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Not that, just that it’s improbable because of lives soent

That’s true. It also doesn’t invalidate it if I do waste it though. OK, bye

May have been both. Just like with Biden, there may be people feeling that their party should win, but not with such a candidate.

What? Are you fucking delusional? I understand brown people are not really people for you guys there, but do you realize how many people indirectly and directly “these” people have killed in Syria alone, counting only cases of being simply too lazy?

Killing two people for fucking presidency? You think it’s unrealistic?

Anyway, the answer to the question “how Machiavellian” is “fully” for everybody participating in politics, because we are still homo sapiens and our time is just as Machiavellian as Machiavelli’s time, there are no naive people there, and if there are no poisonings and assassinations left and right there, that’s for the same reason only there are no nukings left and right on the map, not because they are moral.

A “false flag assassination attempt” is not as hard to rig if you know it won’t be properly investigated.

You are making a good example of a person who maybe thinks they can argue in good faith but very clearly doesn’t, with emotional pressure and such.

Well, this comment of yours doesn’t look like a good faith argument.

What I meant is that it takes two sides for one. And when two people are ready to argue in good faith, one may downgrade the level of contention from “argue” to “discuss” without any loss.

(For me and my sister it would still be “argue”, but we are just rude to each other.)

That would be try to attract people outside of social media, not try to divert them inside social media where you’ll waste energy

it necessarily widens the debate-space from an unopposed confident statement to a dialogue that the onlooker can take into consideration while making their own decision.

That part would be right if we weren’t talking about social media, which are designed to neuter this effect.

So who debates in good faith and how often?

he goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.

Friendly reminder that the above is what I answered first.

Sorry, but this is a load of bollocks. It’s you putting yourself above some “gullible people” and still using debate skills to deceive them, just in some “good” direction. Maybe you are really right, but they believe you for the wrong reasons, and the process itself doesn’t reinforce that you are right in any way.

and one of the first things Zalensky did was crack down on that.

Rather replace Russia-dependent corruption with more generalized corruption.

for freedom and democracy. Supposedly what the alliance exists for.

What? It’s been founded by a bunch of colonial nations (not ex-colonial at that point) still from time to time fighting colonial wars with war crimes and such. It has Turkey of all genocidal bastards as an important member.

The only reason for its existence was accumulating power. Well, as with all alliances.

Of course, kinda motivated by USSR redesigning its ground forces for capturing large parts of the world after they’ve been nuked. I’m not joking, that’s the reason ex-Soviet militaries so terribly suck at actually fighting - they are sort of a different mechanism, more like huge mobile garrisons to deploy in wastelands. Their analog of western ground forces was, say, VDV in Russia ; which is why despite nominally having the narrow function of paradropped assault troops, they’ve been used for every kind of thing important.

But corruption is present in all countries, including the NATO members, so that’d be a bit hypocritical,

Yes, and also weird.

I don’t think the decision was ever on the table.

Yes, when after 2 years of war and hundreds of thousands dead they meet and sign something about “discussing help to Ukraine” in case fighting gets more intensive by not clear which criterion - it means Ukraine is not becoming a member.

About “irreversible path” - they’ve said such things about Georgia too. Ivanishvili’s party is not good, but there’s been plenty of time before they started acting like now.

For my argument it’s sufficient that they are very much not the same.

This is similar to saying that a big company leading in some area can be benevolent and do good things. Yes, it can, like DEC, Sun, at some point even IBM. Doesn’t prove the statement that every social institution and mechanism out there must be replaced by markets.

As I’ve just said in two other comments, “changing someone’s mind” is just a return to barbarism and Middle Ages. When a few literate theology doctors would publicly “defeat” their opponents, the barely literate mass of their audience (monks, nobles and such) would watch and approve, and the illiterate mass would kinda get that those pesky heretics\infidels got totally owned by facts and logic.

So any person arguing with that emotion and visible goal should just be left to eat other such ignorami. Nobody worth arguing with has those.