[stevenwoo]

They have some of the Russians who worked for the RIA interviewed for newspapers and admitting what they did, which kind of blew my mind. I guess one could claim those were faked, like the moon landing conspiracy theorists.

From your own example which I presume is about the Iraq war, there is nothing that an ordinary citizen can do to prove that powers in the US, UK, and Kuwaiti governments (and Iraqi agents working in favor of an attack on Iraq) falsified the evidence they presented to the public for a compelling argument for invading Iraq without relying on sources that cannot be verified by an ordinary citizen without access to the journalists/non proliferation experts/government agents responsible and nothing an ordinary citizen can do to prove US claims that Iraq had an active WMD program and mistreated Kuwaiti babies as claimed at the time (by what we know now was a state actor who lied for Kuwait) in congressional testimony after the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. Even the New York Times and that one reporter famously lied flat out about Iraqi weapons programs and abuses in the build up to the war. But there were plenty of people who were investigating the claims of Iraqi WMD who said there was nothing there and that led to a lot of people protesting against the war. I don't see any investigators for the FBI or NSA coming out and being a whistle blower and saying this Russian thing is faked, on the contrary, the only whistle blower who came out so far, actually showed the internal NSA documents that said the USA elections was under cyberattack by Russia. The most reputable guy who came out for the Iraq WMD was possibly Colin Powell. Less well know is that he was also the first US Army investigator who looked into the My Lai massacre and he found that nothing was done wrong, so he was kind of used to this type of thing by then. It took a second Army investigator to reveal what happened there.

Or more contemporaneously there is nothing a citizen can do to prove that the recent Russian spy who was released to the UK and attacked was poisoned with a Russian only sourced nerve agent. And if it was the Russian nerve agent (that the Russians offically proclaimed to have destroyed all stockpiles of), there's no way for a citizen to prove it was Russian government behind it or that some other power was responsible for usage of it. I didn't vote either way on your comment, it just seems like an impossible standard.

[mistermann]

I honestly don't think wanting to see verifiable evidence before forming a decisive opinion on something is anything near an impossible standard, especially since as you've noted, our governments and newspapers are known to lie to citizens. Anyone who's done any reading on the topic outside of the mainstream knows what you see on TV in the west is a slanted version of the truth at best. And yet, look how absolutely certain people are about their beliefs, but when asked to provide some of the hard-factual content they read to form this rock solid opinion, almost no one has anything other than a downvote. To me, this looks like some sort of a classic mania, and it's quite concerning.