Pretty much everything about Ukraine has been propagandized to hell and back, including its history, current events and the war. So of course you're going to get some crazy takes no matter which side of the political spectrum you're on.
I don’t really understand that. Before - yes. But now and on HN.
If people are really curious about Ukraine to the point that they want to express their takes why not to fly to Poland, cross the border and spend several month in Ukraine. See how things are, talk to people and so on?
Many people on HN definitely can afford that. Why just retell some story from one friend you have instead of going on the ground and talking to hundreds of people?
> why not to fly to Poland, cross the border and spend several month in Ukraine. See how things are, talk to people and so on?
Because, Ukraine lack systematic, and Russia have it.
For example, look on "list of Ukrainian products" - I from very first and very surface look, see it is outdated, as example, Petcube, Solargaps ceased, I only sure about Ajax functioning.
So, I think this is manually created list, without any automation. Appear question - where is famous Ukrainian IT? Why this list is not synchronized with banking transfers? And so on...
What I want to tell, from such nuances, Ukraine looks like small African country, not European, and Western people feel very much difference from powerful Russian propaganda.
Imagine, for example, France news services use systematic approach, when they seen public interest on Ukrainian region, they tried to hire cultural experts, and they just can't find Ukrainian experts, so they after long thoughts, hired Russians, thinking they should also know their neighbors, you understand how bad words I want to say, and this is not joke.
These things are very obvious for me as I mostly work for Western clients.
If you really want to help Ukraine, we could talk on more private channel, because I don't want to share with Russians know how.
Ukraine is a very small part of the lives of most people here and they are definitely not going to make that trip just to post a better comment of this website.
If you look at the "Selected readings" and "comments" sections you'll have a better idea of the sort of discussion I had been hoping for when submitting this link to HN.
(some nutty ideas mentioned, yes, but nutty ideas about things that happened thousands of years ago...)
I would extend it from Ukraine in particular to foreign policy in general. It's worse, genuinely, than large portions of Reddit.
On one hand there are the contrarian libertarian types that seem to flock to Silicon Valley and the VC sphere. Elon Musk, David Sachs, Peter Thiel, etc.
On the other hand there are are a lot of genuine tankies and campists, who (I assume) may have gone down that rabbit hole because of Snowden / Assange / Iraq and never taken a step back to re-evaluate their worldview as new events take place in less formative years.
And I think this is probably less of an issue on this particular website, but there's a third group of right-wing culture warriors that adopted the Russian propaganda framing Russia as the lone Christian Nationalist holdout in the war against the LGBT, multicultural, liberal West. Never mind that the Russian Orthodox Church is stuffed full of ex-KGB and FSB operatives.
every time I read comments here I want to cry from the amount of bullshit.
Many comments are ok, but the proportion of quality is way off.
Apples to oranges all time. People quoting some crazy friends etc.
I really struggle to understand why it’s simultaneously oversimplification of the issue and mixing signals and noise.