A court in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod has jailed a woman for wearing rainbow earrings, the human rights group Egida reported late Wednesday, marking the second case of its kind after Russia banned the so-called “LGBT movement” as an “extremist” organization in November. According to Egida, law enforcement agents tasked with combating “extremism” detained the woman after a group of “aggressive people” approached her and her friend at a local cafe and filmed them on camera.
Our government has invested a great deal of money into media designed to cultivate all or nothing, black and white, good vs evil thinking in us from a young age, and the media typically reports on foreign policy and designated enemies in ways that rely on this programming to build simplistic narratives of heroes and villains. We may be past the point where most Americans consider America the good guy, but most Americans still very much see other countries as the bad guys, which is easy because most of us don’t have the money to travel to those places and meet the people there, so we just sort of subconsciously assume that they’re not real people, not like us.