I don't believe this, even for a second.
How are those that truly do question everything treated?
Well, as either looney conspiracy theorists, or vindicated activists, depending on when the official State narrative (or classification status) changes.
Not always, or even often unjustified, but I hardly think you can call it an "underlying axiom of western thought" with the extreme negative public sentiment towards it.
Nobody said it's without cost to hold non-consensus views. The point is that those costs are incurred by the marketplace of ideas itself (people being "mean" to you, not the state beheading you) and that, in the long run, correct views become the consensus through winning such competitions over and over again.
There are alternative regimes where incorrect views can reign indefinitely because they choose to prevent people from criticizing each others' views.
I was saying that the narrative of a single truth was western propaganda and that the world is more nuanced than that.
There's many truths. That simple dichotomy "truth vs propaganda" is a staple of the western approach to propaganda.
One country illegally occupies quarter of another country in 2014 and launches full blown invasion in 2022.
Question: how many truths are there?
That's exactly my point, your truth is a reflection of your world view and your ideology.
It is silly to assume one's truth as universal and doing so kills all nuance.
The russian military doctrine of spreading a "firehouse of falsehood" is well documented.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation
And yet, you switch it around and blame the west - exactly as per russian misinformation doctrine.
Odd, eh?
An earlier comment mentioned how hard it is to get down to objective truth. Sometimes there are cases, like 'accelerate climate change in the belief that it'll help Siberia and hurt the West and Europe and open up the Arctic for shipping' where it's not at all hard to get down to objective truth: objective truth comes for ya like a tiger and will not be avoided.
Are you going to claim that US politicians don't do the exact same thing? This is my favorite example of it, where one literally tells you what the play is while it's getting made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I
Feelings not facts.
For example, it is the truth that the Golf of Mexico is called the Gulf of America in the US, but Golf of Mexico everywhere else. What is the "correct" truth? Well, there is none, both of truthful, but from different perspectives.
We're pretty much okay with different countries and languages having different names for the same thing. None of that really reflects "truth" though. For what it's worth, I'd guess that "the Gulf of America" is and will be about as successful as "Freedom fries" was.
I get the general point, but I disagree that you have to choose between one of the possibilities instead of explaining what the current state of belief is. This won't eliminate grey areas but it'll sure get us closer than picking a side at random.
But that also isn't the truth everywhere, it's only a controversy in the US, everyone else is accepting "Gulf of Mexico" as the name.
The exact word "controversy" might have been the wrong choice by me, but whatever, I'm not a Wikipedia editor and I don't run Google Maps. The world has standards for dealing with government disputes and with i8n.
I guess that's the fundamental disagreement, I wouldn't call that a "dispute" more than I would call the name "America" a dispute, it's just that different people understand it different. For some, it means a group of continents (that's how most people around me would take that for example), for others it means a country in North America (which I'm guessing is the common meaning if you live in North America already). Just because different people has different meanings doesn't make it into a dispute.
Are markets a driver of wealth and innovation or of exploitation and misery?
Is abortion an important human right or murder?
Etc etc
You have to look at the details before you find the grey areas. Consider the case of abortion, and further consider the question of the existence of the human soul. There's no scientific evidence for souls, but the decision to look only at scientific evidence is itself a bias towards a certain way of understanding the world.
This is still much better than just deciding to pick one or the other side and ignoring the dispute.
Parent is arguing one thing, show up with some bullshit argument and watch dozen comments arguing about Gulf of Mexico instead of discussing original point.
The US, like other countries, doesn't get redefined with every change of government, and Trump has not yet cowed the public into knuckling under to his every dictat.
Russia doesn't care what you call that sea, they're interested in actual falsehoods. Like redefining who started the Ukraine war, making the US president antagonize Europe to weaken the West, helping far right parties accross the West since they are all subordinated to Russia...
That saps your will to be political, to morally judge actions and support efforts to punish wrongdoers.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
https://jordanrussiacenter.org/blog/propaganda-political-apa...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/insi...