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You can also just lie about nukes, it's just that nobody cares for lies in either case. Russia could drop a nuke and say "it was totally a Swiss plane", but tha

You can also just lie about nukes, it's just that nobody cares for lies in either case. Russia could drop a nuke and say "it was totally a Swiss plane", but that doesn't matter to anyone, and the same would be true for them attacking nuclear power plants. They shot down MH17 and only the hardcore believers are pretending to believe them, and those folks would say it wasn't them if Putin personally pushed the button while on live TV and narrating what he's doing the whole time. The difference is that we don't care enough about MH17 to go to war over it. Put Nancy Pelosi on that plane, and see what happens and how far they'd come with "it totally wasn't us, I swear on Stalin's grave".

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I wish I could agree with you that "only the hardcare believers are pretending to believe them" on the MH17 front. I have had mostly non-political non-Russophile family members regurgitate disinfo/conspiracy points on that topic. My point being that Russian disinformation campaigns generally work. They never paid the consequences for that action. Or for polonium poisonings on foreign territory etc. They're targeting civilians in the war and still there's a significant % of people in the west openly supporting them. And in large part this same phenomenon seems like it would happen if they were to blow the dam on the Dnieper, or, as discussed here, perform terrorist actions involving a nuclear power plant. It's much much harder to do the same with an actual nuclear weapon attack. That would bring immediate NATO involvement of some form. The broader point isn't about nuclear power per se but about the wisdom of building any infrastructure that has clear long term safety and vulnerability issues. The problem with most forms of nuclear power generation is that they require many lifetimes worth of maintenance and continuous high quality engineering and monitoring. I simply am too pessimistic about human beings to feel this is wise.
- luckylion 4y ago
  I believe by and large they don't pay the price because nobody really cares. The British certainly don't like it, but it'd be a very different story if the Russian agents were murdering Royals or British politicians. If they're "only" murdering exiled Russians, it's more like the Turkish intelligence services murdering Kurdish activists in France: not amused, but definitely not something to go to war over. You're right, there are lots of people who "believe" them, but I think that's a somewhat different story. There's a group of people we've left behind in the West that will believe whatever you tell them, as long as it vaguely resonates with their world view. They dislike their country's government because of their personal situation, so if you start your tale by "your government is lying to you", you have their attention. I don't know how to win them back, but I don't think they actually 'believe' it, it's more of a tribal thing, and they've switched tribes because they didn't feel like they were treated as part of their original tribe (which I can understand to some degree). It's important to say though: these people 'believe' those tales precisely because they're powerless; what they believe or don't believe does not matter. It's not like the Russian military would blow up a nuclear power plant to irradiate the area and have radioactive clouds drift westwards and we'd hold a plebiscite on how to respond (thank god!).
pvaldes 4y ago
I had to search it. MH17: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (2014)

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

I wish I could agree with you that "only the hardcare believers are pretending to believe them" on the MH17 front. I have had mostly non-political non-Russophile family members regurgitate disinfo/conspiracy points on that topic. My point being that Russian disinformation campaigns generally work. They never paid the consequences for that action. Or for polonium poisonings on foreign territory etc. They're targeting civilians in the war and still there's a significant % of people in the west openly supporting them. And in large part this same phenomenon seems like it would happen if they were to blow the dam on the Dnieper, or, as discussed here, perform terrorist actions involving a nuclear power plant. It's much much harder to do the same with an actual nuclear weapon attack. That would bring immediate NATO involvement of some form. The broader point isn't about nuclear power per se but about the wisdom of building any infrastructure that has clear long term safety and vulnerability issues. The problem with most forms of nuclear power generation is that they require many lifetimes worth of maintenance and continuous high quality engineering and monitoring. I simply am too pessimistic about human beings to feel this is wise.

luckylion 4y ago
I believe by and large they don't pay the price because nobody really cares. The British certainly don't like it, but it'd be a very different story if the Russian agents were murdering Royals or British politicians. If they're "only" murdering exiled Russians, it's more like the Turkish intelligence services murdering Kurdish activists in France: not amused, but definitely not something to go to war over. You're right, there are lots of people who "believe" them, but I think that's a somewhat different story. There's a group of people we've left behind in the West that will believe whatever you tell them, as long as it vaguely resonates with their world view. They dislike their country's government because of their personal situation, so if you start your tale by "your government is lying to you", you have their attention. I don't know how to win them back, but I don't think they actually 'believe' it, it's more of a tribal thing, and they've switched tribes because they didn't feel like they were treated as part of their original tribe (which I can understand to some degree). It's important to say though: these people 'believe' those tales precisely because they're powerless; what they believe or don't believe does not matter. It's not like the Russian military would blow up a nuclear power plant to irradiate the area and have radioactive clouds drift westwards and we'd hold a plebiscite on how to respond (thank god!).

pvaldes 4y ago

I had to search it. MH17: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (2014)