Most members on this site get their news from a single ideological viewpoint promoted by American and Western media. Unfortunately, US mainstream media are stenographers for the US State Department and the White House. What you are fed is highly politicized propaganda with nuggets of facts. Like a gold miner, you need to sluice the sands of fabrication away to get to the gold. It's a lot like during the Covid pandemic where we were literally told to "trust the science" which meant, "you may only accept mainstream media's narrative of Covid, and you must shut off your own innate analytical skills and stop trying to pick apart the facts from fiction" and there was a s***-ton of fiction being bandied about during Covid. Same for war. ..."you may only accept mainstream media's narrative of <enter war here>, and you must shut off your own innate analytical skills and stop trying to pick apart the facts from fiction" and there was a s***-ton of fiction being bandied about during <current war>. Same same. It order to reach some semblance of truth, you gotta get out of your comfort zone and read multiple sources of information from foreign media including Russia, Iran, China, India, and non-Western souces, left wing media, right wing media, the media of those who are considered combatants, the media of you countries allies, and non-mainstream open-source independent media reviews and analysis. One thing you can be sure of, "The First Casualty of War is the Truth," therefore you have to have the intuitive capability of dig into information troves and pick facts from fiction - unfortunately most people can't do that. Using the same analogy, like a gold miner with a sluice pan, you're mining for nuggets of truth. So what most members get is "unfiltered" propaganda, and therefore what you get on forums like this are ideologues spouting the version of propaganda the watched on their screens while completely discounting any narrative but those promoted by their home-country's media - and as such everything they state as opinion on this forum is skews by the impact of the propaganda they unquestioningly accept. That's why I find wading through these OPs on the Iran War to be a sad state of affairs, i.e., watching people get the situation on the ground totally wrong. Currently Trump is spouting, "The War Is Over - We Won." Believing that is a huge mistake. Like Br'er Rabbit, he smacked a tar-baby right in the face and now he's stuck. And he's flailing. Don't be like Br'er Rabbit. Ideologues only find half-truths.
