Lawyers:
1. if the facts are on your side, pound the facts
2. if the law is on your side, pound the law
3. if neither is on your side, pound the table

In international relations, everyone is always reducing every claim from every hostile party to misinformation and propaganda and dismissing it as such. But for it to be dismissable, it would have to be of case 3 - pound the table, and it's ludicrous to argue as if on every disagreement the other side is never right about ANYTHING. This
>everything I don't like is Russian propaganda
is deliberate and tactical stupidity, coming from professional lawyers who definitely understand the facts/law/table pounding hierarchy.

But also, I think it's pretty easy to see when people are pounding the table vs. pounding the facts or the law. This is what so rapidly set me against the western narrative on Ukraine. Even before I'd heard any arguments from the other side, I'd gotten tons of extremely obvious and extremely underhanded high-energy propaganda from the west.

In this and in many other areas in life, I'd be somewhat open to a frank assertion or frank request, but immediately become wary and distant as more effort is put into persuading me. If you're right, you don't need that kind of effort to get your point across.

This attitude has served me well but it fails in the case that people are right but lacking confidence. People can also be right while arguing completely ineptly. And as a kid, when I was sick I would always play up being sick, because I was always worried that my sickness would be doubted.

But for western propaganda, I think the terrible nature of it comes not from a lack of confidence but from an abundance of contempt: of course these psychos, who believe that white people are a dangerous racist mob, would switch from trying to restrain that racism (patting themselves on the back all the way for narrowly averting all the lynchings that would happen) to encouraging extremism in the direction of an enemy once an enemy appears. The cry was: hey all you knuckle-draggigng patriotard rubes, the stupid subhuman orcs are here and they're going to human-wave all over you with their crude stolen-washing-machine weaponry!