PhilipTheBucketFor anyone who like me was unaware why Trump all of a sudden cares about Greenland and Panama
SanctusWe got a Russian sock puppet as president again. Yay.
đ° đ đ± đŠ đł đŠ đ° đź đAgain? Who was the ot- Oh you mean when he was president the first time?
Panama is also currently investigating the Trump Org for tax evasion
EmberleafTrump doesnât have anywhere near the power he thinks he has. This is all just bluster like 90% of everything else that comes out of his mouth.
Yâall act like this is solely a Trump thing, but the US was expanding and annexing territory in the arctic during the Biden admin, while getting all of their âalliesâ to expend all of their military assets & ammunition reserves on a proxy war and a genocide.
It would be unwise to assume this is another crackpot Trump scheme, and not something the MIC & intelligence agencies have been preparing for years.
Reported for misinformation. Usually I think the propagandists can just be dealt with by disagreeing in the comments and letting people figure out who is and isnât full of shit, but this has crossed into the territory of being pure annoying noise.
Do you bother trying to look into anything, or do you just immediately label anything you donât like as misinformation?
âŠcolorado.edu/âŠ/us-defines-outer-limits-its-contiâŠ
www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66984944.amp
Denmark donated all of their F-16s to Ukraine, and arenât expecting the replacement F-35s for years, leaving them in a worse defensive position for Greenland: reuters.com/âŠ/f-16-jets-being-sent-ukraine-denmarâŠ
So your claim is that sending a few science vessels into the north impacted our ability to help in Ukraine?
I would not advise trying to engage in a back-and-forth.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA
The whole series is an interesting and somehow still relevant look at how dishonest debate on the internet tends to work. Itâs a little bit dated because it comes from the era of freelancers, not todayâs polished professionals, but a lot of the techniques of argument are the same. There is simply no good result, by engaging with them in a factual discussion, any more than you can win a chess game against someone who insists on moving pieces wherever they feel like moving them and keeps insisting that youâre breaking the rules and theyâre winning.
The Alt-Right Playbook: Never Play Defense
patreon: http://patreon.com/InnuendoStudiostumblr: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.comtwitter: https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudiostranscript: http://innuendost...
Surprise, surprise. Philip doesnât like pushback against his NATO propaganda, and wants people to look away.
I provided sources, Phil. They can decide for themselves. And your desperate plea for them to look away just gives away the game youâre playing.
Hereâs what I think you should do:
- Stop using the buzzwords. I get what youâre trying to do by introducing âblue MAGAâ and âTrump Derangement Syndromeâ into the conversation, but to people who are paying attention, itâs a massive red flag about what youâre trying to do. It will overshadow any more authentic-seeming point youâre trying to make.
- Donât tangle up multiple issues. You can say that the Biden administration supported a genocide in Gaza, or try to make this particular point about how invading Greenland is somehow consistent with previous US foreign policy, or that Ukraine is Nazis, or that Wikipedia is selling out their editors to fascist governments (that was you, right?). But combining all of them together into one account makes you stand out like a beacon. I think you want to silo your talking points more. Use one or at most two per account.
- If someone calls you out for being a propagandist, take that as a learning opportunity. What did you do that gave the game away? In this case, it was some kind of previous interaction I had with you. I donât remember what it was, although I think it was about Wikipedia, but it was something totally nutty that you were saying that you were insisting made sense. It meant I was dead certain that I could open your profile to the first page and find lots of material to point out about where youâre coming from. If someone does call you out, definitely donât double down and amplify the volume of that conversation. Just dismiss it and go back to what you wanted to talk about.
- I think you want to involve more general discussion and chatter into your accounts. Be yourself! Remember, you can have normal conversations. Not everything has to be about NATO. If you like hunting and riding four-wheelers, talk about that. If youâre just this guy who loves ATVs and being out in nature, but also thinks the US government is crazy for sending all this money to Zelensky when we have nothing to do with whatâs going on in Ukraine, thatâs going to blend in a lot better. Right now youâre acting almost like a caricature of a propaganda account, where everything has to tie back to Biden, NATO, and European geopolitics, all the variety of issues are all mushed together, and almost half your comments tie back to some talking point. A lot of the propagandists take this really low-effort style of commenting about their smokescreen of non-talking-point issues, but I think thatâs a mistake, because someone whoâs paying attention can see through it and it becomes a way to detect you.
I think youâre doing really well though! In particular, I think you did a pretty good job with the deflection to taking some factual claim you made in service of that larger Frankensteinâs monster of bad reasoning, and insisting that the original claim is factual, you backed it up and showed sources, everyoneâs just trying to cover it up because they hate the truth. That part was good. It redirected (or tried to, if I had taken the bait) away from the larger issue and into weird minutiae where you can defend that one detail point. So you have the argumentation down pretty well. You just need to introduce more cover to make it a more realistic account, and do a better job of what issues to focus on how much, and I think you can do really well.
Doug HollandPhilip, this is a frickinâ masterpiece. You ought to charge admission.
The joy of reading it justifies not (yet) expelling @surph_ninja.
Iâll open up a Patreon. Freelance NATO propagandist. At the silver tier, you can sync a tier list of Lemmyâs greatest propaganda accounts to your client, so a link appears on every one of their comments showing their propaganda tier and a link to them getting ridiculed in some previous comments section.
I label anyone who uses âblue MAGA,â says Biden and Trump have equal levels of corruption, uses the phrase âTrump Derangement Syndrome,â and says that Ukraine is Nazis, misinformation, yes.
Iâm not even slightly interesting in a conversation about how âannexing territory in the arcticâ equals invading Greenland or how weâre expending all our military assets sending aid to Ukraine. I wish we were expending our military assets sending aid to Ukraine. If we were actually emptying the warehouses completely sending them whatever they need, and not putting silly bureaucratic restrictions on how they can use it while fighting for their lives, then they might be winning the war. Instead, they get just enough to continue a long, bloody, pointless stalemate which has been a catastrophe for both Russia and Ukraine.
Yes, you also repeatedly deny knowledge of the very world events you continually post articles promoting and spreading propaganda for (here we go again).
Youâre an astroturfing propagandist.
Stupid and gullible Iâll tolerate here, but youâre starting to smell like a troll. Change my mind.
I gotta say, since I already spent way too much time re-reading this conversation. As much as I donât agree with @[email protected]âs extrapolation of previous facts into how they apply for this conversation today. They make a clear arguement, based in the reality we all live in and back it up with how they got there.
Even looking over their post history, I find plenty of strong arguments they bring to conversations that I tend to agree with from my understanding of the world today. Once again, I donât agree with what they are saying here, but I donât believe this behavior is âtrollingâ. If we want open discourse people need to be able to have strong opinions regardless of how much everyone else agrees.
Thatâs my take, too, except for the part about looking at @surph_ninjaâs (or anyoneâs) post history. Life is too short and this thread too unimportant for such investigations.
Fair, life is too short for a lot that I do online, but Iâm cursed with a day job that requires me in front of the computer all day and find looking over the comment/post history of a user can be helpful when trying to determine if I would consider them a troll worth blocking and never listening to again.
Yeah. Itâs sort of sad that the nature of the network is such that itâs sometimes necessary to invest some effort in figuring out what the history is, of the person youâre talking to, whether theyâre coming from a place of conversation or a place of broadcasting a bad-faith argument to distort the conversation, but themâs the breaks. I think itâs necessary sometimes to be a pain in the ass about these types of minor annoyances, or else theyâll take over and the whole place will be populated with only annoyance instead of real conversation between humans.
What do you think your post history says about you? What impression do you think people get from continually pushing US propaganda, telling other people not to engage with people or read sources that counter your narrative, and attacking everyone who disagrees with ad hominems?
Better yet, what do you think your constant comments on strategies for running bots is making people think? You really believe people are stupid enough to think, âgee, surely if he was an astroturfer he wouldnât be telling people exactly how to astroturf.â Hanging a lantern on it isnât the brilliant strategy you seem to believe it to be.
Oops, youâre right, I need to make some smokescreen posts. I posted a B movie to a media community just now. Maybe too much effort, though. It took a few minutes, I could have spent that on like 5 random memes I found on the internet thrown around in a meme community.
With @surph_ninjaâs follow-up links, itâs not quite âmisinformationâ. More like, bonkers extrapolation, based on slivers of cherry-picked truth. The nuttiness exposes itself.
Claiming that CIRES thing amounts to âthe US was expanding and annexing territory in the arctic during the Biden adminâ? Thinking a propaganda quote from 2023 shows âall [war alliesâ] military assets & ammunition reservesâ are being depleted?
Nah, Iâll let it stand. When gullible people show how they swallow whatever they swallow and regurgitate, itâs educational (just not in the way @surph_ninja thinks).
Sounds good to me. The comment itself isnât all that bad. I think, as you said, itâs extrapolating from something objectively true to leap to an endpoint thatâs totally nuts.
A lot of my reaction was from the combination of this particular conclusion being totally out there, and it being in service of a particular type of pro-Russian-viewpoint talking point, and the pattern of that type of thing being a very clear and consistent pattern from this user in the past. But I do agree with you. Usually, itâs better to just let people talk. Itâs educational.
I am not âpro-Russia.â I am simply not anti-Russia enough to promote the lies & narratives to justify US aggression, and you accuse everything critical of US foreign policy of being pro-Russia.
Iâm a particular thorn in your side because I come with receipts, and it makes your attempts to get it censored fall flat. Though Iâm sure you get away with it anyway in the Politics community mods.
See, this is what I meant about the chess game. You can say I accuse everything critical of US foreign policy et cetera. I can send you a big wall of text of about 10 different times in the last 24 hours that I was critical about US foreign and domestic policy. And it will make absolutely no impact on what you say. Youâve just got your thing you want to say, and youâre going to keep broadcasting it at everyone, and what they say makes no difference.
Do you want me to? I did that a while back when someone made the same accusation. If you want, Iâll dig up the comment and send it to you, to illustrate that this is one more thing youâre saying that has no connection to reality.
Like I say, I think engaging in this conversation is a mistake for you. Itâs highlighting something that you really should be wanting to downplay. Iâm happy to talk about it if youâve decided you want to, though.
Yes, Phil. We know. You already spelled out your strategy for making sock puppet accounts believable, in this very same comment section. A real grand master in that chess game!
Do you believe your tepid criticism cancels out your imperialism defense here? Or your reflexive accusation of âRussian botâ every time someone criticizes US foreign policy, or raises the alarm about the US currently escalating to world war by attacking on multiple fronts across the globe as we speak?
You know what doesnât help your credibility? Your continual jump between âwhat are you talking about? Iâm not aware of any such thingâ to âIâm actually thoroughly informed, and hereâs why what they did is justifiedâ the moment someone provides a source. You canât play dumb and pretend you have a better understanding than anyone of the facts. Pick a lane.
For anyone whoâs still reading this trainwreck of a conversation. Check this out:
Thereâs some further wider context here: lemmy.world/comment/14154055
Iâm trying not to prolong this exchange, because itâs no longer adding anything. I feel like at this point pretty much everything that needs to be said has been. You can draw your conclusions. The only thing Iâll add is that, at the point of the above links, I donât think I had pegged surph_ninja as conclusively a propaganda account, let alone a âRussian botâ which Iâve never said. I just thought he was talking nonsense. I read his sources and then was talking with him about his argument at face value. After a while of doing that, and encountering a particular breed of total non-logic and a particular style of argumentation in service of a particular viewpoint, I formed a pretty strong conclusion that he is doing pro-Russian propaganda. But I think some of the conversation from above is from back before that happened.
Edit: Changed from double quotes to single, around âRussian botâ. Happy now?
YSK Thereâs someone running around Lemmy posting misinformation against Wikipedia - Lemmy.World
He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts: * Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else * Narrative is fundamentally false * Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what heâs posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess I also suspect that itâs not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world thatâs less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors. Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result. Edit: Number of people real salty that Iâm talking about this: Lots
ClinicallydepressedpoochieItâs not good. We let these people just throw shit at the wall constantly and no one has the time or ability to sort through it all. With plain text looking exactly the same no matter the argument the uninterested get snookered into thinking there might actually be a valid counter argument. You were right the first time. This shit is all noise drowning out the message and making people tune out.
Yeah. Iâm not aware of a good solution. I donât want to let every comments section have random âand THATâs why NATO is terrible and China/Russia are by far the lesser evil in geopolitics as everyone knowsâ comments interjected into it unchallenged. I donât want every comments section to get taken over by extensive arguments about who is and isnât a Russian propagandist. And I donât want every comments section to be picked through by some kind of arbiter of who are the âallowedâ comments, so that anyone whoâs provisionally identified as propaganda gets removed never to be seen again. Even if there were someone who had time to do that, which there isnât, thatâs not going to wind up being implemented perfectly if that were the system.
My MO is to call out the very severe propaganda when I see it, talk about how I see it as a problem and why, without getting drawn into the endless bickering into which the propaganda accounts inevitably like to draw anyone who responds to them. It doesnât seem like an ideal solution, but itâs the best reaction I can see.
I do think itâs fair to ban the ones that are just laughably obvious, I guess, for the sake of all of our sanity, since theyâre clearly bringing nothing anyone wants to the table. At the same time, all that is going to do is set a higher bar, which Iâm sure they will be able to clear. And also, it sets a precedent for moderators aggressively policing comments sections and kicking out the âwrongâ people, which the propaganda accounts are also able to manipulate to their advantage when that becomes the norm. Thatâs a whole other conversation. Thatâs why I mostly donât go on lemmy.world, this community being one of a few rare and sensible exceptions.
Iâve started just blocking them on the off chance they are powered by AI. Iâll give one to comments to see if they will attempt good faith but if there is no sign they are capable I donât want to be a part of their disinformation strategy ever again.
I think the answer is to let people self identify. Something like a profile and then allowing users(and instances) to sort or filter incomplete profiles and keywords/phrases. Sure you can get an AI to create unique generic profiles but the second you look at them youâll be able to decipher the quality of their content and distinguish immediately.
Of course this could lead to more insular communities but Iâm actually for that. I am for like minded people finding each other and organizing. In this way these people can juice each other up to maybe take action without some infiltrator coming in and difusing the momentum.
Yeah. I think Mastodonâs model where there are no âcommunities,â just networks of trust with users choosing to follow or interact with each other and where there is no way to automatically get your stuff shown to everyone until trusted people have affirmatively given you approval for what you have to say, is just a better model. The reddit-like model is just too open to anonymous accounts in groups manipulating the conversation.
Honestly I think the âTrump as an agent of Russiaâ take is an extremely uninformed take on geopolitics. Trump is an agent of the U.S. empire. Thatâs why he supports all the U.S. fascist militarism, xenophobia, giveaways to arms manufacturers, oil/gas/etc. companies, giveaways to Wall Street, all of that. Russia is a whole separate power structure whose interests are largely opposed to those of the U.S. empire. So where does that leave you? It seems this is meant more for Democrat ingestion and boogeymanism/scapegoating to detract attention away from the actual workings of the system here.
Ooh, this is interesting.
Iâve talked before about how I have a working theory about how when the top comments section looks âwrong,â some of the propaganda accounts will make new top-level comments and top-level replies, in a sudden flurry of activity to a previously pretty dormant comments section, until it looks ârightâ again and the conversation theyâre trying to downplay, in this case suprh_ninja getting ridiculed for being transparent propaganda, is shifted to way down the page.
That might sound like some tinfoil hat stuff except for how low-effort and bizarre this comment is. Trump was proven after extensive investigation to be an agent of Russia. Heâs pretty open about it. He is actively hostile to the US empire, both the good and bad parts, although he is also aligned with a lot of domestic fascist elements. Are you saying Trump is happy about spending $60 billion dollars on aid for Ukraine, because itâs part of âall the giveaways to arms manufacturersâ?
Heâs âactively hostileâ to the U.S. empire? Show me where he decreased its budget:
Itâs ridiculous to just start throwing around âpropagandaâ accusations at any random user you disagree with. Evidence first, smears later.
What âextensive investigationâ? What is the specific evidence that was shown to the public, and what does it establish?
Trump is a war criminal and a fascist, focus on what you can actually prove that heâs done wrong, so youâre not chasing red herrings that validate him to his supporters when you canât prove them.
And now there are three more top-level comments.
Timestamps of all the top-level comments on this post:
- Original post, Jan 8 6:38 PM
- Flurry of new-post replies, ending with:
- Jan 8, 7:43 PM
- Jan 8, 8:55 PM
- Jan 8, 9:02 PM (last comment before things die down)
- Jan 9, 9:51 AM
- Jan 9, 10:14 AM (this is surph_ninjaâs comment with a massive replies section which over the last couple of hours started going poorly for him)
- Jan 9, 12:52 PM
- Jan 9, 12:43 PM
- Jan 9, 1:00 PM
- Jan 9, 1:13 PM
- Jan 9, 1:18 PM
Why just now did it become active again, and all with top-level replies, not people responding to anything in the conversation below?
This is actually the first time Iâve seen some real confirmation for my theory about specific activity to bury conversations that people donât want to have at the top of the comments. Before this, it was just a feeling, but this seems pretty hard to explain any other way.
^ Beware of confirmation bias.
Dude figured out how the âHotâ sorting algorithm works, and thinks heâs uncovered a conspiracy. LoL.
Thatâs actually, in all seriousness, a really good point. I think itâs âActiveâ that works that way, not âHot,â but I get your point. It still doesnât explain why theyâre all top-level comments, or why there was a sudden rush of new ones all with similar totally bizarre lazy takes, like âTrump loves expanding the US empire and doing the bidding of the US foreign-policy establishment.â
An empire builder would work with existing alliances, surely, rather than weakening them all systematically, threatening the allies, and undermining their governments until only the USAâs enemies remain strong, while simultaneously implementing policies that damage the USAâs own economy.
This reads like a conspiracy theory. But this whole site is basically nothing but.
Greenland is a good move, strategically, for the US.
Just like Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were good moves, strategically, for Germany. It doesnât make it OK.
The way you go to a ridiculous extreme is why people donât take you seriously.
Whatâs ridiculous about interpreting the man telling us daily how heâs going to take over some or all of our country as meaning he plans to take over some or all of our country? He has said this repeatedly about Canada, Greenland, Panama and Mexico. Is it ridiculous and extreme to suppose he might mean it?
Very sad Putin derangement syndrome in post.
Greenland is needed for US to attack Europe. He doesnât want it to put Russian bomber/nuke bases there, he wants it out of Europe control.
Panama is obedient US slave for its sanctions on Russia. Panama is not threatening to remove sanctions before US and other colonies remove them. Russia does not do much transit through there. It already has access to both oceans. Pure propaganda to say US control of Panama canal is for Russian interests. It is to block Chinese use.
Russia is not interested in developing far away Canadian offshore resources. Like Greenland, there is no infrastructure there to bring them to customers/users. Russia has many decades of resources/development projects on its own sparsely populated, largest by far coastline, Arctic waters. Explosive level of delusion to think Trump wants to give Russia access to âNew USAâ coast for projects.
War on Russia is extremely stupid and unwinnable. You donât need to be paid by Putin to not understand the stupidity and evil. Much better to take over Canada, Europe and Americas for successful evil. The derangement level in this post deflects from the actual obvious evil of US empire, as if you morons should go fight Russia instead.
Iâve talked before about how I have a working theory about how when the top comments section looks âwrong,â some of the propaganda accounts will make new top-level comments and top-level replies, in a sudden flurry of activity to a previously pretty dormant comments section, until it looks ârightâ again and the conversation theyâre trying to downplay, in this case surph_ninja getting ridiculed for being transparent propaganda, is shifted to way down the page.
Timestamps of the top-level comments on this post:
- Original post, Jan 8 6:38 PM
- Flurry of new-post replies, ending with:
- Jan 8, 7:43 PM
- Jan 8, 8:55 PM
- Jan 8, 9:02 PM (last comment before things die down)
- Jan 9, 9:51 AM
- Jan 9, 10:14 AM (surph_ninjaâs comment with a massive replies section which over the last couple of hours started going poorly for him): lemmy.world/comment/14379661
- Jan 9, 12:52 PM
- Jan 9, 12:43 PM
- Jan 9, 1:00 PM
- Jan 9, 1:13 PM
- Jan 9, 1:18 PM
- Jan 9, 1:24 PM (this comment Iâm replying to)
I feel bad that this comments section has now completely been taken over by conversations about propaganda. Itâs meaner and less fun to talk about than the original political subject matter. On the other hand, for as long as people are posting propaganda, I guess itâs important for us to be talking about how people are posting propaganda. I will give kudos to the parent comment for being a lot higher caliber of propaganda comment than surph_ninjaâs attempt.
You think youâre playing chess, while you keep playing checkers.
You can only DARVO and spell out your own strategy over and over so many times before people realize youâre projecting.
Maybe not every person critical of US foreign policy is a bot.
You think youâre playing chess, while you keep playing checkers.
You win todayâs Thomas Friedman award for nonsensical metaphors.
Itâs not competitive on the same level as âWhen youâre in a hole, stop digging. When youâre in three holes, bring a lot of shovels.â But then, what is?â
Edit: I got the quote wrong.
Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldnât make them up even if you were trying-and when you tried to actually picture the âillustrativeâ figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.
Remember Friedmanâs take on Bushâs Iraq policy? âItâs OK to throw out your steering wheel,â he wrote, âas long as you remember youâre driving without one.â Picture that for a minute.
Or how about Friedmanâs analysis of Americaâs foreign policy outlook last May: âThe first rule of holes is when youâre in one, stop digging. When youâre in three, bring a lot of shovels.â First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If youâre supposed to stop digging when youâre in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense?
Itâs stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.
Courtesy of the formerly-glorious Matt Taibbi.
+1 for slamming Thomas Friedman.
It is mind-boggling that he was taken seriously for decades as an economic and foreign policy thinker. Heâs a pre-LLM argument for the idea that being able to put any number of sentences together so they scan is not an indication that thereâs any intelligence behind the text. Heâs a walking wrong answer. He was unerringly backwards about so many things, on such a basic level that even a very casual critical reading could identify the flaws, and no one noticed at what was supposed to be the highest levels of American journalism, save for a handful of heretics who had to shout from the margins and were basically ignored for basically his entire career.
âŠtypepad.com/âŠ/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-âŠ
Enjoy. I started rereading it just now, and itâs just as great as it was back when everyone was reading Judy Miller and Paul Krugman.
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. Itâs not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. Itâs that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and itâs absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And thatâs guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.
This just reached my frontpage. There are alternated explanations to your madness. Propagandist evil deflections bordering on absurd just because âPutin is evil because Stalin was evilâ but Yeltsin was a glorious âfreedom and democracyâ CIA sockpuppet who privatized the country with western financing, and then everything Trump does is because Putin has a pee tape, is a meme narrative that you are significantly overstretching here. All of these threats are pro US empire threats. That reaction against the threats gives colonies a rationality wake up call to no longer treat US as a friend is the open question that most colonial leaders are already too invested in corruption/capture to contemplate.
Putin is evil because Stalin was evil
Yeltsin was a glorious âfreedom and democracyâ
everything Trump does is because Putin has a pee tape
Boy howdy, that sure is exactly what I said. Iâm amazed at your ability to cut through the apparent meaning of my messages and discern that at the core, Iâm talking about Putin mostly in terms of Stalin, and also how I sure do love Boris Yeltsin. You can reach back to literally the only thing I ever remember saying recently about the Yeltsin era, that post I did of an article from a State Department person who was active in the 90s, and reference back to what stupendously great things for freedom and democracy I think the US and the Russian government were doing during that time.