Well, lest we gaslight ourselves into what'd happened, the Putin Administration spent a lot of time hand-waving and saying that they weren't going to invade Ukr

Well, lest we gaslight ourselves into what'd happened, the Putin Administration spent a lot of time hand-waving and saying that they weren't going to invade Ukraine. And then they did, and apparently expecting that they were going to be greeted as liberators. So there is no reason to trust them at all. (Maybe just like there was no reason to trust GWB's folks either.) From where I'm sitting, Biden's folks did no small part in subtlely goading the Russians into doing stupid things. But really, they just led Putin and Xi into their own worst excesses, much like how those have been doing to the U.S. in turn. The world is an ugly place, and it's up to us citizens to figure out what's going on. We are not served when the U.S. invades Afghanistan. How was that geopolitically smart, even in a realpolitik sense? Likewise the Russian people would be smart to realize just how much the public opinion in sympathetic countries (like Germany) has turned against them. When we buy into this Brave New World stuff, we are creating a worse situation for ourselves – and even more so for future generations. Most of all, we need to know ourselves, because these artificially constructed realities work against us when the algorithms know us better than we do.