This is a particularly vacuous thread, and it would appear that the whole forum on which it appears is similarly devoid of intelligence. This thread in particular has all the intellectual resonance of a bowl of goldfish (nothing against goldfish!). The problems in Russia and former Soviet territories are "because they eat too much cabbage"?
If this "Man to Man" forum is typical of the forums you frequent, or what you base your opinions on, you need to raise your standards. The thread is what you might expect to hear from three guys drinking beer in a pickup truck. I'd wager they know more about football than about Russia, and their opinions should be considered accordingly.
Oleg is right. There are many knowledgeable people in the US who can competently assess the situation in Russia and surrounding countries. Regrettably, few of them are within the Administration and almost none of them work in the mass-media, but they are there if you bother to look for them. They are voices crying in the wilderness, and they deserve a larger audience than they get.
While I live in Canada, we get CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and PBS on cable television. PBS must be considered separately, but the other networks can be lumped together. Foreign affairs and international news gets pretty short shrift — there is some coverage of events in Iraq, two or three minutes in a broadcast glorifying the heroic deeds of Yankee imperialist troops, but anything else gets no more than sixty seconds, if it gets anything at all. Topics are treated superficially, with no exploration of the underlying issues. Networks are unwilling to devote the airtime to explain the often complex sub-currents of events, perhaps because they believe that the average US viewer is incapable of understanding, perhaps because they fear alienating the US government, perhaps because they don't have people who are capable of objective analysis. Who knows? The fact remains that the mainstream US media limits itself to presenting the Administrations's propaganda as fact and is content to present a canned version of "what happened" rather than looking at "why it happened", and prostitutes itself to advertisers and government.
I often find myself shaking my head at the general level of ignorance of people in the USA, and I have to remind myself that they are not culpable individually. They are are not more stupid than people in other parts of the world, although they may be more ignorant and are certainly more arrogant. They are victims of their circumstances. The US media is biased, incompetent, and what they present is incomplete. US consumers have become easily misled because of their blind trust in the "rightness" of their society, and their flawed belief that their government and their media would never lie to them. Sorry, but the US government has mastered the black art of propaganda, and the US media has learned tha waving the flag is more profitable than burning it. And I look at all those poor bastards in Iraq, patriotic, dedicated, motivated, resolute, and I think of lemmings.
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.