Hey, just made an account after lurking here for like a year or so. Anyway, I just got out of a rather exhausting conversation with some friends where the topic of Ukraine came up and I tried my best to give a reasonable overview of why people in Crimea/DPR/LPR would support joining Russia, complete with several sources on the brutality of the Ukrainian government in the years since Maidan. Almost immidiately I got hit with “Well I have Ukrainian friends who say that Russia is the problem.” I’ve noticed very often that people will trust what they’ve heard personally from people they know over any evidence you give them. My question is, has anyone found an effective way to get through to people who entirely base their stance on an issue on what the people they know personally have to say? How do you show someone that they need to look beyond what their token friend has to say and actually study the topic themselves?
Appriacte the responses so far, they all seem pretty sound to me. Unfortunately I think that I had vastly underestimated how deep in the muck of western propaganda this particular group is (I just got sent a very long message about the terror of the soviet union and how everyone is still afraid of Russia because of it), so I think I’m not going to put any more energy into this discussion right now.