For some 21 years I've attended a weekly forum where old people sit around a long table and talk about issues. This week we discussed the war in Ukraine; we discovered that one of our members believes that the media is manipulating us into a dislike of Putin.
I don't know why the member believes that. He is not a Fascist. But for a while we all talked about how we know things. Epistemology.
This came the same day that I saw on French television a row of dead bodies that had once been people standing in a breadline in Ukraine. Machine-gunned by Russians.
It took the forum a while to get into gear, but our conclusion was that each of us lives in a sea of related sources and memories that join to give us convictions about issues.
My view of Ukraine comes from time, from years of books about Putin, from Russian friends, the New Yorker, my local newspaper (The Corporate Democrat), NPR, Amy Goodman, CNN, TV news programs from Germany, Japan and France, MSNBC, a quote from Mila Kunis, etc. They all say the same thing about Ukraine. In a sense everything comes together like one ocean in which I float.
Of course, there are other oceans with other outcomes, but from the outside the pro-Russian ocean looks more like a shallow pond.
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