So, before I get started, I'm not really defending the content of Putin's message. But I'm seeing people making fun of Putin because he gave this long 40 minute introduction in which he basically discussed the entire history of Russia, and most people found it very boring, and it has made a lot of funny memes. I mean, it was dry, it was boring, and a lot of it was factually inaccurate. For example, no, WWII didn't start because Poland collaborated with Hitler, that was your guy, Stalin, wtf are you on. But I digress.
In a sense, I understand why Putin decided to do that, and I felt the need to clear the air here. As I've hinted on here before, I'm actually attempting to write a book on my political views. A lot of the inspiration of the book is drawn here from this blog. But I can't just take blog articles word for word and expect to have a book. I need to have a narrative. I need to express a worldview. And I actually find writing a book very difficult, because I need to spend a metric crapton of time explaining my worldview and how it works before we can even begin to get to the good stuff regarding the book. I'm actually kind of self conscious about this fact, and think the drafts I have so far are, shall we say, "hot garbage'. Much like Putin, I spend the first several chapters just going into a bunch of basic foundational stuff that is required to build up to my main point. I imagine that a reader reading this would find this very boring and wonder why I am talking about things like humanism and the role of the state in a book about basic income and a world without work. But worldviews are complex things. Before I can get to the ideas, I need to introduce the ideas behind the ideas. I need to build up a foundational worldview in order to get to the good stuff. If I just approach the good stuff first of all, it won't land, because people will have all of these ideas baked into their own worldviews that are very much anti my worldview. As we know, jobism and its ideological foundations are so entrenched that when the idea of basic income, a world without work, and transitioning to a voluntary participation economy is raised, it requires a virtual lifetime of deprogramming to deconstruct that, so that I can build a new worldview. As was said in avatar once, someone with a full mind can't understand the blue people, I forget their names. You need to empty your mind and understand the world anew. In some ways, my own issues with getting my worldview are the same ideological divides as shown in that movie. A very dull, materialistic worldview based on profits and resource extraction and taking over everything in the name of capitalism and growth, even to the point of interplanetary conquest, vs a more qualitative worldview about living free and with a clean environment, and enjoying nature, and not working all the time, etc. Yeah, you get the idea.
Anyway, I'm pulling a putin and rambling on, but you get the picture. Putin decided, in an interview where he was able to have a serious discussion, to spend the first 40 minutes just going over the entire 1200 year history of his country from the 800s onward. And it was long, and it was boring, and people were like wtf is he doing, but in some ways, he probably felt he needed to do it, because western audiences are going to approach the interview from their own worldview and narrative of events, so he needed to build up a narrative of russia as a state in order to make his arguments.
You can think of those arguments whatever you want. Quite frankly, I dont care about Russia's history, and as I discussed in the israel situation, I dont really care about what happened prior to your average life expectancy in a country of question. Since most countries have people live around 80 years, I literally don't care that much what happened before, say, World War II. I dont care who owned what land, blah blah blah. Rules exist for the living, not the dead. Putin might have a point Ukraine as an idea is new and historically, Russia owned that land most of the time. Fair. However, the people living in Ukraine now...have been part of Ukraine for their whole lives. Even under the USSR, Ukraine was its own soviet socialist republic. And when the iron curtain fell, it became its own country. And those are the rules and international borders that the world as a whole respects. And Putin violated those borders with his little stunt. He doesn't care about recent history because he seems to look at the world through the grand arc of history going back to 800something, and seems to think anything post cold war is an America/NATO led construction that he disagrees with and wants to dispute. He is free to think that, but we are free in the west to stop him for being a maniac threatening the world order.
I'm just trying to explain why he did that and where he's coming from. Russia is a very old country. Maybe not as old as some, but certainly a lot older than, say, the US. A lot of European countries are. And these old countries have a lot of history. History over here is a flash in the pan compared to history over there. I know I mention Rammstein a lot on here, but once Rammstein did a fricking concert in an old roman colosseum. They even made a professional concert video on it that these days you can watch free on youtube. Just sharing because it's one of those things that I find interesting about these European countries sometimes. Over here our stadiums are like only a couple decades old or maybe a century at most, over there, yeah, they still got old fricking Roman colloseums that they have concerts in. It's wild.
In some ways, that shift between being old and guided by a long sense of history, and being unmoored by history and looks at things in terms of where things are now, is an ideological dividing line between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives look at the good old days, whereas liberals look at progress and the future. I am a progressive, not a conservative. Again, to me, history is something to learn from but not something that should dictate the course of the living. If people in Ukraine want to be free from Russia, then I care not what Russia thinks of the matter and their grand 1200 year history. Again, for me, anything before WWII is largely irrelevant these days, as that was around 80 years ago and that is your typical life expectancy these days. While some people live longer than 80, sometimes 90, 100, or even longer, most people are going to be under 80, and have largely lived their lives in a post WWII world order. Russia and its former soviet republics have yet another divide, that between the older generations who lived both in the USSR and Russia/other eastern European states, and those who only lived after the cold war. I mean, i'm in my mid 30s. I dont even remember the cold war. my first real memories are of the early years after. I don't really remember much before, say, 1991-1992 at all, and I was a very young kid then. So I dont even remember the cold war from a first hand perspective. And everyone my age or younger is going to have lived purely in a post cold war world. In a sense, men like Putin are already relics of another time, although I understand that we have very real divides between older generations like Boomers like Putin, and Millennials and Gen Z. We see this in the US too, with older politicians like Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump seemingly horridly out of touch with the wishes of the younger generations (although I admit gen Z, the group that came after me, is starting to overcorrect too far in the other direction).
Sometimes we need fresh new perspectives of looking at things. I'm not going to say Putin's perspective is INHERENTLY invalid (although it is obviously full of a lot of misinformation as he was spouting a lot of pro russian propaganda that distorted history to be favorable to his own perspective) simply because it is old. But I kind of believe, much like our own Thomas Jefferson over here, that every generation should decide their own governance for themselves, rather than being moored to the past. Does it matter if Ukraine is less than 100 years old? Not to me. Because it's old enough that most who live there have lived their entire lives there and they are free to self determine. And if they dont wanna be part of russia any more, that's the breaks. They have a legit case to stand on, and if anything, I think Putin is the aggressor in violating their sovereignty and ability to self determine. He is a dictator and a tyrant, and his perspective is not valid from a factual or moral perspective.
Still, despite that, I'm glad this interview exists. A lot of propagandists here in the west hate this interview because his propaganda counters their propaganda. But...honestly, being a free speech absolutist, I beleive everyone has a right to their perspective, and a right to express it, even a nut like Putin. And I believe, in a true free market of ideas, that the truth will come out on top. This interview did not, to my knowledge, endear Americans to putin. Most people I know who watched it think the dude is off of his rocker. And I tend to agree with them. I mean thats the thing, if you have a society full of informed free thinkers, you dont need propaganda to keep them in line, nor do you need to keep people away from certain information and misinformation to safeguard certain narratives. i believe that if you want to find out who rules you, find out what you're not allowed to criticize.I would argue the failures of people falling to misinformation in the west come from them being ignorant and uneducated, not from being exposed to the info itself. If we actually had a nation of free thinkers where critical thinking and scholarship was taught in schools to every American, we wouldnt have this problem of misinformation. Because people would be inoculated against so called 'mind viruses". Our inability to achieve such ideals come from our own failings to properly educate people, not from the presence of misinformation itself. That's how I see it at least.
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