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Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

I also found the captions off putting and unnecessary, so much so that I felt compelled to tell him as much on his facebook page.

Having spent a considerable amount of time in eastern Europe (where the photographer is from), it has been my observation that, at least anecdotally, considerably more people from these regions (as opposed to more mature democracies) are emotionally unprepared to look at political issues from a neutral perspective. His comments are heavy with his own experiences and prejudices. It's an understandable reaction to growing up in a repressive regime however it seems highly biased to more neutral observers.

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Thank you, I was trying to say something along similar lines in another comment but you summed it up more eloquently.

That's an interesting comment for me to read as someone born in Eastern Europe. I can sort-of see what you mean from my own experiences, but I'm not entirely sure if I'm guilty of that as well.

What would it mean for you to "look at political issues from a neutral perspective"?

To me at least it means to understand the geopolitical sphere from first principles. To achieve this I think it is necessary to have studied and understood the history of and the art form of propaganda and to be able to analyse media from this perspective, regardless of it's source and regardless of whether or not it confirms your world view.

I would also like to add that it requires a strong aptitude for multistep thinking.

That's kind of vague, though, and is laden with the assumption that YOU understand the world "from first principles" and the ones disagreeing with you don't.

Especially your second comment strikes me as quite arrogant. "I know what I'm talking about because I can do lateral thinking, and the brainwashed masses clearly do not".

The way I see it, anyone with a university-or-equivalent education tends to believe that what-they-know is some absolute truth of the world and "the other side" is somehow brainwashed by their respective media or government, whether "capitalist" or "communist".

Can you tell me what these "first principles" are that you use to understand geopolitics? Can you justify to me that this set of first principles is necessary and sufficient for a complete understanding of the topic in question? That there exists no other principle that you've ignored without which your understanding is incomplete?

Or.. are you just using your world-view to make yourself feel good about how clever you are?

Admittedly I found it hard to verbalise and perhaps I didn't do it justice. I don't claim to know any absolute truths (actually I don't believe they exist when it comes to politics). I have spent a great deal of time and thought into seeing multiple sides of arguments. I often see the lack of this ability in people who share the same world view as I do.

>the other side

You've really misunderstood me if you think this is about taking sides.

I would characterise first principles to be things like 'who benefits in this situation' and 'what is the historical context of the situation'. Essentially it comes down to not taking sides and looking at situations from everyones and no ones perspective.

I'm aware that it's never possible to 100% escape ones conditioning and we've all be conditioned in one way or another, either purposefully or not. You really don't need me to tell you that certain people are far more susceptible to their conditioning purely based on the fact that they're not even aware of the possibility that they have been conditioned at all. I wouldn't take offence by anything I said as while I did single out Eastern Europeans it's not exactly a unique phenomenon to any locality, it purely reflects my experiences. I've also met plenty of Eastern Europeans to whom this doesn't apply at all.

Thanks for your follow up!

Yes, it does look like I misunderstood your position a bit. It wasn't that I took offence as an "eastern european" (I moved out a decade ago and prefer to have as little to do with the place as I can), but more so as a computer scientist it's ingrained in me to respond to a claim of knowing something from "first principles" by asking what those principles are.

I agree with you that the two that you've mentioned are excellent starting points. In that light, yes, those are not the kind of things that the people I grew up around tended to do. (Or like you say, not a thing that a lot of people anywhere tend to do).

I guess like you, I've spent a lot of time looking at all the sides of an issue that I can find, but I guess I reached a point where I'm just like "so what now?" For all that analysis, I never really figured out what to do with it.

agreed. And actually for me, the pictures are nearly indistinguishable from what I've seen in India and Thailand. nothing shocking about minimalist infrastructure in a 3rd world country unless you have never been out of the 1st world.

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