khzw8yyy

Turns out there is more to a good life than having a ton of food.

Only if that moves you into that last 1%.

It's more about frustration with hypocrisy than being evil. When your friends kill in Gaza - "that's different", that's freedom, it's for democracy. It's not like the West shies away from cruelty when advancing its interests. You just choose to be blind to the brutality, that's all.

And the Yank said that only the US of A gets to have anything to do with geopolitics because "we are just better that's why". Oh, and "because all my life I've been told Russians are evil".

Putin is unfortunately right, you understand only one kind of argument.

This is relevant how?

I asked about a hypothetical scenario: would the USA violently suppress a Pro-Russia Party of Finland. That seems to have caused a crash and you fell back to your default rhetoric.

If a political party came to power in Finland or Sweden outside the normal electoral process and decided to align the country with Russia, would the EU and the USA call them usurpers and terrorists and start military intervention to liberate Finland or Sweden? Or would they not?

But I don't think Putin is self-destructive / suicidal. There is no hope for controlling a hypothetical conquered European country for any length of time given Russia's present capabilities.

Realistically the only thing Russia can hope for is the preservation of the status quo - keeping Crimea and the land bridge to it.

What in the world would Putin do with a larger Russia?

Come on, you don't actually believe in "and beyond", do you? That's just a scare tactic to feed more of your tax money to the military industrial complex.

That's just being obtuse to be obtuse. You and I both understand the difference between the choices that Finland or Sweden made and the "choices" that Ukraine or Iraq made.

This one was actually heard by a sizable audience?

The Western take is: look, Putin is avoiding talking about the current conflict and talks history instead. The Russian take is: look, Crimea changes hands once every 100 or so years, and this is just the latest iteration.

Just to clarify: the "we" who would like to join is a government that was installed by the USA in a coup. What kind of "attacking and oppressing" happened before the coup?

On the other hand, we've already heard all these stories and they are clearly very sticky. Getting a different angle was at least new.

I think it highlights differences in American and Russian communication style very well. Even with the softball questions, Carlson kept trying to steer the conversation towards a series of questions and answers and seemed a bit annoyed by the long-winded stories. Putin kept saying he'll answer the question but finish his explanation first.

To an American this kind of communication seems like evasion and filibustering. To a Russian not getting into the details feels shallow and rash.

Personally, I've struggled mightily with writing in American business style. You know, executive summary front and center, any details relegated to an appendix. A much more natural style for me is storytelling - linear, chronological, with details inline.

Then there are some of us for whom this smooth communication is a huge challenge. We spend a lot of time and energy masking, trying to fake the perfect vibe (and failing of course, because the result is predictably unnatural), but this is a necessary survival tactic.

This is why all the talk of valuing neurodiversity is BS. The leaders want an autistic savant without the autistic part. Playing one is exhausting and can never be done perfectly.

The problem as I see it is that people tend to see communication issues as a character flaw. They don't think it's a handicap like poor vision or a broken leg, but must stem from laziness or worse.

A Tesla is not an expensive car anymore, it's the new Toyota Camry.

So, what kind of person writes an article meticulously analyzing imagined flaws of book authors?

Armenia is run by a US-backed stooge, so Russia expected the US to defend Armenia. But whoops, the US chose to win a favor with Turkey by backing Azerbaijan instead :)

All small countries are someone's puppets. The US tried to take a puppet state away from Russia and somewhat succeeded so far.

The first move was at the end of the Cold War. The drunken President Yeltsin took the existing administrative map of the USSR and created a new state that had artificially attached Russian regions. This set up the time delay fuse. Second was the US-backed coup in 2014. And third - what we have today. The US is good at playing the long game. Only China is better.

Downvote away, it seems to make you happy. But maybe before you write this off as "Russian propaganda" go read what Solzhenitsyn had to say on the subject. Yes, that Solzhenitsyn, the dissident who wrote "Ivan Denisovich".

It's interesting that you bring up Iran. They are actually doing pretty well considering that the US stole all their foreign currency reserves (and also precipitated the original conflict in the first place).

Maybe the problem is the shortness of sight rather than the lack of an end?

Rest assured, if the powers that be decide that "Russia is good now" they will convince you of the same within 6 months.

All wars have something in common: they end. That thought in your head about lack of hope of normalizing relations is just the current propaganda working.

Edit: it's amazing just how short-sighted people can be. Look, we still bring up the Nazis as an unassailable argument for how something is bad. And yet the war with Germany ended and they are now a US ally fighting Russia. I'm sure in the midst of WW2 the common folk also believed that there can be no peace with Germany, after all the man on the radio said so.

Besides, during WW2 the situation was the opposite: Russia was an ally. And hey, if you study European history at all you'll note that it's a series of wars with shifting alliances.

Is there any other way? Aren't we all supposed to be "passionate" and "team players" and hustle and all that?(without actually being paid anything extra)

The Russian is too broken to be comprehensible, so the burn doesn't work as well as it could. The equivalent broken English would be something like: "SVAX: when you whaaant enough steal genuine best". Yes, it's just as difficult to parse the Russian.

Golly assumptions, Batman!

Pretty sure that for any company with more than a few people the "CEO" reaching out to you is just a recruiter with the CEO's LinkedIn login.

Doesn't get more "white people problems" than this. Every cliche you can think of is here:

- A child of well-connected parents who can putter around doing music until his 30s and then go on to work in public policy

- ... but of course this is because he "works like a maniac"

- Compares self to Darwin and Bach

- Needs a guru in some remote place in India to tell him basic truths about life.

IKEv2 hasn't worked since last fall (and mine was self-hosted). They keep upgrading the DPI.

"That's different" (tm)

We are supposed to go overthrow Putin to get LinkedIn and Spotify back (or something).

It's OK :) This place became a cesspool quite a while ago. I switched to using throwaways so I'm unphased by karma.