going to foam at the mouth and say things like “The KGB may have been awful, but at least the FSB poops rose petals” and that after gazing into Putin’s eyes you now feel secure in fondly refering to him as “Pootie-Poot.”

The only one foaming at the mouth and saying that is you, horse-apples.

You could have TRIED not to be a moronic redneck mccarthy tit but you didn’t. they’re just bad people because they’ve been bad people for hundreds of years!!!!

Which is bollocks. There’s nobody there that old, so they were, at the very least, different people.

But, hey, you’re a bigot. Who coulda guessed, eh? Merkin hates russians. How tropey.

Your comment was:

you’ll hate it Russian style. They’ve been playing nasty since before the U.S. was a nation.

That you made this fatuous statement to another does not preclude you being told you’re being fatuous by anyone else, and by attempting to go “Oh, I wasn’t talking to YOU” you merely prove you fail to think of an actual argument to support your assertion and cede the point of it being vacant idiocy.

If you’d wanted to say “You’d hate russian with the likes of Putin in charge”, that would have been a different matter, but you bleated out the red-under-the-bed scare story of how ebil the ruskies are because, well, they’re russians, innit.

Back at you.

First of all this thread is “The Truth about Syria and Obama” and my original comment was in response to Jeff Harvey. It has nothing to do with your diversionary tangent about the environment.

If you’ve read my comments on other threads you know that I’m no apologist for the shit America perpetrates. That doesn’t oblige me to turn around and pretend that Russia just magically appeared on the world stage riding a unicorn only to be victimized by a bunch of mean old Yankees.

The Middle East is on the back doorstep of their empire. It’s not as though they don’t have historical, ongoing, and self-serving interests there. They’ve also been mucking around in our elections. I don’t like that– and no, that doesn’t mean that I was particularly happy with the process to begin with.

I’ve already given you more of a response than you deserve, but let me guess: you’re going to foam at the mouth and say things like “The KGB may have been awful, but at least the FSB poops rose petals” and that after gazing into Putin’s eyes you now feel secure in fondly refering to him as “Pootie-Poot.”

Great. Now go take your meds.

So you would accept that the USA has been fucking up the environment for the last several thousand years, then, hmm?

Russia isn’t the same, just the name carried on.

Much like the USA.

It’s rather idiotic to claim as you did “Russia” has been tyrannical “since before the USA formed”, because that claim is vapidly empty rubbish.

For a start, the USA “formed” recently, but the russia then is not the russia now.

Hell, many of the assholes who were buggering things up in Europe went to the USA to continue it. Do we blame the USA who now have their descendents, or do we blame Europe because everyone apart from the native indians came from there and started off, before it even formed, with genocide, racism and theft.

At least “Russia” got going before it did that shit.

Or is the chewing of old bones pointless because the country changes far too much to be considered the same country a century later?

For starters.

Indeed part of the reason why they now live in tune with nature is they’ve fucked it all up so badly that they had to learn to do that or die.

This comment is worth repeating.

Most long-term successful indigenous cultures were so because they learned the hard way, as Wow noted, and they remembered those lessons. And those lessons are encapsulated in their taboos, their totems, their wise lore and foklore and mythologies.

Western culture is only now coming to terms with the facts of living in a world of finite resources, but the tragedy is that it’s mostly the scientists and biophiles who grok it – business and olitics are still mired in the fairytale of boundless cornucopia.

It won’t end well.

Would it be fair to claim that the USA have been into mass extinction ever since the Mastodon was wiped out by the first human settlements?

And the USA have been playing nasty since they first landed in the country….

Tsarist Russia is not the same country as current communist russia. And that’s different from the cold war era russia, which was different from stalinist russia.

It’s only begging off to go “But they’ve been worse for longer” when the only “they” that continued is the name of the country.

Current Russia started post-perestroika.

The point is it’s rather dumb to go blathering about “oh, this named state that has been a named state for hundreds of years has done things for longer than this state which is only a couple hundred years old” because it’s rather a stupid comparison to draw.

Doubly so for European countries. The reason for the first world war being touted as the war to end all wars and the production of the EU and UN after WWII showed it was not the last war, was because each state had changed by nicking bits (or losing bits) of other countries for hundreds of years.