. But just like with the outside filter, we can make some efforts to get around them. Even if our efforts don't always lead to perfection.

W-Stool 5y ago

Reminds me of a recent US President. Very recent ...

mcv 5y ago
It's certainly true for politicians too. Many politicians cherry-pick the facts that suit them best, but very few are so completely detached from reality as that guy was.

tablespoon 5y ago

> It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously. IIRC, the correct term is disinformation, and I believe the idea (at least sometimes) is more akin to "jamming" than any kind of persuasion (e.g. encourage passivity because it's too much effort to sort out the truth from the lies).

malloryerik 5y ago
The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model -- Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model -- Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html Completely off-topic, but what a strangley formatted document. The pages of the PDF are 9x8 in.

theshrike79 5y ago

The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. And one of those (pravda) is a kind of a half-truth used to keep moving from the current situation. Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.

waffleiron 5y ago
>The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. I looked into this, and found this blog post [1]. The comments are quite interesting, but the main post points out this isn't much different from English. In English we use synonyms for truth/true (e.g. authentic, factual, legitimate, etc) and lie (e.g. fabrication, falsehood, misrepresentation, disinformation) with different meanings too. Maybe we shouldn't use vocabulary of a language to draw/imply further conclusions about a culture. [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29814 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29814
- bombcar 5y ago
  The eskimos have fifty five billion words for snow but only one word for Bitcoin.
the_gipsy 5y ago
> they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever. Same can be said about the west. What matters is that there is free press, call it "picking your favorite lies", but it makes a big difference.
watwut 5y ago
Pravda means truth. Pravda was also name of state journal. The half-truth is said as half-pravda. English has many words for lie too: misinformation, lie, untruth, false, deceit, deception, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fabrication, falsehood, fiction, forgery, misrepresentation, perjury, slander, tale. I got them from synonyms dictionary. That does not say anything about English speaking people other then their language is rich and can express nuance.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

This is a deliberate part of KGB style propaganda. It's not designed to convince people of any specific lie, but rather so muddle things that people become cynical about knowing the truth period. There's a book on the topic where the title kinda tells the whole story: "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible"