Readit NewsThere is definitely propganda on both sides (and how much of it is true is hard to tell). Russia isn't the only one with a propaganda machine, if anything the US is much more successful at it than Russia could ever hope to be.
I encourage you to read more of the Quora article, even if I appreciate that some of the stuff in the article might be hard to stomach, since you seem emotionally closer to the issue than I do. I believe a lot of it is very unlikely to stem from Russian propaganda.
Some of the stuff you attributed (eg you mentioned tribalism and spite) to Russia isn't unique to them or their politics; it's just a very primitive part of human nature that we still struggle with.
And to close with a tangent: it's always good to keep in mind that nobody (neither you or I) is immune to propagand; especially when it's pushed by state actors with a larger agenda. This is why I often indulge in reading stuff I don't agree with (within reason). Does give me a bit of cognitive dissonance occasionally, but alas.
They even have a term for it - "Cordon sanitaire": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(internationa...
Here's a collection of sources compiled by someone on Quora. I dont know how biased or accurate this person is. However, there were other instances that made me think this isn't so black-and-white or "clean" as I'd like it to be.
https://www.quora.com/If-Putin-is-indeed-the-real-aggressor-...
A lot of the sources he used are from Ukranian websites so you might need to run them through Google Translate. Some are from reputable (for at least some definition of reputable) western media outlets like CNN, BBC, NYT, etc.
The embedded vidoes don't seem to work in Chrome (they just disappear when I click them) so I've extracted the link for one of them here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 - Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer, uploaded by The University of Chicago
Other videos are shorter clips to prove a point, but if anyone's interested they can see the video ID in the embedded image URL when inspecting the element.
Again, maybe this is all dogshit like you say, but I find that too dismissive of the facts presented.
These tensions have been brewing between NATO (mostly America) and Russia for at least a decade. It's unfortunate that the situation escalated in Ukraine though, which AFAIK is the victim in the scheming and plotting of those two powers.
I don't support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it seems like that's the only thing people are focusing on because it makes the situation simple for them, and it's easiest to have a single villain and the rest are the good guys.
I assume most people offended by this submission here are American (or at least heavily support America) and want to think of their current government/country as the good guys.
I don't think there's any good guys in this situation.
As a person from Eastern Europe this is literal Russian propaganda or in simple words - dogshit. You know why somebody like Baltic countries wanted to get in NATO? Because Russia was/is a genuine threat after these countries were deoccupied from the Soviet Union. Russia thinks that these former Soviet Union countries are still their own property, they can't imagine that these countries don't want to live "the Russian way".
Even if the foreign government spies more nether jurisdiction is likely to care enough about you specifically to make an international case of it.
In other words I'd think most Americans would be better off proxying through Europe, and most Europeans would be better off proxying through the US.
Even better would be to proxy through a third country that your own country is unlikely to cooperate with, and which won't care about you personally.
E.g. I wouldn't want to live in Iran or North Korea, but I'd think proxying DNS through them would in some way maximize my privacy if I was living in Europe or the US.
I'll never travel to either of them, and my authorities are vanishingly unlikely to cooperate with either of them for anything short of murder.
Everyday people who are worried about state-actor threats - an incredibly targeted and unlikely scenario for the average person - but are less concerned about their personal information being harvested for marketing purposes - something that happens all the time to everyone.
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>I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed.
That you have followed or listened to a podcast in Spotify is what makes you different here.
I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify, despite being a user since the invite-only days, yet the UI recommends podcasts at the same frequency as you've described.
I imagine many of the other people here do not want podcasts to appear anywhere in the Spotify UI.