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Knowing Your Audience
Don’t waste your breath talking to a brick wall
Sometimes it’s hard to find anyone to talk to about the dystopia that we find ourselves living in here in the US. It’s not that conversations about our political figures, our military spending, our schools, and our “health”care system are not happening, it’s that these conversations consist of the repetition of the pre-thought thoughts provided by the mainstream media (in my neck of the woods, the favorites are CNN and MSNBC).
My nephew tells me that the Ukrainians are winning the war against Russia (because that is what his preferred pundits say). When I tell him that is simply not true, he responds, “then why haven’t the Russians taken Kiev yet?” I begin to tell him that taking the whole of Ukraine was not the goal of the Russians, and attempt to explain that Ukraine walked away from a potential peace deal early in 2022 , at the request of the UK’s Boris Johnson and the US.
When Zelensky said a few days after Russia’s invasion that Ukraine was ready for neutrality, a peace agreement was in reach. I know the details of this because I talked to key negotiators and mediators in detail and have learned much from public pronouncements of others. Shortly after the start of negotiations in March 2022, a document was exchanged between the parties that President Putin had approved…
