On Fri, Sep 23, 2016, 17:16 Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net> wrote:
What many in the West don't get is that many Russians are a patriotic
lot, and hardy in their nationalism, and with the history of the world
since perestroika, they carry now a not insignificant disdain for "the
West".

Putin really is the most moderate politician that is actually
acceptable/ electable in Russia.

And this is not a comment on the particular man, Vladimir Putin, but on
the political positions or nature of him - by Russian sensibilities he
is very moderate, excessively accomodating to the Western regimes, and a
bit too much of a "weak pussy" who ought to have stepped in and
militarily protected the Donbass (the area where the Russian people in
Eastern Ukraine live), should teach the West a royal lesson in Syria,
and generally dish out some Russian justice to the axis of Western evil.

You do realize you're insulting Russians by calling them jingoists, right? But I guess you don't realize that, since you seem to think calling someone a "nationalist" is a compliment.

This is like saying that we should be happy that PETA is only trying to ban horsemeat, and we shouldn't fight them on it, because what they REALLY want to do is ban ALL meat and pet ownership and force us to be vegetarians. Or let's go ahead and give Poland to the Nazis, because that's just a tiny thing compared to what they REALLY want!

I get that Russians are pissed about how they've been treated since the end of the Cold War. Far longer, really. Just like I get that Germans were pissed about how they were treated after they lost WWI. You see where I'm going with this?

The solution in both cases, by the way, is TRADE. When goods cross borders in sufficient quantities, ICBMs won't. But the Russians seem to want the US to be run by a Putinesque strong man, too. One who thinks trade is a weapon to deployed only when it suits one's own interests. You seem to think Hillary has her finger on the nuclear button, but the fact of the matter is Trump does too. The major difference between the two is that Hillary actually knows it, whereas Trump is suffering so badly from Dunning-Kruger (as are you, AFAICT, assuming you aren't simply a paid propagandist) that he genuinely thinks he'd make us safer by returning us to a pre-WWII world of 30% tariffs and trade wars.