You know, I've been sitting and thinking here, and I really can't help but think you're very much in the wrong.

That much was obvious from the get-go.

Putin has a history of doing fucked up shit to consolidate and maintain power for him. America has a history of doing fucked up shit to consolidate and maintain power for America. They're different, but the same.

Truth does not appear through repetition.

Both are immoral.

And as we all know, there are two moral states in the world: 100% moral and 100% immoral.

Both are selfish.

And as we all know, there is pure selflessness and there is pure self-interest and nothing in between.

Both create victims and enemies.

And as we all know, the victim of a murder has been just as injured as the victim of a shoplifting. My distaste for Tom Brady is 100% equivalent to my distaste for Rodrigo Duterte.

Both of them create road maps for other people/organizations to try the same.

Yes. It is a well-proven fact that those who smoke marijuana immediately begin freebasing cocaine.

Tell me how they're different.

Because when the CIA propped up the despotic Diem regime, our goal was to contain the deprivations and societal injustices of the Communist sphere of influence and forbid their spread throughout the countries we traded with, exchanged tourists with, and shared ideas with. WE WERE WRONG and we did a lot of bad shit but the general idea was "the world will be a better place if this dangerous way of life is discouraged from flourishing." When Mee Lai happened, there were congressional hearings.

When Vladimir Putin blew up a half-dozen apartment buildings, his goal was to panic Russians into accepting authoritarian rule and a drummed-up war against a pesky (muslim) separatist movement. The general idea was "the KGB wants to run the country." When Litvenenko fled Russia to tell journalists, he was poisoned in London.

One might argue that both sides are fighting for their ideals. However, one would then be forced (by me) to go through the thought exercise of James Comey not suggesting that mmmaybe they wanna take a look at Clinton's emails again, but of James Comey and a willing crony FBI carrying out the equivalent of eight Boston Bombings against the citizens they're sworn to protect in order to rule the country through terror... and then poisoning Robert Baer when he flees to Switzerland to write a book about it.

This is the problem of refusing shades of gray. This is the issue with taking the moral position that "all bad is bad." Yes. All bad is bad. How pedantic of you. But we are a species of big brains and pointy teeth and there is such a thing as "more bad" and "less bad" and when you decide that blowing up Anwar Al Awlaki's kids by accident is the same as drumming up a war with Chechnya on purpose... well, this is how we end up with Trump as President.

Know who leaders are? They're the people who make the least bad choices. Not the ones who make good ones.

Let's pretend it's 1942. You're Churchill. You know that Hitler is murdering Jews by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. You've got intercepts of daily kill counts at Auschwitz. What do you do? Do you bomb it? It's deep behind enemy lines, it isn't militarily significant and you aren't in any position to win. Besides, if you bomb it, it'll probably start right back up again somewhere you don't know about. Plus, the Nazis will realize that one of their secret channels has been compromised. So you do the evil thing: you keep it quiet. You keep monitoring it. And you preserve that channel until you can do something about it. And you know that millions of Jews are dying because you lack the strength to act and win.

I'm not going to defend PRISM. I'm not going to defend extra-judicial killings. I'm not going to defend puppet governments or propaganda.

But I'm not the guy who said we're as bad as Putin as an offhanded aside.

You wanna see where, in your word salad, you lost the script?

The problem is, we easily have the potential to go down that same road and that’s a huge reason why I say “the ends don’t justify the means.”

You say this the same way we say "the sky is blue" or "water is wet" when in fact it's one of the most heavily debated concepts in geopolitics. More than that, you're attempting to boil the entire nuance of geopolitics down to "the same road", much the way you're saying "all bad is bad." But worse than that, you present it as an accepted maxim and then run with it, stating that the fundamental mechanism of evil is the natural tendency of people to do whatever the fuck they can get away with.

You are arguing, in no uncertain terms, that evil is a function of "The people who often attempt these kinds of behaviors." In other words, if it weren't for the psychopaths we'd be fine. And that's beyond childish. It's beyond simplistic. And it's a ridiculously insulting framework to put someone else in, which is exactly what you're doing when you say Putin is evil, we're evil, and evil is a function of psychopaths therefore if you're defending evil...?

...I'm defending psychopaths?

No. I'm saying the world is a fuckin' messy place, global conflict is rarely a positive-sum game and I will ALWAYS pick a ruler doing evil for me and my 300 million fellow citizens over a ruler doing evil for himself.

Because good people often do evil in the name of good.

Virginia Woolf committed suicide because she couldn't stand to live in a world where the Armistice had fallen. My grandfather, on the other hand, built bomb casings to drop on Nazis. And they were fuckin' nasty bombs, too - they had these acetyl disks and weak acid in series that was set in air so that once you dropped the things they'd sit there unexploded in the dirt for hours, days or weeks. The point was to keep the Nazis from using their railroads and factories. The Nazis used Jews to clear them out. So. There's my grandfather. Not just making bombs, but making bombs to drop on civilian targets that largely blew up Jews.

The moral choice was to be Virginia Woolf. The righteous choice was to be my grandfather.

I'm a complacent citizen in a first world country and my comfort and safety comes at the cost of the suffering of others and I am not okay with that.

Then you should at least be okay with the fact that your country causes less suffering than Vladimir Fucking Putin.