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This is a gigantic comment with a million points but I think our core disagreement lies upstream of a lot of the individual datapoints. As far as I can tell we're living in separate universes - your view of the deep state and MIC is incredibly different to my own. I think they're far more constrained, less competent and less capable than you're implying, and when I look at their actions and see them failing to achieve their goals, you see them as succeeding at a different set of goals. Similarly, our views of Russia and their goals are extremely divergent as well - I view Putin as a rational actor with his own motivations and goals, and you seem to view him as a cartoon dictator who walked straight out of Inspector Gadget.
But beyond all that, I find the paternalistic tone you're taking with lines like "The world is dark and full of terrors. Sorry to disappoint. No, Putin's evil not caused by "US meddling", whoever sold it to you lied to you." to be annoying enough that I just do not think continuing to engage with you on this topic is worth my time. If you really want to know what I think about these issues, just go back through my comment history on the topic.
No, that's not true at all. Of course he has his own motivations and goals. And these motivations and goals can be easily seen from his speeches, his state propaganda and his actions. I mentioned some of them (though yes, the long comment was long, so maybe you TLDR it) - for example, his desire to restore the Russian Empire with him at the helm, and his view that he is in the existential struggle with the West. Once thing that is needed to consider them rationally though is not taking them as true factual statements. When he's saying his goal is to liberate Ukraine from the Nazis - it reveals a lot about his motivations and goals, but it does not mean he actually thinks Zelenskiy is a Nazi and he wants to liberate anybody.
Always your choice. For me, it is equally annoying to be confronted again and again by Russian propaganda templates taken at face value and presented as facts, even when it can be easily seen they have nothing in common with easily observed realities. It is equally annoying to encounter again and again a myopic worldview where everything is blamed on "meddling" and no critical analysis is even attempted. I guess each person has their own pet annoyances. Yet I took the time to explain where, in my opinion, you went wrong. Of course, you don't owe me anything here. Good luck.
This is the point where we depart - I just do not think that this is the case when you look at recent history and this difference is so stark that I don't believe it is possible or really consequential to debate anything beyond it, in the same sense that there's no point having a serious discussion about whether Jesus would beat Krishna in a fight. There's no point litigating the vast array of points you provided when there's a much more fundamental disagreement. I agree that "denazification" is not really his goal or a true statement, but I just don't think the truth behind it is what you think it is.
And so did I. But I stand by my original point regarding tone:
This paragraph in particular was so incredibly smug, confident and above all wrong about the motivations and actual content of my position that it read like an incredibly thinly veiled insult and felt like a paragraph that you came up with for some other argument with someone else, repurposed for use here despite the lack of congruence to what I was actually saying. If you want to actually converse with people, or even change their mind, this kind of writing is worse than useless and (irrationally, I fully recognise - faulty arguments for a position aren't actually arguments against it) made me more hostile to your position than I would have been otherwise.
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