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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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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.

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.

to be annoying enough that I just do not think continuing to engage with you on this topic is worth my time

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.

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

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.

Yet I took the time to explain where, in my opinion, you went wrong

And so did I. But I stand by my original point regarding tone:

Some feeble-minded American conspirologists think because their immediate, closest enemy is the US Deep State, everything in the world, especially - everything evil - is caused by it and nobody has independent agency but their Big Satan. Like in a children's tale, where the mice thought the biggest, strongest, most powerful monster in the whole universe is their house cat. Because that was the limit of their conseptual universe. But we can - and should - do better. There are a lot of forces - and evil forces - that have independent agency and aren't caused by the Deep State. 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.

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.