Quote (Goomshill @ Feb 22 2022 03:17pm)
Just for devil's advocate, I can imagine carrying water for vladimir fucking putin in 2022. Autocratic dictatorships only "work" if the dictator is more Augustus and less Elagabalus. There's a reason George W was still drawing portraits of the guy after he left office, Putin took over the kleptocratic dregs of an imploded empire and rebuilt it into a functional first world country, without the colossal crimes against humanity and catastrophes of his predecessors. The criticisms of him stem from stuff like 'assassinating a dissident' or 'rigging a democratic election', instead of 'killing millions in purges' or 'millions dying in famines'. Cracking eggs to make omelets instead of repeating the Holodomor. The quality of life index for Russians tripled under Putin, he couldn't compete with the US or China yet carved out a 3rd place sphere of influence in a world full of rival developing nations that threaten to eclipse Russia. I don't think kneejerk jingoism and blind hatred of 'the enemy' serves any purpose when discussing geopolitics, look what its got us in the past.
Looking at geopolitics, its pretty hard to pretend America has played a good game of chess against Putin in Afghanistan, the EU, Syria, Ukraine, etc etc. All our injuries are self-inflicted, Putin's main tool of destruction has been to weaponize our idiotic instincts against us, like spraying a hose of brown people at the EU and watching the chaos ensue. Maybe if anything it diminishes any credit we could give to Putin's own skill, in that he's been profiting off American incompetence. And back on the double-devil's advocate, Putin's unstable autocracy is not a sustainable model and we could see Russia implode once more if Putin chokes on a pretzel. Too much relies upon one man, and his successor's main claim is being his puppet.
It doesn't take plunging yourself into moral relativism to just acknowledge that Putin is a more competent leader than Joe fucking Biden, at least.
The main criticism of Putin is that he benefited inordinately from high resource prices, and has done very little to change the underlying parasitism infecting Russian state capitalism. He has wrested control from the oligarchs, insofar as they obey him and not the other way around, but he has built them up to be pillars of the state. The theft continues, just under the auspices of the Russian president.