I do not post on other platforms (besides a very infrequent blog on Java game development). My commenting online is mostly Less Wrong and ACX, occasionally Hacker News.
I actually do not think I have much useful to say on the topic other than what I already wrote here; this was a dump of everything that was on my mind. Could generate some more text about what pro-Russian people in my country actually believe (a mixture of Putin admiration and conspiracy theories about our local politicians), but at the end you would see that this comment was the 20% of the text that provided 80% of the value.
One more thing that comes to my mind is this: Imagine how a paranoid antisemitic person thinks about Jews. Remove the religious things like circumcision or cooking matzos from blood of Christian children, and only keep the non-religious ones like ruling the world from shadows, only caring about profit, manipulating the world’s finance, being untrustworthy and generally immoral. Replace the world “Jew” with “American”. Add an army, used exclusively to kill innocent people across the world, especially recently in former Yugoslavia; motivated by greed, power, oil. -- The result is a good approximation of how pro-Russian people in my country think and talk about Americans. Generally, pro-Russian mindset and conspiracy mindset are very close to each other.
I am getting most of my information about the war on Ukraine from r/ukraine. Yes, it is obviously biased in favor of Ukraine. Sometimes they post animated maps.
I have procrastinated for years on reading The Gulag Archipelago, because it is such a long book. Then I have read it, and now I think it should be a mandatory reading for everyone who wants to discuss Soviet Union or Russia. Some people say it is exaggerated, I believe it is the other way round: as a religious patriot, Solzhenitsyn was making excuses for Russian nation and Russian Orthodox Church, trying to put all the blame exclusively on communism. (Which is nonsense, because the typical Russian disregard for human life predates the communism by centuries.)
The war in Ukraine made me update towards the suspicion that pretty much all nations that are currently part of Russian Federation were conquered in a similar way. I now suspect that the “terrorists” in Chechnya were about as real as the “Nazis” in Ukraine. People from ex-Soviet republics say that their referendums to join Soviet Union were of the same kind as the referendum in Crimea.
It is hard to find a balance between believing that your enemies are innately evil, and a typical-mind fallacy. Some situations are correctly described my mistake theory, others by conflict theory. I think that people overestimate differences related to race, gender, language, but underestimate the difference of psychopaths and bullies. (If someone seems different and speaks a different language, we are likely to conclude “this person must have very different thoughts and feelings”, when in fact they may be saying exactly the same things as you are saying. On the other hand, people keep making endless excuses for bullies, refusing to consider seriously the possibility that some individuals simply enjoy hurting others.) Somewhere in the middle are the cultural differences, which on one hand are real and won’t disappear overnight; on the other hand are not universal and might change after decades, though probably not spontaneously. -- Russia insists that Russia and Ukraine are pretty much the same. I predict that if Ukraine wins this war, especially if it joins EU, it will become another member of the “Western civilization” (maybe not perfectly so, but not less than an average Eastern European country), while Russia will… remain the Russia as we know it, sadly.
...thus conclude political ramblings of the guy who promised not to discuss politics on LW. :D
Okay, seriously. Enough. No more. Thanks for all the karma, though, I really appreciate it!
(The best place to discuss politics with rationalists are probably the ACX open threads. However, ACX is open to everyone, including people who are clearly not rationalists.)
I do not post on other platforms (besides a very infrequent blog on Java game development). My commenting online is mostly Less Wrong and ACX, occasionally Hacker News.
I actually do not think I have much useful to say on the topic other than what I already wrote here; this was a dump of everything that was on my mind. Could generate some more text about what pro-Russian people in my country actually believe (a mixture of Putin admiration and conspiracy theories about our local politicians), but at the end you would see that this comment was the 20% of the text that provided 80% of the value.
One more thing that comes to my mind is this: Imagine how a paranoid antisemitic person thinks about Jews. Remove the religious things like circumcision or cooking matzos from blood of Christian children, and only keep the non-religious ones like ruling the world from shadows, only caring about profit, manipulating the world’s finance, being untrustworthy and generally immoral. Replace the world “Jew” with “American”. Add an army, used exclusively to kill innocent people across the world, especially recently in former Yugoslavia; motivated by greed, power, oil. -- The result is a good approximation of how pro-Russian people in my country think and talk about Americans. Generally, pro-Russian mindset and conspiracy mindset are very close to each other.
I am getting most of my information about the war on Ukraine from r/ukraine. Yes, it is obviously biased in favor of Ukraine. Sometimes they post animated maps.
I have procrastinated for years on reading The Gulag Archipelago, because it is such a long book. Then I have read it, and now I think it should be a mandatory reading for everyone who wants to discuss Soviet Union or Russia. Some people say it is exaggerated, I believe it is the other way round: as a religious patriot, Solzhenitsyn was making excuses for Russian nation and Russian Orthodox Church, trying to put all the blame exclusively on communism. (Which is nonsense, because the typical Russian disregard for human life predates the communism by centuries.)
A different author wrote on Less Wrong: Anti-social Punishment.
The war in Ukraine made me update towards the suspicion that pretty much all nations that are currently part of Russian Federation were conquered in a similar way. I now suspect that the “terrorists” in Chechnya were about as real as the “Nazis” in Ukraine. People from ex-Soviet republics say that their referendums to join Soviet Union were of the same kind as the referendum in Crimea.
It is hard to find a balance between believing that your enemies are innately evil, and a typical-mind fallacy. Some situations are correctly described my mistake theory, others by conflict theory. I think that people overestimate differences related to race, gender, language, but underestimate the difference of psychopaths and bullies. (If someone seems different and speaks a different language, we are likely to conclude “this person must have very different thoughts and feelings”, when in fact they may be saying exactly the same things as you are saying. On the other hand, people keep making endless excuses for bullies, refusing to consider seriously the possibility that some individuals simply enjoy hurting others.) Somewhere in the middle are the cultural differences, which on one hand are real and won’t disappear overnight; on the other hand are not universal and might change after decades, though probably not spontaneously. -- Russia insists that Russia and Ukraine are pretty much the same. I predict that if Ukraine wins this war, especially if it joins EU, it will become another member of the “Western civilization” (maybe not perfectly so, but not less than an average Eastern European country), while Russia will… remain the Russia as we know it, sadly.
...thus conclude political ramblings of the guy who promised not to discuss politics on LW. :D
Okay, seriously. Enough. No more. Thanks for all the karma, though, I really appreciate it!
(The best place to discuss politics with rationalists are probably the ACX open threads. However, ACX is open to everyone, including people who are clearly not rationalists.)