[SirYandi]

I know this is a selfish perspective but the Ukraine/Russia news cycle has been hitting my mental health pretty hard. Its nice to come here and see the usual interesting techy stuff and get a break from the horror.

Not that I disagree with your point. This is a place of intelligent discussion which could perhaps benefit Ukrainians better.

[galaxyLogic]

Yes HN is supposed to be about intellectually interesting ideas. And the fight against war and fascism needs those because otherwise we are in deep sh*t. So why not combine the two?

The situation with Russia is much about information. HN is about information and IT, no? HN could be the primary forum to discuss ways to counter MIS-information.

There seems to be a deep problem in Russia, its citizens are mostly duped by misinformation pushed by their government. What kind of intelligent solutions exist or could be developed to counter that?

[hurflmurfl]

Just this once, I want to contribute a "view from the inside" on how things work in Russia [in my opinion].

Sure, some people are hoodwinked by the propaganda. However, a weird misunderstanding is that "if they new what the Truth was, they would surely relent".

From what I've gathered growing up in Russia, that's not quite the case. I don't know why, but a lot of people here have a very apathetic view on politics. In that even if they knew all the "real truth", they wouldn't go into "fight mode", but would instead go into "man, same shit as usual, our life's about to get harder" mode.

I've just chatted with some friends who don't support the war effort in any way and are just as dismayed as your average European Joe (Giuseppe??) (and they have relatives in Ukraine too). What struck me really hard is that once again I had a glimpse of this weird mentality, whereby the person laments being in bad circumstances and start doing a lot of planning (and hoping) on how to deal with the coming misfortunes. Taking control of the change and nipping the said misfortune in the bud is just plain out of sight!

With this in mind, the problem that needs to be solved, in my opinion, is the "victim mentality" in the population, rather than the "misinformation", since "solving" misinformation would seem to push people into the usual victim loop.

Just my 2 cents, and I'm no one and my opinion is based solely on more than a decade of life in Russia.