@m0xEE @PurpCat @ins0mniak @olmitch

> American young adults, who, like you said, might have very wrong idea of it themselves

If you wander by some of the cranker Poast users or basically anyone on Nice Crew Dot Digital, you can actually see where the Americans got their ideas of the 1950s: feminists of the 1970s painted a dark picture of the era, and kids that didn't like feminism as taught in school never bothered to question whether it was true. Some loopy professor says that in the 50s, men could go around and rape whoever and black people weren't allowed to make eye contact with horses and then these idiots declared it based.

> Their idea of their own country's past comes from what gets regurgitated in the West and fed back to them.

That is kind of a mess.

> And plastic bags — they were rare, but looked cool

Yeah, I listened to an account of a North Korean defector, he almost got caught because they went through this aqueduct and he spotted a discarded plastic water bottle and he tried to go back for it, he was arguing with the guy helping him get across and he wouldn't move until the guy promised to get him another one when they arrived. He said he hadn't seen one before and he thought it must be valuable. I don't think things were as bad in the USSR as in North Korea back then, but I don't think reducing pollution was very high on the list.

> But I would never be able to prove it to this girl — she just won't believe me as sustainability aligns with modern progressive agenda so well

Yeah, I can imagine. Even after the collapse, there was still a contingent of academic hard-liners here defending the USSR. A lot of them stonewall on objections because they've fully bought-in. Same thing as the Nazis or the other communists here, they're too invested to accept reality.

> Until that, Occam's razor applies: just because they could have, doesn't mean that they did.

No, but if these organizations have a long history of interfering in other countries and there are enough economic or political ties to incentivize them to influence large social movements, then it's more reasonable to expect that they will attempt to influence large social movements. You look at the FBI fedposting on 8chan, you look at the CIA inventing modern art (not directly, but they find a guy that likes it, then they offer him free money to fund artists he likes, so he's acting as a cut-out, etc.; I can dig up the article if you want), or you look at the Family Jewels reports, or you just look at their website. They've always stopped for real this time.

Apparently, because it has run for so long, there's a rule in the writing room for "The Simpsons": Homer and Marge have been married for twenty years, no matter what year it is. So an episode from the 1990s has Homer meeting Marge in the 1970s at a roller-disco, then an episode from the 2010s has him meeting her at a grunge concert in the 1990s. It feels like that with the CIA: they have always stopped doing evil stuff 40 years ago, so they'll put on their website some things they did in the 80s, and ten years from now they'll explain all the evil stuff they did in the 90s that is currently a "conspiracy theory". Incidentally, "conspiracy theory" is a term that the CIA coined to describe people that didn't think Oswald assassinated JFK or didn't act alone, and then started applying to other things because if the term is saturated with JFK assassination theories, you can use it to paint things with that brush, the same way that anyone that doesn't like the mRNA vaccines is called an "anti-vaxxer", even if they like all of the other vaccines.

Then you have the BMBF, which has admitted in court to conducting surveillance on American journalists that have never even gone to Germany, conducting influence operations targeting the US, and then you look at the BNF funding "hate speech trackers" in the US and eventually being outed as the source of the dox for the LiberalsOfTikTok account.

> I think there is a reason for that: these ops are extremely hard to carry out and coordinate, human error is not a made up thing

Well, sure. You mean Operation Eagle Claw? So that was a military intervention; Bay of Pigs was CIA. The thing is, an influence operation is much lower risk than shoving a bunch of guys in helicopters and not mentioning that there are sandstorms in Iran. You look at the Kremlin's astroturfing operations, right, that place called "The Agency" where people would be paid to troll on Twitter? Or even easier, you just figure what you want done, find someone that is committed to doing that, and then get him some money. (Find an agitprop activist without a Patreon or similar.) And if you screw up an influence operation, all that happens is you don't get the outcome you want. It's very low-overhead, very cheap, very low-risk. So if you have a reason to do something, it's a matter of risk/cost versus reward, right. If there's an interest in, say, some social movement in Poland, and you can find an activist pushing something you want pushed, then you can toss him $10k, $20k.

> It's always easy for me to believe in Russia's involvement, but it doesn't mean that I should always do that.

There's holding a positive belief in something and there's keeping the possibility in mind. Unless there's a reason they wouldn't or couldn't, it's always worth keeping in mind. It's probably more expensive to fund an American activist than a Ukrainian one, so you can reason that budget might get in the way depending on the direction of cashflow, or say North Korea where communications are locked down.
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