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> your country's elected leadership Are you insinuating Putin is a legitimate president because he holds „elections“ for show every couple of years? If him li

> your country's elected leadership Are you insinuating Putin is a legitimate president because he holds „elections“ for show every couple of years? If him literally invading another country is not enough to make you abandon him, what is?

kragen 5y ago
I don't support Putin. His invasion of Ukraine is putting a more or less functioning democracy with reasonable protection for human rights (despite significant corruption) in danger of becoming just another impoverished Russian puppet state that harshly represses dissent. This is appalling. However, your suggestion that his popularity in Russia is fake is completely unfounded; polls consistently show very high domestic approval, often above 70%; it hit 87% when he invaded Crimea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Vladimir_Putin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Vladimir_Putin https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-rating-russia/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra... I do not think Putin is legitimate, but I think it's even less legitimate to confiscate people's assets because they disagree with me about that. George W. Bush literally invaded two other countries, Afghanistan and Iraq (incidentally, Ukraine is Putin's third, after Georgia and Chechnya), and got re-elected — in a country with, unlike Russia, a functioning bipartisan system that is at least marginally democratic. I didn't support him either, but I didn't go around taking away other people's property by force because they did. Bush also arguably invaded Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Kenya. Obama also literally invaded Libya and Daesh, and arguably Uganda and Syria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_invasions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_invasions Would you argue that they were therefore not legitimate presidents? Would you support confiscating the investments of US oligarchs in China and Brazil if they supported Obama's invasion of Libya? But that's not really the point. Even if you think confiscating other people's assets because of their political beliefs is an okay thing for a government to do, you probably still don't want it to happen to you. This may be a reason for you to put some of your savings in Bitcoin instead of buying real estate in Sheffield: if at some point it disagrees with your politics, the UK government may at some point confiscate your real estate with its Kleptocracy Cell (I still can't believe they actually chose to call it that), but it can't do that with Bitcoin unless you give it the keys in an interrogation room, which is very unlikely unless you live in the UK. And if it can happen in the UK, which has a tradition of limits on government authority and legal protection for human rights going back 807 years, where actually Hume and Locke invented the idea of human rights in the first place, it can happen anywhere.

kragen 5y ago

I don't support Putin. His invasion of Ukraine is putting a more or less functioning democracy with reasonable protection for human rights (despite significant corruption) in danger of becoming just another impoverished Russian puppet state that harshly represses dissent. This is appalling. However, your suggestion that his popularity in Russia is fake is completely unfounded; polls consistently show very high domestic approval, often above 70%; it hit 87% when he invaded Crimea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Vladimir_Putin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Vladimir_Putin https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-rating-russia/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra... I do not think Putin is legitimate, but I think it's even less legitimate to confiscate people's assets because they disagree with me about that. George W. Bush literally invaded two other countries, Afghanistan and Iraq (incidentally, Ukraine is Putin's third, after Georgia and Chechnya), and got re-elected — in a country with, unlike Russia, a functioning bipartisan system that is at least marginally democratic. I didn't support him either, but I didn't go around taking away other people's property by force because they did. Bush also arguably invaded Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Kenya. Obama also literally invaded Libya and Daesh, and arguably Uganda and Syria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_invasions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_invasions Would you argue that they were therefore not legitimate presidents? Would you support confiscating the investments of US oligarchs in China and Brazil if they supported Obama's invasion of Libya? But that's not really the point. Even if you think confiscating other people's assets because of their political beliefs is an okay thing for a government to do, you probably still don't want it to happen to you. This may be a reason for you to put some of your savings in Bitcoin instead of buying real estate in Sheffield: if at some point it disagrees with your politics, the UK government may at some point confiscate your real estate with its Kleptocracy Cell (I still can't believe they actually chose to call it that), but it can't do that with Bitcoin unless you give it the keys in an interrogation room, which is very unlikely unless you live in the UK. And if it can happen in the UK, which has a tradition of limits on government authority and legal protection for human rights going back 807 years, where actually Hume and Locke invented the idea of human rights in the first place, it can happen anywhere.