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" I have trained myself to ignore the news, or rather I have trained myself to think I can ignore the news, or rather I thought news can ignore me and we both c

" I have trained myself to ignore the news, or rather I have trained myself to think I can ignore the news, or rather I thought news can ignore me and we both can mutually agree on ignoring without even temporarily igniting the interest or a glimpse of it towards each another." and then: "But now, a real war... A war, aggression, a direct invasion is something my consciousness cannot ignore. It devours all my attention, all my thoughts, all my emotions and feelings – everything." "Pain because of all countless stories, photos, videos, and live TikToks of destroyed cities and injured people, shootings, shoutings, explosions. Pain because I have friends from and in Ukraine. They tell me stories about their families and other people hiding in the undergrounds and basements, or desperately trying to leave their country, without food, shelter, or medicine." There was always stuff to be scared of on the news. But from his perspective, what's changed? He still doesn't have any personal experience of this war, any more than he had of the previous stories he saw or ignored. What's happened is that he is bought into it, because of the scale of what is being presented to him on screens. There are other wars, but somehow those are/were possible to ignore (eg Yemen, Afganistan, Iraq, Ukraine pre-2022, etc). Eg apparently 97 people were killed in Iraq last month: https://original.antiwar.com/updates/2022/03/31/iraq-monthly-roundup-97-killed-during-march/ https://original.antiwar.com/updates/2022/03/31/iraq-monthly... ... but this is NOT news. This war is only special because the media are putting it in our faces. The media is a part of this - they are playing a role. Their role is to increase fear, by bringing our attention to this all the time. It is likely to me that the media reaction plays a role in pushing people to do something - sign up to fight, flee their homes, etc. I don't trust the media nor what is presented. I'd like to understand better why this war is sucking in all the air, and why we have this being presented to us. I expect that the mass co-ordination of the media in promoting this story, at this time (immediately after covid) indicates that we are being manipulated.

baq 5y ago
Check out a history book about the lead up to 1939 (including an afterword why Russia doesn’t think 1939 is a special).
- ailef 5y ago
  Do you believe there's a real risk of Russia invading and occupying other countries in Europe?
  - sharken 5y ago
    Georgia and Moldova are on the same path as Ukraine, they want to be members of the EU. All three countries are outside of NATO and EU, so they will have no one daring help them against a Russian invasion. Putin has shown that he is willing to take on 44 million Ukrainians with the invasion of Ukraine, so it's impossible to know if Georgia and Moldova are also on the list. Any country not a member of any defense pact are at risk, so membership of the EU is a sound but also dangerous choice. A regime change in Russia would of course change the dynamics, but that outcome seems highly unlikely.
    - YorkshireSeason 5y ago
      You are entirely correct, those countries have good reason to fear Russia (with the additional complexity of substantial numbers of ethnic Russians in those countries), but, as I wrote a month ago [1], there is a symmetry here and Russia also has good reason to fear NATO, for the latter, in the last 2 decades, have invaded (directly or through proxy forces): Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan. The sibling post [2] by "chrisco255" summrises some of the arrising issues. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479658 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30887328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30887328
      - sharken 5y ago
        The symmetry of NATO being involved in the named countries is hard to view as a threat to Russia. Yes, those countries are all in Asia, same as Russia, but apart from that it's a really weak argument that Russia should feel threatened. In no way can the invasion of Ukraine be justified and yet here we are, nobody can tell if Putin wants to invade Georgia or Moldova. It requires a paranoid person such as Putin, to think NATO has a master plan for attacking Russia.
tetris11 5y ago
I overheard a colleague talking to another colleague about it, and what he said was "this is a christian country they're invading!" I privately raised an eyebrow at the time, but I later understood what he meant and probably what the media is saying: they might be coming for us next, i.e. other culturally christian countries. We tolerated/ignored the Syrian conflict because we could not see ourselves in them.
- fuoqi 5y ago
  I wonder about his opinion regarding the US-NATO invasion of Yugoslavia in which christian Serbs got bombed into stone age to protect muslims and change state borders in the middle of Europe by force.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    The Serbs had bad PR at the time, having been seen to be responsible for some pretty awful things. I'm not saying they didn't do them, I'm emphasising that it depends on whether the west sees you as a bad guy like Saddam. Only after the bad guy level does it matter who you actually are in terms of proximity to Western culture. The Nazi regime were also Christian bad guys.
    - throwaway4good 5y ago
      The media apparatus of the west can turn any people into its justified enemy; Christian or not - it really doesn’t matter once the machine gets rolling.
    - JasonFruit 5y ago
      Are you sure it doesn't work the other way around? That is, first the United States government (usually it's them, after all) decides you're getting hit with a war, and then you're portrayed as a bad guy, worse than Hitler, a threat "our democracy" and to all life on the planet — and the people eat it up, put the Ruritanian flag on their profile pictures, and "stand with Ruritania," because we'll fight the bastards to the last Ruritanian. And then we fund the bad guy to fight for us in our next conflict against the real villain.
Olreich 5y ago
Invading a country with mostly non-white, non-christian people: not news Invading a country with most white, christian people: news I don’t think there’s any single global conspiracy, just some deeply seated bias in our systems. But when media outlets, governments, and other organizations all individually try to take advantage of or fall into the biases, you get what smells like global conspiracy.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Alternatively: invading a stable, non-aggressor democratic country: news.
  - ailef 5y ago
    I'm not sure if you're serious promoting such a characterization of Ukraine. Stable is especially egregious, given there's an ongoing war in eastern Ukraine since 2014. Also, sovereignty is in no way tied to the government system: under international law, you have no more right to invade a dictatorship than a democracy.
    - sharken 5y ago
      Disagree. The conflict in Donbas was started when Russian forces helped those who wanted to take up arms against Ukraine. Had there been no Russian help, things would look very different. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas
      - ailef 5y ago
        Unless you don't agree on the definition of "stable", there's not much to say. You simply cannot define a country with an 8 years long conflict as "stable", whichever the reasons for this conflict are. > Russian forces helped those who wanted to take up arms against Ukraine. > Had there been no Russian help, things would look very different. What you said is true but it fails to provide the context of why these people took up arms against their own government. This is a complicated topic and I don't have the time nor the will to write an in-depth answer, but had there be no Russian help there would be thousands more dead civilians in Donbas rather than the ~3000 there are now.
chrisco255 5y ago
After seeing the Ukraine situation, and hearing Prof. Mearsheimer's take on it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4), I've begun to look at the world through a balance of powers political lens. Many of the countries we think of as independent nations, are only pseudo-independent. Much of the Western world has ceded its defense to the United States under NATO in the wake of WW2 and then again after the collapse of Soviet Union. Ukraine is a pawn, unfortunately. A strategic middle ground wedge point from which NATO hopes to box Russia in and prevent it from redeveloping as a peer competitor. Russia wants to be a peer competitor so that it can have self-sovereignty, and dominating oil fields and the Black Sea is critical for them to achieve that. China does too, that's why it wants Taiwan, as a strategic location in the south China Sea. Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, etc. these were all deemed strategic geography by the neo-cons and neo-libs that run the United States. They're playing chess with other people's homelands. The goal, from their perspective, is to contain threats (Iran, North Korea, etc) and prevent other great powers and peer competitors from emerging unless they agree to cede some sovereignty. The thought is that these sort of behavior will prevent another world war. If you can spread democracy around, after all, it's extremely rare that two democracies that actively trade with each other do war with each other. But I think this grand experiment has proven to be a failure. Not all countries have the culture for democracy. And culture matters a great deal. For these countries, introducing democracy (or puppet democracy, as the CIA is wont to do) is often simply destabilizing. I honestly hate my country's meddling around the world. I think it was something we reluctantly took on in the wake of WW2, but the whole military-industrial-technocratic-espionage apparatus that has developed in our country as a result of decades of this sort of policy has undermined our own democracy at home. And we're rapidly approaching a new world in which we are far from the 40s where we had 45% of the world GDP. And we've wrecked more countries than we've helped, in my opinion. But at the same time, I am kinda anxious about a world where the U.S. leaves a vacuum for others to fill. We really won't have a choice, in the near future, though. The financial gravity of this situation will hit us sooner or later, and we'll have to scale back. We've already ceded ground to the Russians and Chinese on hypersonic, EMP, and submarine weaponry. And I feel for the people stuck in the middle. The world is reverting back to a multi-polar state of affairs. I hope we do not repeat the 1930s and 40s as a result.
- 5y ago
oezi 5y ago
From Germany it is closer to Kiew than to Rome and 5k refugees arrive every day in Berlin, so it seems very rational that this war is featuring as big as it is. The big question is why we aren't capable of acting together to stop this war (and the others you are mentioned) without falling in the imperialist trap that Afghanistan was for the last 20 years. How can we stop the murdering Russian/Saudi/Talian regimes if their people can't seem to find the power to do it themselves? Edit: lol, messed up the distances. Kiew to Berlin is pretty much Rome to Berlin. Anyway, the point was: this war is too damn close to ignore. (Covid certainly isn't over when you look at the statistics in Europe btw)
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  > From Germany it is closer to Kiew than to Rome It’s not. It’s 950km from Munich to Rome. Munich to Kiev is 1700km and Dresden to Kiev is still 1500km+.
- fuoqi 5y ago
  >From Germany it is closer to Kiew than to Rome False. It's ~1210 km from Berlin to Kiev and it's 1180 km from Berlin to Rome. If we are to take closest points between territories, the difference becomes much bigger. Also it's ~1000 km from Berlin to Belgrad and I do not remember a similar outcry during the NATO invasion. >How can we stop the murdering Russian/Saudi/Talian regimes if their people can't seem to find the power to do it themselves? Right after the US and EU citizens will be able to stop numerous invasions by their governments with much higher death tolls.
  - ailef 5y ago
    A couple of days ago there was a similar discussion on Italian television and one of the politicians there was asking questions similar to yours. Incredibly enough, the TV host interrupted him and said "but they (the Ukraininans) are like us!". They are like us! "They are European brothers", he added. I don't understand how you have the courage to say something like this on TV: if you don't have a better argument keep your mouth shut. He immediately tried to retract it, saying that he was referring to geographical distance. Of course, when he was made aware that we also bombed Libya, which is way closer to Italy than Ukraine is, he didn't know what to say then.
exizt88 5y ago
> This war is only special because the media are putting it in our faces. You don’t even have to do much work to understand that this is simply not true. 97 people were killed in Iraq, but probably tens of thousands of people were killed in Ukraine in the last month. It’s a two orders of magnitude difference just between these two numbers. I honestly don’t understand how anyone can not see this unless they are actively trying not to see.
- popol12 5y ago
  Deleted
einarfd 5y ago
That this war is getting so much attentions but other wars is not can seem and is in some sense unfair. But there are geopolitical consideration which means that this war is of much higher interest to the west than any other war going on. Both EU and NATO has large combined land borders with Russian and Ukraine, and a war on their border is deeply problematic for both organizations, and their members. Which both organizations, and their members actions after the attack bears proof of. If you look at Europe, the political changes around security policy and that many European countries that have prided themselves on not shipping weapons to war zone have reversed their long standing policies on not doing that, is staggering, and it is clear a seismic shift in policies is happening in Europe. Then there is the fact that this is the fastest growing refuge crises since the second world war. All of these and many other considerations is the reason why the war is the story now. It might seem unfair and racist, and in some sense it is, but it isn't the medias fault. The war in Ukraine is the big story because it affects more and has bigger implications. Btw. Just to be crystal clear, I'm not arguing that the lack of interest in other wars are just, or right. I'm just arguing why there is a difference, and what the reasons for them are.
simion314 5y ago
We might need to know from where country you are to understand better what your misunderstanding is. I am from Romania, I don't watch TV, I don read news, but this was is different, nobody forced their media into me, I am going and checking to see what is happening. It is a bias and you can accuse me that I am not a robot and I care for people that are very similar to me (similar past, same religion, similar political insignificance compared with the giants). So from my perspective some media gives us what we want, they are using their professional team to go and film,talk to people and verify the existing stories that we already find on social media but add their "cofimed or unconfirmed" label on that. Btw I remember as kid I was watching TV with my grand=father, watching news from Chechnya war, and watching their leader speeches, I could not understand things then but I knew who were the patriots too, so at least here in Romania we always had an interest on who around us are Russians killing now and speculating are we next, or maybe our brothers in Modldova are next...
EdwardDiego 5y ago
> But from his perspective, what's changed? He still doesn't have any personal experience of this war, any more than he had of the previous stories he saw or ignored. His country began a war of aggression, with not even an attempt at reasonable pretence[0], against a country with people you could probably describe as having a sibling or cousin like relationship with his, for an attempt at an analogy, it would be like Australia invading New Zealand, or the USA invading Canada. And it's causing schisms with his family members still in his country due to the heavy propaganda they ingest. That's a fair bit of change there, mate. I'm assuming you read the same article I did, if so, not sure how your conclusion was "Screens bad". [0]: Before we hit the whataboutism, GW Bush's government tried hard to convince the UN that they had evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Putin just yelled "Nazis!" and went for it.
cycomanic 5y ago
I don't know where you live but 3 million refugees are pretty hard to ignore if you're in Europe. I was in Warsaw least week, there is 300,000 refugees in a city of 1.5M, many people are housing refugees in their spare rooms, hard to ignore that even without watching one bit of news. If you're living in the US, maybe it's a good thing you guys hear what goes on around the world. I think foreign news taking up so little time in the US was always fascinating to me and really contributes to many of the wrong prejudices that are held about the rest of the world IMO (although news about war is probably not the best at reducing those) .

baq 5y ago

Check out a history book about the lead up to 1939 (including an afterword why Russia doesn’t think 1939 is a special).

ailef 5y ago
Do you believe there's a real risk of Russia invading and occupying other countries in Europe?
- sharken 5y ago
  Georgia and Moldova are on the same path as Ukraine, they want to be members of the EU. All three countries are outside of NATO and EU, so they will have no one daring help them against a Russian invasion. Putin has shown that he is willing to take on 44 million Ukrainians with the invasion of Ukraine, so it's impossible to know if Georgia and Moldova are also on the list. Any country not a member of any defense pact are at risk, so membership of the EU is a sound but also dangerous choice. A regime change in Russia would of course change the dynamics, but that outcome seems highly unlikely.
  - YorkshireSeason 5y ago
    You are entirely correct, those countries have good reason to fear Russia (with the additional complexity of substantial numbers of ethnic Russians in those countries), but, as I wrote a month ago [1], there is a symmetry here and Russia also has good reason to fear NATO, for the latter, in the last 2 decades, have invaded (directly or through proxy forces): Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan. The sibling post [2] by "chrisco255" summrises some of the arrising issues. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479658 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30887328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30887328
    - sharken 5y ago
      The symmetry of NATO being involved in the named countries is hard to view as a threat to Russia. Yes, those countries are all in Asia, same as Russia, but apart from that it's a really weak argument that Russia should feel threatened. In no way can the invasion of Ukraine be justified and yet here we are, nobody can tell if Putin wants to invade Georgia or Moldova. It requires a paranoid person such as Putin, to think NATO has a master plan for attacking Russia.

tetris11 5y ago

I overheard a colleague talking to another colleague about it, and what he said was "this is a christian country they're invading!" I privately raised an eyebrow at the time, but I later understood what he meant and probably what the media is saying: they might be coming for us next, i.e. other culturally christian countries. We tolerated/ignored the Syrian conflict because we could not see ourselves in them.

fuoqi 5y ago
I wonder about his opinion regarding the US-NATO invasion of Yugoslavia in which christian Serbs got bombed into stone age to protect muslims and change state borders in the middle of Europe by force.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  The Serbs had bad PR at the time, having been seen to be responsible for some pretty awful things. I'm not saying they didn't do them, I'm emphasising that it depends on whether the west sees you as a bad guy like Saddam. Only after the bad guy level does it matter who you actually are in terms of proximity to Western culture. The Nazi regime were also Christian bad guys.
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    The media apparatus of the west can turn any people into its justified enemy; Christian or not - it really doesn’t matter once the machine gets rolling.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    Are you sure it doesn't work the other way around? That is, first the United States government (usually it's them, after all) decides you're getting hit with a war, and then you're portrayed as a bad guy, worse than Hitler, a threat "our democracy" and to all life on the planet — and the people eat it up, put the Ruritanian flag on their profile pictures, and "stand with Ruritania," because we'll fight the bastards to the last Ruritanian. And then we fund the bad guy to fight for us in our next conflict against the real villain.

Olreich 5y ago

Invading a country with mostly non-white, non-christian people: not news Invading a country with most white, christian people: news I don’t think there’s any single global conspiracy, just some deeply seated bias in our systems. But when media outlets, governments, and other organizations all individually try to take advantage of or fall into the biases, you get what smells like global conspiracy.

sokoloff 5y ago
Alternatively: invading a stable, non-aggressor democratic country: news.
- ailef 5y ago
  I'm not sure if you're serious promoting such a characterization of Ukraine. Stable is especially egregious, given there's an ongoing war in eastern Ukraine since 2014. Also, sovereignty is in no way tied to the government system: under international law, you have no more right to invade a dictatorship than a democracy.
  - sharken 5y ago
    Disagree. The conflict in Donbas was started when Russian forces helped those who wanted to take up arms against Ukraine. Had there been no Russian help, things would look very different. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas
    - ailef 5y ago
      Unless you don't agree on the definition of "stable", there's not much to say. You simply cannot define a country with an 8 years long conflict as "stable", whichever the reasons for this conflict are. > Russian forces helped those who wanted to take up arms against Ukraine. > Had there been no Russian help, things would look very different. What you said is true but it fails to provide the context of why these people took up arms against their own government. This is a complicated topic and I don't have the time nor the will to write an in-depth answer, but had there be no Russian help there would be thousands more dead civilians in Donbas rather than the ~3000 there are now.

chrisco255 5y ago

After seeing the Ukraine situation, and hearing Prof. Mearsheimer's take on it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4), I've begun to look at the world through a balance of powers political lens. Many of the countries we think of as independent nations, are only pseudo-independent. Much of the Western world has ceded its defense to the United States under NATO in the wake of WW2 and then again after the collapse of Soviet Union. Ukraine is a pawn, unfortunately. A strategic middle ground wedge point from which NATO hopes to box Russia in and prevent it from redeveloping as a peer competitor. Russia wants to be a peer competitor so that it can have self-sovereignty, and dominating oil fields and the Black Sea is critical for them to achieve that. China does too, that's why it wants Taiwan, as a strategic location in the south China Sea. Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, etc. these were all deemed strategic geography by the neo-cons and neo-libs that run the United States. They're playing chess with other people's homelands. The goal, from their perspective, is to contain threats (Iran, North Korea, etc) and prevent other great powers and peer competitors from emerging unless they agree to cede some sovereignty. The thought is that these sort of behavior will prevent another world war. If you can spread democracy around, after all, it's extremely rare that two democracies that actively trade with each other do war with each other. But I think this grand experiment has proven to be a failure. Not all countries have the culture for democracy. And culture matters a great deal. For these countries, introducing democracy (or puppet democracy, as the CIA is wont to do) is often simply destabilizing. I honestly hate my country's meddling around the world. I think it was something we reluctantly took on in the wake of WW2, but the whole military-industrial-technocratic-espionage apparatus that has developed in our country as a result of decades of this sort of policy has undermined our own democracy at home. And we're rapidly approaching a new world in which we are far from the 40s where we had 45% of the world GDP. And we've wrecked more countries than we've helped, in my opinion. But at the same time, I am kinda anxious about a world where the U.S. leaves a vacuum for others to fill. We really won't have a choice, in the near future, though. The financial gravity of this situation will hit us sooner or later, and we'll have to scale back. We've already ceded ground to the Russians and Chinese on hypersonic, EMP, and submarine weaponry. And I feel for the people stuck in the middle. The world is reverting back to a multi-polar state of affairs. I hope we do not repeat the 1930s and 40s as a result.

5y ago

oezi 5y ago

From Germany it is closer to Kiew than to Rome and 5k refugees arrive every day in Berlin, so it seems very rational that this war is featuring as big as it is. The big question is why we aren't capable of acting together to stop this war (and the others you are mentioned) without falling in the imperialist trap that Afghanistan was for the last 20 years. How can we stop the murdering Russian/Saudi/Talian regimes if their people can't seem to find the power to do it themselves? Edit: lol, messed up the distances. Kiew to Berlin is pretty much Rome to Berlin. Anyway, the point was: this war is too damn close to ignore. (Covid certainly isn't over when you look at the statistics in Europe btw)

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
> From Germany it is closer to Kiew than to Rome It’s not. It’s 950km from Munich to Rome. Munich to Kiev is 1700km and Dresden to Kiev is still 1500km+.
fuoqi 5y ago
>From Germany it is closer to Kiew than to Rome False. It's ~1210 km from Berlin to Kiev and it's 1180 km from Berlin to Rome. If we are to take closest points between territories, the difference becomes much bigger. Also it's ~1000 km from Berlin to Belgrad and I do not remember a similar outcry during the NATO invasion. >How can we stop the murdering Russian/Saudi/Talian regimes if their people can't seem to find the power to do it themselves? Right after the US and EU citizens will be able to stop numerous invasions by their governments with much higher death tolls.
- ailef 5y ago
  A couple of days ago there was a similar discussion on Italian television and one of the politicians there was asking questions similar to yours. Incredibly enough, the TV host interrupted him and said "but they (the Ukraininans) are like us!". They are like us! "They are European brothers", he added. I don't understand how you have the courage to say something like this on TV: if you don't have a better argument keep your mouth shut. He immediately tried to retract it, saying that he was referring to geographical distance. Of course, when he was made aware that we also bombed Libya, which is way closer to Italy than Ukraine is, he didn't know what to say then.

exizt88 5y ago

> This war is only special because the media are putting it in our faces. You don’t even have to do much work to understand that this is simply not true. 97 people were killed in Iraq, but probably tens of thousands of people were killed in Ukraine in the last month. It’s a two orders of magnitude difference just between these two numbers. I honestly don’t understand how anyone can not see this unless they are actively trying not to see.

popol12 5y ago
Deleted

einarfd 5y ago

That this war is getting so much attentions but other wars is not can seem and is in some sense unfair. But there are geopolitical consideration which means that this war is of much higher interest to the west than any other war going on. Both EU and NATO has large combined land borders with Russian and Ukraine, and a war on their border is deeply problematic for both organizations, and their members. Which both organizations, and their members actions after the attack bears proof of. If you look at Europe, the political changes around security policy and that many European countries that have prided themselves on not shipping weapons to war zone have reversed their long standing policies on not doing that, is staggering, and it is clear a seismic shift in policies is happening in Europe. Then there is the fact that this is the fastest growing refuge crises since the second world war. All of these and many other considerations is the reason why the war is the story now. It might seem unfair and racist, and in some sense it is, but it isn't the medias fault. The war in Ukraine is the big story because it affects more and has bigger implications. Btw. Just to be crystal clear, I'm not arguing that the lack of interest in other wars are just, or right. I'm just arguing why there is a difference, and what the reasons for them are.

simion314 5y ago

We might need to know from where country you are to understand better what your misunderstanding is. I am from Romania, I don't watch TV, I don read news, but this was is different, nobody forced their media into me, I am going and checking to see what is happening. It is a bias and you can accuse me that I am not a robot and I care for people that are very similar to me (similar past, same religion, similar political insignificance compared with the giants). So from my perspective some media gives us what we want, they are using their professional team to go and film,talk to people and verify the existing stories that we already find on social media but add their "cofimed or unconfirmed" label on that. Btw I remember as kid I was watching TV with my grand=father, watching news from Chechnya war, and watching their leader speeches, I could not understand things then but I knew who were the patriots too, so at least here in Romania we always had an interest on who around us are Russians killing now and speculating are we next, or maybe our brothers in Modldova are next...

EdwardDiego 5y ago

> But from his perspective, what's changed? He still doesn't have any personal experience of this war, any more than he had of the previous stories he saw or ignored. His country began a war of aggression, with not even an attempt at reasonable pretence[0], against a country with people you could probably describe as having a sibling or cousin like relationship with his, for an attempt at an analogy, it would be like Australia invading New Zealand, or the USA invading Canada. And it's causing schisms with his family members still in his country due to the heavy propaganda they ingest. That's a fair bit of change there, mate. I'm assuming you read the same article I did, if so, not sure how your conclusion was "Screens bad". [0]: Before we hit the whataboutism, GW Bush's government tried hard to convince the UN that they had evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Putin just yelled "Nazis!" and went for it.

cycomanic 5y ago

I don't know where you live but 3 million refugees are pretty hard to ignore if you're in Europe. I was in Warsaw least week, there is 300,000 refugees in a city of 1.5M, many people are housing refugees in their spare rooms, hard to ignore that even without watching one bit of news. If you're living in the US, maybe it's a good thing you guys hear what goes on around the world. I think foreign news taking up so little time in the US was always fascinating to me and really contributes to many of the wrong prejudices that are held about the rest of the world IMO (although news about war is probably not the best at reducing those) .