Quote from: legendster on August 22, 2018, 01:41:07 PM

Quote from: suchmoon on August 21, 2018, 07:45:56 PM

Quote from: byteball on August 21, 2018, 07:26:26 PM

When have you last been there? or in Syria? you seem to know everything.

Do I have to go there to have an opinion about it? To be fair, Ukraine and Syria were not in your list of visited places either.

I don't know everything. I do know enough about authoritarian regimes and the climate of fear and propaganda they tend to rely on so that I don't fall for RT bullshit.

...
While in an authoritarian world with some form of prohibition in right to movement, freedom of speech, right to form communities and right to protest could, at least in theory, provide a thin blanket of a sense of security.
...

First I would like to note that my freedom of movement is not restricted.
My passport allows to enter without a visa almost every country I would conceivably want to visit.
I wouldn't swap it to Ukrainian for any reason, especially since I believe their honeymoon with EU will be short.
I wouldn't reject Israeli one in addition to it, but I wouldn't replace it with one and our governments are OK with having the two.
If I cannot enter UK without a visa, that's not largerly a fault of my government.
If we would admit UK citizens without a visa, we might have a problem, and same for them.

Second, you are right about the blanket. That is part of the thinking that goes into contradicting Washington consensus.
And in your example, of course Washington will try to prop up said extremists, sending money, instructors, hiring PR
and journalists to portray the thugs as "freedom fighters" (real life examples abundant).

I don't consider my freedom of speech restricted either: I can go to bookshop and buy a book about Putin's "exploits" and discuss
them with peers and so on. I can speak freely about "identity politics": whether I am pro- or anti-LGBT etc and not get
hysterical shit from lefties and Social Justice Warriors. The 2nd is more important to me than the 1st.

Whether I support "murderous dictators" or not is not the point here.

What I am trying to popularize is: it's not like the West got suddenly ill, lost immunity and murderous dictators sprang up
everywhere like mushrooms after a rain. (But it will get well!)
It's more like the project is failed, and we need another one.
And Trump and Putin need to be reckoned with, whether you like them or not. They are symptoms, and you cannot treat
the disease by removing it's symptoms.
Let's hope the project's administrators will just "shoot their German sheepdogs" and not try to flood Berlin underground,
bringing everything and everyone down with them.
I am hinting at another project, that officially ended in May 1945.

Books suppressed despite the 1st amendment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcHRaxN-u5U